on making demands, and reading hotel du lac (VIDEO)

 Anita Brookner's beautifully observed novel Hotel Du Lac feels a bit like Thomas Mann crossed with Barbara Pym.  Edith, the protagonist is a romance writer vacationing off season at a "traditional establishment used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era of tourism."  And although she intends to finish her latest book at the hotel, she finds herself distracted by her fellow guests who are all passing through their own kinds of psychological off seasons.

The most delicious residents are Iris and Jennifer Pusey, a mother and daughter, who in conversation "composed their past as deliberately as they did their present and to both of these one was expected, in some curious way, to pay homage."  Thus Edith becomes audience to their chatter about clothes and money from which she "doesn't withdraw or emerge untainted."

But get a load of this character description: "Iris Pusey was a star, and like many a star she could only function from a position of dominance. She held information at bay, so that Edith was not required to give an account of herself."

It is against this backdrop of virtual anonymity that Edith reassesses her relationship with a married man in London, with whom she's been having an affair. She writes him long letters. You can't imagine him reading them.  She tries to come to terms with her standing in his life.  "Is it because I am so meek that people fail to notice my demands," she wonders. "Or it is, even more simply, that I fail to make them."

Then  Mr Neville, another of the hotel guests, takes Edith out for an afternoon. She becomes quite chatty under his attention.  He alone, of all her new acquaintances, has observed her closely.  But conversation get a little too deep and he says something pointed and cutting.  "Suddenly there was an antagonism between them, as he intended," Brookner writes, "for antagonism blunts despair."

But there is more to come.  For having unmasked Edith's unhappiness and loyalty to the man she loves,  Mr Neville is about to reveal the secret to his own happiness.

"It is simply this," he says.  "Without a huge emotional investment, one can do whatever one pleases.  One can take decisions, change one's mind, alter one's plans. There is none of the anxiety of waiting to see if that one other person has everything she desires, if she is discontented, upset, restless, bored.  One can be as pleased or as ruthless as one wants.  If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood - simply please oneself- there is no reason why one should ever be unhappy again...You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself," he concludes.

It's not a radical observation. But because of where it's inserted in the narrative,  directly after Edith's assessment of her prospects,  this one strikes a nerve.  Edith has never manipulated others in a selfish way, but prior to her visit to Hotel Du Lac we learn that she took a surprising stand.  It shifted the delicate balance with her lover and put too fine a point on things.

 She wonders if her hold on him rested on the fact that she had been less difficult than his wife.  Maybe she has just been "a rather touching interlude." But Anita Brookner seems to believe that those who behave like Mr Neville and the Puseys are in danger of turning their hearts into stone,  of becoming like Jennifer Pusey "as inexpressive as a blank window."

#anitabrookner #hoteldulac