but also the love between parents and children, sisters and brothers. Her examination of the Dorn family reveals the breakdown of traditional social codes that had allowed family life to operate smoothly.

The Misalliance, Brookner’s sixth novel, returns to the 1980’s and the exploration of one woman’s attempts to come to terms with loneliness. Middle-aged Blanche Vernon is separated from her husband of twenty years, who has left her for a younger woman. Blanche is attractive, intelligent, and financially well-off, but the departure of her husband has left her without a defined social position. With no activity to occupy her, Blanche involves herself in the lives of others, particularly those of an irresponsible young woman and her small daughter, in whom Blanche senses a loneliness similar to her own. A surprising turn at the end of The Misalliance leaves the reader wondering what life holds for Blanche Vernon.

In Brookner’s next novel, A Friend from England, the emancipated heroine and narrator has protected herself from emotional pain by refusing to allow herself intimacy with others. Her friendship with the Livingstones, a thoroughly conventional and innocent family who cannot fully understand Rachel’s stripped-down, modern life, leads to her gaining understanding when, in an attempt to protect the Livingstones, she learns the depth of their innocence. Despite all of her worldliness, this encounter leaves Rachel feeling ignorant and incomplete.

In Latecomers Brookner tells the story of two men who came to England from Germany before World War II. A sense of displacement, seen before in Providence, pervades this book. In Lewis Percy Brookner again uses a male protagonist, continuing her exploration of loss and the “unlived life.” She returns to a woman’s world in Brief Lives; in A Closed Eye, which concerns that blindness of a mother’s love for a selfish daughter; and in Fraud, in which an overlooked middle-aged woman successfully changes her life. In A Family Romance the author investigates an older generation of traditional women while maintaining reservations about their liberated daughters. A Private View brings back a lonely male hero who is tempted by a charming young sociopath, and Incidents in the Rue Laugier points up the connection to France often seen in her other novels.

Altered States continues Brookner’s standard themes as a stuffy barrister becomes infatuated with a beautiful yet heartless woman yet marries her clinging, childlike friend, with tragic results. In Visitors, the arrival of American relatives for a family wedding jolts a solitary widow out of her drab, routine life. Falling Slowly contrasts the approaches to life of two bright but equally isolated aging sisters, one an overly romantic pianist and the other a more cynical translator. In Undue Influence, a seemingly nondescript woman with an extraordinary capacity for fantasy and speculation about the lives of others becomes entangled in the lives of a man and his ailing wife.

The Bay of Angels provides a somewhat happier ending than most of Brookner’s novels; Brookner’s typically passive heroine must deal with her mother’s nervous breakdown and realizes the limitations of her “independent” life, ending up in a long-distance relationship that allows her both connection and freedom. In The Next Big Thing, published in the United States as Making Things Better, Brookner returns to a male protagonist, exploring the efforts of a seventy-three-year-old Jewish man to find the meaning of his life, which has been spent caring for others.