Feb 16, 2004 06:05 PM
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(Updated Feb 16, 2004 06:05 PM)
I have been a fan of anita brookner for a time and I have read around 10 books of anita brookner and this was my eleventh. Anita Brookner, who published her 22nd novel, The Rules of Engagement, was, before she became a novelist, a distinguished scholar of 18th-centuryFrench art. It's interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, to learn that she focused on both Ingres and David ? artists whose work is elegant. Static, beautifully composed, highly controlled and exquisitely finished, sensuous but oddly without passion.
Ingres once said that the surface of a painting should be ''smooth as a [peeled] onion.'' All these comments might be made of the immaculate style of Anita Brookner. The Rules of Engagement is set in a world that has become familiar to her readers, after 21 versions upper middle-class London. Elizabeth and Betsy are classmates who meet on their first day of school. Their relationship over time ? intricate and nuanced, composed of affection, competition. Envy and support ? is the focus of this book.
Elizabeth, the protagonist, is worldly, un- intellectual and unambitious. Her Place in the world seems secure: Her family is well off, her father successful, her mother a beauty. Betsy, by contrast, is unsophisticated, intellectual, earnest and impecunious. The novel starts After the two friends reconnect ? when Elizabeth is settled into her stultifying marriage and Betsy returns from Paris with the free-spirited Daniel.
Daniel, -.says Elizabeth, ''was beautiful, with a lithe mythical beauty that brought to mind certain classical statues seen in reproduction, as if only now was I face to face with the real thing.'' But Daniel walks around the room, humming rudely, while the two women sit and talk, and Elizabeth passes judgment. ''Nevertheless 1 found him repellent. His activity, his humming deprived him of ordinary accessibility.'' Elizabeth has chosen Daniel's opposite. Her husband.
Digby ''was not a young man. He was twenty-seven year'-my senior, but for that very reason seemed lo promise an extension of the parenthood and guardianship which my father appeared to have relinquished without regret.'' Though friendship seems to be the subject of the story, the underlying motif is its opposite ? a self-willed and inexorable solitude. This is a tale of helplessness, subjugation and renunciation.