[In the following review, Kino offers a tempered evaluation of Dolly, noting flaws in the novel's later stages.]

“Dolly was the wife my uncle had acquired before my birth,” explains Jane Manning, the narrator of Anita Brookner's 13th novel. And in two shakes of a Dunhill fountain pen, we're back to familiar territory: the echoingly empty London flat; the dead, beloved parents; the “working woman” who grimly battles for her place in the world with an alluringly framed décolletage; and the other woman who observes, rendered hors de combat by her own wealth and emotional chasteness.

The working woman in question is Dolly, a half-Jewish Parisian who comes to postwar London seeking better times, and finds them with Jane's well-off uncle Hugo. After extricating him from his mother's orbit, Dolly lures him to the Continent, whence they loom large in Jane's childhood imagination. When Hugo dies some years later, having somehow run through his money, Dolly returns to be near the family—or, more likely, its fortune. And so she enters Jane's life, fluffing her furs, smoothing her hand-tailored frocks, enjoining the girl's artless mother to make more of herself and always admonishing, “Charm, Jane, charm,” as she exits, freshly written check in hand.

On one level, Miss Brookner's novel tells the story of how this pair, after all the other relatives linking them have died, finally develop the bonds that make them a family. Yet Dolly is also about the act of writing, about how Jane turns from a cannily vigilant child into an omniscient adult narrator. Before long, she has stopped witnessing and begun imagining salient events in her family history; first the circumstances surrounding her parents’ placid, near-courtly liaison; then those of her mother's birth; and in time, those that created Dolly—from the childhood spent helping her mother sew streetwalkers’ clothes to the moment she steps onto the dance floor with Hugo. “I have mentioned the primal scene,” Jane says, “that imaginary sexual encounter which children reconstruct for their parents and which some believe that they have actually witnessed. This primal scene I unhesitatingly ascribe to Dolly and Hugo”. In a sense, Dolly （which was published in Britain as A Family Romance） is one long primal fantasia—if not exactly of the act that made Jane, then of the imaginings that fire her romantic consciousness.

Certainly its first two-thirds are about as wonderful as anything Miss Brookner has ever written. Jane's apparently aimless ramblings, grounded with exacting detail and raised on a structure of steel, seem a faultless demonstration of authorial assurance. And so, at first, do Jane's people, as they emerge from her languid, dispassionate regard like complexly faceted gems. But the problems—for both Jane and the novel—begin when her parents die and she inherits Dolly along with their estate, at which point she herself is forced into the action. Dolly suddenly makes it brutally clear that she is interested in Jane's family only for its money, and then rubs salt into this wound by cavorting somewhat crudely with a new boyfriend.

Yet the more Jane the character becomes confused and hurt, the more Jane the narrator seeks refuge in omniscience. As she does, she stops displaying the characters’ actions and starts meting out broad assumptions: “a woman of Dolly's type,” “the coarseness of her own behavior,” “the worst kind of man,” “the sexual equivalent of an osteopath or a chiropractor. “With her nostalgic tone and her talk of “the young” and “the hippie years” Jane has always seemed closer to 80 than 30—a conceit whose very artificiality, coming as it does within this patently literary endeavor, has so far been curiously pleasing. It's sad to hear her end as a crotchety old fogy. As she draws her story to its close by explaining the characters’ motivations with such certainty and completeness. Jane finally proves this novel's undoing.