[In the following review, Hegi finds Brookner's novel Fraud overall satisfying, but states that its conclusion is “too abrupt, too convenient” to be convincing.]

Anita Brookner's brilliant and complex new novel, Fraud, opens with a mystery: a woman “in middle years, living alone,” has vanished from her London flat. Her name is Anna Durrant, and she has worn the mask of good manners all her life, deceiving others with her cheerfulness but most of all betraying herself.

Intelligent yet confused, Anna longs to have a voice of her own, to free herself from the maze of politeness “which she herself found burdensome, as if she were only just learning what other women had always known, so that she made too many efforts, and all of them inept.” She sees deeply into others and is sensitive to their discomfort at her helpfulness, her compulsion to please.

In her 11 earlier novels, Miss Brookner has often written about women who are alone in a world that feels alien to them. Her strength lies in exposing her characters’ internal lives—every thought and feeling, every nuance of a thought and feeling—and creating tension by juxtaposing these perceptions with the characters’ external lives, which are governed by proper behavior. Of course, proper behavior does not permit for private thoughts and feelings to be expressed.

In Fraud, Miss Brookner explores relationships between elderly parents and their grown children, the most tragic the bond between Anna Durrant and her vain, selfish mother. Before Anna's mother dies, she admits to her reluctant friend, Mrs. Marsh, that she has kept her daughter from living her own life. “I clung to her, I admit. She was so strong, so good.” Yet Anna's mother uses this confession only to manipulate, Mrs. Marsh into accepting a letter, to be handed to Anna after her death, encumbering her daughter even then with her “hellish and absorbing love.”

Without the “small pleasing rituals” of her mother's company, Anna feels lonely and desperate. Already anorexic, she becomes increasingly indifferent to food. Her days are too long. In her terrible isolation, she relies on sleeping pills for release.

As Miss Brookner takes us through the years leading up to Anna's disappearance, it becomes evident that she vanished long before her family doctor reported her missing: Anna ceased to exist when she was a girl and fell into the vortex of her mother's cloying needs. But what keeps Anna from being a victim is Miss Brookner's compassionate refusal to absolve her from this “pleasant collaboration of unrealities, each secretly knowing that she was making a sacrifice for the other.”

When does a parent's love become destructive? Miss Brookner keeps returning to this question. Anna's only friend, Marie-France Forestier, lives in Paris, controlled by an aging father who expects her to keep his house and obey his commands The women's long-distance friendship has been held together by 30 years of cheerful letters that leave out anything unpleasant: “They extolled the joys of spinsterhood, never hinting at its pains.” Like Anna, Marie-France lives with the curse of being a good woman; both have repressed their needs and have dreamed of some freedom from their parents. Yet when, at age 60, Marie-France is finally allowed to marry, it is with the understanding that she will move her husband into her father's house.

Additional variations of the parent-child theme are played out through some of the other characters. The most significant, in its impact on Anna, is the relationship that her doctor, Lawrence Halliday, had with his patient and adoring mother. He is still drawn to women who sacrifice themselves. Like his mother. Like Anna Durrant. But he is afraid to propose marriage to Anna, “whose presence would have absorbed all hurts.”

In an intricate tapestry of perspectives, Miss Brookner gives us different views of Anna and those around her As we are taken into their speculations about one another, and into thoughts they would never share, we come to know them more completely than they know one another or themselves. Yet, after guiding us through each subtle shift within their lives, Miss Brookner rushes into an ending that seems very unconvincing. Though the potential for transformation exists within Anna's character, the way in which Miss Brookner presents it is too abrupt, too convenient. However, up to those last five pages, Fraud is an immensely satisfying novel with unsettling insights into what can happen when the boundaries between aging parents and their children dissolve.