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A review by storyofjosh
Undue Influence by Anita Brookner
dark
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
a slow, purgatorial novel about the lonely life and unhappy observations of claire pitt, a young woman living in her recently deceased mother's house in london. her social interactions are limited to her friend wiggy, with whom she dines each saturday yet preserves a certain emotional distance from, and two elderly women who own the used bookshop in whose dark basement she is tasked with dull archival research. preferring to wake up early to have the city to herself, mostly she populates her life with elaborate imagined narratives of various strangers supposedly unsatisfactory emotional lives. often these are cruel without the relief of wit and make it hard to go along with her thoughts. though brookner has great fun with the irony of claire's belief in her own superior powers of perception versus her constant misapprehensions, and her light, elegant style helps what is a tonally quite dark novel go down easily.
as the novel progresses she becomes entangled with a third person, martin. he is a much older man, recently widowed and unable to talk of anything except his dead wife in conversation, having very little interest in claire, who mainly sees him as an object of pity anyway. yet at her insistence they nonetheless start sleeping together. their unsuitability for each-other romantically helps drive the narration into a overwhelming sense of trapped despair, with the outside world mainly intruding via constant reminders of death and presence of invalids and spinsters. brookner wants you to sympathise with claire's predicament, explaining her life as being uncomfortably stuck between modern independent women who have been prepared from youth to take agency over their lives and older traditional women whose path was laid out in front of them regardless of how they felt about it. her upbringing meanwhile, especially the long influence of her mother whose house she still cannot bring herself to alter in any way months after her death, made her life in late 90s britain nearly impossible. this is interesting but not always convincing, and while it grew on me as i read it the characters and world of undue influence is too slight to be satisfying.
as the novel progresses she becomes entangled with a third person, martin. he is a much older man, recently widowed and unable to talk of anything except his dead wife in conversation, having very little interest in claire, who mainly sees him as an object of pity anyway. yet at her insistence they nonetheless start sleeping together. their unsuitability for each-other romantically helps drive the narration into a overwhelming sense of trapped despair, with the outside world mainly intruding via constant reminders of death and presence of invalids and spinsters. brookner wants you to sympathise with claire's predicament, explaining her life as being uncomfortably stuck between modern independent women who have been prepared from youth to take agency over their lives and older traditional women whose path was laid out in front of them regardless of how they felt about it. her upbringing meanwhile, especially the long influence of her mother whose house she still cannot bring herself to alter in any way months after her death, made her life in late 90s britain nearly impossible. this is interesting but not always convincing, and while it grew on me as i read it the characters and world of undue influence is too slight to be satisfying.