[In the following review, Simon offers an unenthusiastic evaluation of A Private View.]

Anita Brookner, in her previous 13 novels, has written about genteel Englishmen or women who have lived circumscribed lives, seeking but never finding the kind of romantic love glorified in literature. They are often dutiful sons or daughters to self-absorbed mothers who do not deserve such loyalty. They may have friends, but not intimate relationships; they may have felt sedate affection, but never fevered, torrid, rapturous love. We find them at a moment when they hope to change their lives, when they are on the verge of doing something outrageous, but they never do. Instead, they retreat, resigned and regretful.

If this basic story interests you, as well it might, I suggest that you read the novel that still stands as Ms. Brookner's finest, Look at Me （1983）. Frances Hinton, the medical librarian whose quest for romance ends in failure, is one of Ms. Brookner's most complex and sympathetic protagonists, and Look at Me is written with a freshness and passion that Ms. Brookner has not sustained in subsequent novels, including her latest, A Private View.

As Ms. Brookner ages—she is now 66—so do her characters. The aptly named George Bland is 65, retired from a career as a personnel manager, during which time he was mildly distracted only by an affair with a docile woman who, in a rare act of self-assertion, finally married another man. As the novel opens, George's one friend, Michael Putnam, has just died of cancer. Bereft of that companionship, George sees his life as empty and boring.

Although George appears to be literate—in fact, Putnam warned him that he had picked up some dangerous ideas about life from the novels he read—he finds scant comfort in books; and although he frequents museums and galleries, he gets little sustenance from art. Like many of Ms. Brookner's protagonists, George is wealthy enough to be free to do whatever he fancies. But he is decidedly not fanciful.

With ample time to examine his past, George regrets his cautious, sensible choices. “He wanted life, more life,” Ms. Brookner tells us “He had never lost his heart, burned his boats, gone in search of something indefinable, out of reach.” He seems to be exhaling his life as a sigh until Ms. Brookner interrupts his orderly existence by confronting him with Katy Gibb, a thirtyish woman who takes up temporary residence in a neighbor's flat.

Katy pouts, sulks and espouses New Age ideas. She is not particularly attractive, but George becomes fascinated by her. Although he does not love or desire Katy, he sees her as a possible liberator from “the sadness that seemed to hover like a shadow over the end of every day.” He wonders if she can help him to start his life again. “But this time to be different, to be selfish, to be obdurate!”

Certainly Katy is concerned only with herself. Although she can speak with authority about such matters as tantric massage, crystal therapy, flower remedies and the child within, Katy has not found spiritual peace. Instead, she seems irritable and even angry; it is her anger, more than anything else, that attracts George.

In his fantasies, he does not see her as a companion or seductress; instead, she is a subject of his own rage: “He almost ground his teeth when he thought of the girl, her provocation, her beady-eyed passive aggression, the limitations of a mind which, in its very idleness, wrought in him that irritated frenzy which was part of his malaise.” Yet George seeks not power over Katy, but a kind of redemption. If approaching her seems to him like opening a Pandora's box, he recognizes that “Pandora let loose Discord, but at the bottom of the box discovered Hope.”

George, like all of Ms. Brookner's protagonists, hopes for the strength to reinvent himself, to do something shocking, to feel, at last, fully alive. Of course, succumbing to the fate of all of Ms. Brookner's protagonists, his hopes are dashed. Katy rejects George's attentions and decides to leave England. George returns to the placid routine of his former life.

All praise is due Ms. Brookner for the economy of her elegant prose and her sensitive rendering of moments of solitary introspection But after so many novels in which she allows her characters no glimmer of happiness and, especially in her later works, treats them with condescension, her readers are bound to feel disgruntled. Her plot, her characters and especially Ms. Brookner's bleak view of reality have become tiresome. She has not lately been able to re-create the tension of Look at Me, where it was possible, even if not probable, that Frances Hinton would escape from her claustrophobic existence. But George Bland is so unimaginative in conceiving new directions for his life that he can do nothing more than repeat past patterns of behavior. Where Ms. Brookner might have conceived an incisive portrait of an aging man, she gives as instead another version of her familiar story.