Latecomers (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

“You are not a survivor,” insists Hartmann to Fibich. “You are a latecomer, like me.” Haunted by doleful dreams and incomplete memories, Fibich is obsessed by the tenuousness of his current happiness. Compelled as a boy to abandon his parents in Nazi Germany, Fibich has made a life for himself in England, but, despite material success, broods over what he has lost.

Hartmann, too, was forced to flee catastrophe, but, as the first sentence of LATECOMERS notes, he has become “a voluptuary” amid the comforts of contemporary London. “Why dwell on the past, particularly when the past was so uncongenial?” he asks, and answers by savoring the immediate delights of fine dining. Fast friends and foils since immigrant boyhood days, Hartmann and Fibich went into the greeting card business together and prospered enough to insulate Hartmann from the dread of misfortune and to tease Fibich with the fickleness of fate.

Their wives, too, are latecomers to security. After an awkward two-year engagement, Fibich married Christine, the self-effacing daughter of a loveless marriage. Hartmann married shapely Yvette, whose childhood in France was blighted by the loss of a collaborationist father and who, as if in compensation, has become, to Christine’s mind, “incurably frivolous...in all important ways, innocent, uncorrupted by the reflections that seemed to burden her own life.” Those burdens make her an apt match for the melancholic Fibich, as narcissistic Yvette is an appropriate mate for epicurean Hartmann. The two couples live in nearby flats, and form an extended family of latecomers.

Aside from Fibich’s disastrous attempt to revisit Berlin, LATECOMERS is spare of incident. Instead, its lapidary prose examines Hartmann and Fibich as they are in their sixties, the strategy that each has devised to cope with an uncertain universe, to create the semblance of a home in a world in which none can feel fully at home. Brookner is unsparing but tender in taking the shape of two fragile lives. Much of their attention is directed to their solitary offspring--Hartmann’s disappointingly drab daughter Marianne and Fibich’s flamboyant actor son Toto. The novel concludes with a letter that Fibich, reconciled to their differences in personality and heartened by the continuity of generations, addresses to Toto, his own beloved latecomer.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. March 30, 1989, V, p.3.

Commonweal. CXVI, May 19, 1989, p.306.

London Review of Books. X, September 1, 1988, p.24.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 3, 1989, p.3.

New Statesman and Society. I, August 19, 1988, p.39.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVI, June 1, 1989, p 34

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, April 2, 1989, p.3.

The New Yorker. LXV, May 1, 1989, p.111.

The Times Literary Supplement. August 12, 1988, p.891.

The Washington Post Book World. XIX, March 12, 1989, p.3.