It has been years since I’ve read anything by Anita Brookner and so I cannot tell whether or not The Rules of Engagement, which I read yesterday, is typical Brookner. I hope not: I hated it. It was well-written but I just could not stand anyone in the book at all. The narrator, Elizabeth, is a complete neurotic, self-absorbed and miserable most of the time, except when engaging, for a very brief period, in an adulterous affair. The novel explores her friendship with another Elizabeth, a school friend dubbed “Betsy” who has neither the apparently stable home life nor apparently (again) happy marriage that narrator Elizabeth has. But the narrator’s home life is not so stable and her marriage is undertaken only as an escape from warring parents. Disappointment is the fate of both Elizabeths, one for aiming too low (Elizabeth deems herself realistic) and one for aiming too high (Elizabeth deems Betsy to be a romantic).
Similar to the narrator of the book I read two days ago, The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz, Elizabeth is widowed early in her marriage: all similarities between the two end right there. For Elizabeth, the widowing is both a relief and a plunging into an abyss of inaction, languidness, and a low-grade but chronic state of depression. I kept thinking, “Do something! Engage yourself!” But the only time Elizabeth stirs herself at all is to invite a man she is not really that interested in to sleep with her and so begins a small, boring engagement of adults. Aurora from The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz lived quietly, without grand gestures, and fully. Elizabeth lives quietly but is not even one-quarter of the way engaged with life. Aurora was a not a woman of action yet I never felt impelled to scream “Do something!” at her. She was busy thinking about everything around her, she was curious and thus very much alive. Elizabeth takes lots of long walks but only to dwell on what she does not have, on what she is missing. She is not curious but rather the opposite: she does not want to know the details of anything that might commit her to become involved or disturbed. She fears “damage”, emotional and physical, she fears weakness and, in the end, she fears men for the damages of both kind that they can wreak.
What is most interesting about The Rules of Engagement is that Brookner has written a thoroughly nineteenth century novel — French nineteenth century novel — about late twentieth century women. Flaubert or Balzac or George Sand could have written this book about women utterly reliant on men, bristling at rules of conduct but still accepting the rules. The women and the men in this book are not contemporary in any way, other than in their bids for sexual freedom but even those thrusts seem thoroughly nineteenth century: the rented flat for illicit rendezvous, the cheated-on wife who knows what is going on but accepts it as part of her own grand scheme, the passionate orphan whose heart and body are abused, the repressed woman who only finds release within the impersonal rules of an affair. Although the book is set in the last four decades of the twentieth century, it reads as if it were set one hundred years earlier. The attitudes expressed and the opinions given, the desire for decorum and good behavior — and then the furtive sex, no details provided — seemed so impossibly old-fashioned.
Perhaps Brookner was creating a miasma of the past on purpose. Elizabeth the narrator loves nineteenth literature (so do I!) and since we are hearing everything from her point of view, the nineteenth century heroine stance on things makes some sense. Her “rules of engagement” are drawn from the novels she reads but then were does her utter lack of motivation or interest come from? Neither Brookner’s novel nor the narrator engaged me in the least. Elizabeth findsMadame Bovary a bit frightening, but I’d take Emma Bovary any day over this limp biscuit.
