[In the following review, Lee depicts Brookner's A Private View as exhibiting a well wrought “poetry of forlornness.”]

Every year for the last fourteen years, the distinctive Brookner perennial has reappeared in the mixed herbaceous border of the English novel, looking formal, old-fashioned, faintly Continental. Pale and elegant at first glance, it seems darker, almost grotesque, on closer inspection. It is greeted with habitual critical reactions, ranging from settled adulation （“vintage Brookner”; “a class of her own”） to impatience or unease. Devotees praise her irony, her sadness, and her beautiful prose; dissenters long for more talk, more action, more vulgarity, and more sex. Those in the middle （like me）, who are both addicted to and dismayed by these compulsive, straitjacketed novels, feel a resigned admiration in the face of a great stylist who does one kind of thing supremely well.

Brookner herself anticipated all these responses in her second novel, Providence, in an exchange between her heroine and a professor of art: “'I like your drawing. But why do you always do the same one?’ ‘Ah, that is called stylistic mastery.’” She must know that her novels invite recognition rather than surprise. They often have titles that suggest limitations: Latecomers, Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, and now A Private View. They frequently begin with solitary figures unhappily considering their lives. A Misalliance begins, “Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay.”

These patients in Brookner's fictional hospital are suffering from some form of repression, or what in Latecomers is called “the panic of the shutting of the door.” They feel displaced—as in Brief Lives, “forcibly put down in alien territory.” （Two of her best novels, Family and Friends and Latecomers, concern families, like Brookner's own, of European Jewish immigrants in England.） They are often grieving for lost parents. Their usual setting is a flat, with central heating, in a dark, gray London. There are walks through empty streets at dusk. There is often a public holiday impending, and dreaded. There may be an escapade to the Continent, but that won't necessarily relieve these life sentences of solitude.

An ethical debate continues from novel to novel—a set-to between the good taste of melancholy and the vulgarity of happiness, between a stoic fatalism and a modern idea of lives as infinitely transformable. Brookner's formidably dandyish satire has always exercised itself rewardingly on “options” and consolations. （“Blessings, it seemed, had once again to be counted” is the driest sentence in A Private View.） Transformations do occur, but more often the possibilities of change or escape are missed. The narration, with its lack of dialogue and its deliberate repetitions, reflects this airlessness uncannily.

With every new Brookner, I find myself looking for what I think of as her key word （a word not otherwise much in use in late-twentieth-century British fiction）, which is “claustration.” Sure enough, it's here in A Private View, on page 192, sounding more than ever like an echo of “castration.” The central character, George Bland, “wondered if he could ever bear to endure his habitual claustration again.” His life has been a “refusal of adventure”; his surroundings are muted （“the lighting was adequate, although subdued”）; he increasingly feels that “something was amiss.” In all these respects, his experience resembles the reader's.

Bland is a well-preserved sixty-five-year-old businessman （retired after forty years in the same job） who has inherited a small fortune from his only friend. He has a tepid long-term relationship with a placid widow, whom he has failed to marry. Behind this “desperately calm and comfortable life” lies a sad childhood. Bland was a poor boy from Reading with “disorderly” parents—feckless father, embittered, possessive mother. His escape into the middle classes （Brookner is an intensely class-conscious novelist） and his attempt to cancel out his past have resulted in a permanent sense of shame. Like James's Lambert Strether （“Live all you can; it's a mistake not to”）, he is looking for a way out of what he's made for himself: he longs for more life.

The longing is immense, the scale is tiny. Apart from the dead friend, the patient widow, some neighbors, a porter, and a cleaning woman, there is one dea ex machina. This intruder, Katy Gibb, is one of Brookner's dangerous predators: nomadic, evasive, casual, dubious. George always thinks of her as “the girl,” but she seems to be older than she looks. Her shadowy business is human improvability （“Tell the world how great you are!”）, and her language is transatlantic: sure signs of moral inadequacy. She offers her clients Tantric Massage, Crystal Therapy, Color Counselling. Bland imagines “a playground filled with adults in leisure wear, all self-actualizing obediently until the end of the session.” He shares his author's distaste for all forms of evangelism.

Nevertheless, George Bland becomes obsessed by Katy Gibb, and the novel takes on that anxious, imprisoned feeling essential to all stories of improbable erotic fixation. He is both ashamed of and aroused by the Dionysian last gasp of his hitherto repressed libido: he reflects with embarrassment on his “irrelevant penis.” （“An Irrelevant Penis”—the title of Anita Brookner's nineteenth novel, perhaps.） There's something seedy and sadomasochistic about his desire. Violence is latent, if not against “the girl,” then against himself. His orderly patterns begin to break apart.

On the novel's last page, Brookner offers Bland an escape from repression that allows for the possibility of self-help rather than self-destruction. But fairy-tale transformation is not what the novel as a whole seems to believe in. Brookner's poetry of forlornness is stronger and stranger here than ever. Brightness falls from the air everywhere in this novel, which takes place in a cold winter half-light and keeps crying out for “the sun, the sun!”