The Next Big Thing. By Anita Brookner. Viking, 247 pp. £16.99 sterlingIt seems ironic that having embarked so noisily on this new century, we repeatedly find ourselves drawn backwards by contemporary fiction to the troubled history of its predecessor. The weight of the past, and particularly of the dark European past anatomised so exhaustively by W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, still grips the supposed securities of the present.
That it remains a particular concern of Anita Brookner is hardly surprising - she is, after all, a novelist who has never pursued the contemporary, and her resolute, even dogged stylistic conservatism is inextricable from her commitment to melancholic individuals forged in the cradle of wartime Europe, or to families compromised and blighted by its displacements and deracinations. While she has rarely foregrounded her own Polish-Jewish ancestry, it clearly influences the way in which her characters are shadowed by their former refugee identities, branded even across generations with the track-marks of immigration. Their gradual absorption into the slow routines of middle-class London - Brookner's primary landscape - is underwritten by allusions to a Europe left behind, glimpsed occasionally on continental sojourns, but never successfully retrieved.
And so the protagonist of The Next Big Thing, Brookner's 21st novel, is not entirely unpredictable in his tendencies and habits. At 73 years, Julius Herz (his name a nod to the German for "heart") has little to fill his day bar reminiscence and routine: an occasional lunch with his comfortable ex-wife Josie, an occasional dinner with his confidante and accountant Simmonds, afternoon visits to the National Gallery, and, in between, the relentless contemplation of a life of failure, crowned by the refusal of his offer of marriage to his cousin, Fanny Bauer. Above all, Herz's memories are clogged with the collective grief of his immediate family, permanently damaged by its wartime flight from Germany. "Exiles," Herz had time to reflect, "were the original networkers", but this is too cheery a description for the way in which his mother clutched at the threads of another existence, clinging to the routine of her friend Bijou Frank's weekly Friday afternoon visit: "The tea-table, like Bijou's hat, which was never removed, reassured them both that standards were being maintained, that worldliness had not entirely deserted them. This reassurance was perhaps their last link with their former lives."
Such vignettes portray the straitened conditions and small imprisonments which are the quotidian legacy of liberation. A deeper psychosis, the long-term result of the family's disorientation, leads to the breakdown of Julius's musician brother, Freddy. But with the deaths of his parents, then of Freddy, the story of the family is effectively over.
Now, Herz's own life lurches into a vacuum, and here the moral probing of the novel really begins. As he attempts to construct sufficient material for existence - both mental and physical - Herz must start to distinguish between the psychological legacies of the past, and the plain facts of personality and old age. At what point do the determining forces of history cease to be the reason for his isolation, his behavioural tics, his misplaced desires?
This is where Brookner's novel departs crucially from Sebald's. Of course the two are dramatically different, the baroque composition of the latter a world away from Brookner's attachment to good old-fashioned "point-of-view", and that slightly arch prose, routinely described by her critics as Jamesian, (a tennis-player "issued into the bright afternoon"; a woman retires from the terrace, "thus ushering in the evening"). But where Jacques Austerlitz has the security of knowing that his uneasiness of being, his sense of "living the wrong life", as he terms it, is a direct consequence of the cataclysmic historical events of 1939, Brookner's Herz is only permitted hints of such causality: for much of the second half of this book he must confront the possibility that his alienation results, at least in part, from the generic discomforts and anxieties of age. His hand, which in boyhood photographs, covered his heart in a silent promise of love, now fumbles in his breast-pocket for the pills which keep that same heart working. The evocative details of a family history are now replaced by the humdrum matter of living, and stretching out life towards death, "the next big thing".
But this is too easy a reading, and what nags increasingly at the back of the reader's mind is the suspicion that Herz's problem (and possibly Brookner's problem also?) is, to put it crudely, a Class thing.
His pursuit of the fine arts; Claude, Turner, a work by Delacroix (the painter venerated in Brookner's art history, Romanticism and its Discontents), is doubtless a means of finding solace in the aesthetic where his own ancestral religion, "an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness" has failed him, but perhaps it is also a defence against the assaults of modern life. Similarly, his attempt to discuss Freud with a harassed NHS doctor reconfirms his exile's identity, his lingering grasp of European intellectualism, but stamps him too, with an ostentatiousness, a refusal to engage with contemporary, democratic discourses. His pursuit of a genteel life, shaped by idealised images of that life which never took place, seems increasingly like an affectation, a process of negation. "On his desk he saw the letter which Simmonds had handed to him as they parted the previous evening, but instead took up his volume of Thomas Mann once more, and sank gratefully into the landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past." How suddenly that "bourgeois", leaps out of the page here as a byword, not for a lost Europe as such, but for the loss of an ascendancy, an élitism, a caste.
With such cues, Brookner leaves Herz open to question. Having praised Jane Austen so often for her "ability to leave things out", she herself produces, yet again, a novel which omits the certainty of a character judgement. This, together with the scrupulous detailing of consciousness which it conducts, makes The Next Big Thing a vintage Brookner performance.
A masterful meditation on what happens when history stops, it is utterly typical in its purpose, and almost flawless in what it ultimately achieves.
Eve Patten is a lecturer in the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin