Lifelong Loneliness
[In the following review, Roiphe admires Altered States for its ability to harken back to and emulate “the days when a novel could transport you out of yourself.”]
Anita Brookner's 16th novel is not a surprise. Winner of the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac, she is a master of the repressed, the inhibited, the left out, the trapped-in-a-social-web. She is also a superb critic of the stiff upper lip, the duty done, form instead of substance, an opportunity missed, and the shadowy prison-like life that appears to be peculiarly English, drab, dull, yet mutely desperate.
This time Brookner's hero or antihero is a man, Alan Sherwood, a solicitor following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He tells us about the one great irrational passion of his life and the tragedy it led to in measured, accurate, slightly stiff, but increasingly compelling words. Something in the tone of the language—its very properness, its containment—warns you that hell is under the surface and seems to shout out for action instead of acceptance. Even though Alan Sherwood is telling this tale, he is perhaps the last to know how events have sabotaged him, how mostly excessive, self-inflicted guilt has suffocated him. He willfully remains out of touch with what Freud called the Dark Continent.
Sherwood appears to have a kind widowed mother to whom he is as responsible as a young man can be. After a brief happy but inconsequential fling in Paris he meets Sarah Miller, the grown daughter of his mother's stepdaughter, and becomes involved in a passionate affair. It is singular only in that Sarah has no interest in him as a person. She teases, allows no conversational relationship at all, remains completely indifferent to him, her attention wandering as soon as the sexual act is over. Involved always with others, Sarah comes and goes as she pleases, treating Alan as one might an old hairbrush, used when handy, forgotten mostly in the back drawer. Her very indifference to him ignites his obsession, his one-sided, unruly, painful erotic love. We are used to this kind of thing in women and very rarely think of men being similarly infected, but of course they are. Recall Proust's Swann and Odette for one.
Sarah Miller is almost too bad to be true. She is totally self-absorbed, ignorant, pure id, and has a mesmerizing effect on men, who swarm around her the way a bomb squad might circle a suspicious paper bag at the entrance to a theater. Moreover, she is the love object not only of poor Alan but also of his step-uncle's rescued-from-poverty, younger Polish wife. Sarah is as unkind to Jenny as she is to Alan, all human beings registering in her mind as no more than fall leaves rotting along the path.
When Sarah quits London for Paris and Alan in his despair gets sick, he is tended to and pursued by the duller Angela, who will become his wife. That misfortune occurs because Alan is so easily picked up and pressed into husband service. It occurs because the very worst of our self-destructive forces combine to create relationships in which people have ample opportunity to torture each other, to give and get remorse, to live out a macabre dance that goes on and on long after the musicians have packed up and gone home. The turf is familiar, but it is brilliantly described here.
The core of Altered States is the story of Alan's brief marriage to Angela and the great wake of...
(This entire section contains 1376 words.)
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loneliness it leaves behind. Angela is as antisexual as Sarah is pure sex. She is as manipulative and needy as Sarah is indifferent and wild. Angela is convention without fire and her misery becomes Alan's. The plot revolves on what he does to attempt to escape and how Angela exerts her own power. This is Jane Austen for a more sophisticated, exhausted, soul-weary time. It is about who one loves and marries. It is even about money and class and the role they play in our fates. The ending is not happy here, however, and the misunderstandings of character are not ironed out: rather, they are compounded as the novel progresses.
Brookner's small book contains the sorrow of the gesture not made, as in Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, as well as the kind of doors slamming, hope dying, immobility that Edith Wharton gave us in Ethan Frome. The tragedy lies in the fact that Angela has no sexuality while Sarah has only sexuality, and Alan cannot put together the part of himself that is society's creature, his mother's good boy, and the part that is animal running free in the veldt.
The circumstance has been noticed before in D. H. Lawrence, in E. M. Forster, in Doris Lessing and A. S. Byatt. But in Brookner the hopelessness is especially guilt-tinged, and the ordinariness of life draws blood that weakens both character and reader. Alan suffers a lifelong loneliness that he is incapable of altering even in middle age when he meets a potential and willing companion. This loneliness that afflicts many of Brookner's characters is so profound that it blights the reader, causing an instant need for companionship, for daylight, for an open window, for a telephone conversation with a soul-mate or a cuddle with an obliging child.
Altered States is particularly acute about the ways people use each other in what passes for love. Jenny turns her affections to Angela in search of a daughter she cannot have. She does not have Angela's best interests at heart. Her purpose is to create a place for herself, a stage for her emotions to act upon. She becomes the caretaker who, like an evil blanket, cripples as she warms. Angela takes care of Alan's every necessity to convince him that he must marry her for his comfort. She does for him as a way of doing for herself. Once her end is met she can turn on him with the distaste she has always felt.
There is no one in this Brookner landscape who behaves toward anyone else with full recognition of the other person's independence, moral autonomy, need. What decent behavior there is derives from guilt or obligation or social rules. The guilt that torments does not improve human relationships, it leads to further distortions and missed chances. Alan never repairs his life and never becomes the father he might have been. Love is then fixated on Sarah, whom he is still chasing years later and who, when he thinks he has caught a glimpse of her, still has her back toward him. This is certainly a bleak view of human relations, and one that I would not want to argue with or wish to live with day in and day out.
The writing in Altered States at first seemed submerged to me, oblique and tendentious. As the story unfolded, though, the language seemed to perfectly fit the tale. Its rhythms work well to echo the themes, to reinforce them, to lull you into false security. All the while tension grows, you become caught in the plot, and like the characters are unable to jump out of the way. This is Anita Brookner's genius and her great gift.
In America most novelists are more open with their feelings. Their characters drink too much, drug too much, complain or examine their souls, attend loud parties or have sex that is explicitly described. They go to therapists, they drive cars too fast, they love hard and sometimes some make it, or at least realize what has become of them. In Brookner's very English novel that appears so demure in tone, the action is small, you have to pay attention to catch it, but the emotion, compressed as it is, becomes huge, indeed overwhelming.
Reading Altered States made me wish I lived in other centuries where orphans found patrons and guilt could be atoned for, where fortunes appeared magically and the frontier was still open. Ah, those were the days when a novel could transport you out of yourself. Brookner brings you in very close, too close for comfort. That is essentially a compliment, backhanded as it may be.
