Hotel du Lac

Brookner sets up two competing accounts of what a woman is for, embodied by the hotel's off-season cast: Mrs Pusey, luxuriating in a marriage built entirely on being adored and provided for, and the whippet-thin Monica, starving herself in quiet rebellion against a husband who wants an heir. Edith, a romance novelist who makes her living writing exactly the fairy tale she's too clear-eyed to believe in, is caught between them, and the novel's irony is sharpest where it's quietest: she understands the market value of the story she sells better than anyone in the hotel, which is precisely why she can't talk herself into living inside it.

The hotel itself, drained of its high-season glamour, becomes a kind of purgatorial waiting room where women who have failed to secure a conventional happy ending sit out the low season together, observed by Edith with the same detached, slightly merciless eye she turns on her own novels' heroines. Mr Neville's proposal — pragmatic, undisguised, offered as a business arrangement rather than a romance — forces the terms Edith has spent her whole career prettifying out into the open: marriage as a transaction for status and security, love entirely optional. That he can say this plainly, without shame, is what finally lets Edith see him clearly.

Brookner's great structural joke is making her protagonist a professional romance writer who cannot make her own life conform to her own genre's rules — the disastrous affair with the married David that opens the novel, sending Edith into effective exile at the hotel, reads nothing like the plots she publishes. The gap between what Edith writes for a living and what she's willing to accept for herself is the novel's real subject, and it's why the ending, so quiet on the page, carries the weight of a genre being deliberately refused.

Hotel du Lac famously beat In the Memory of the Forest, Empire of the Sun, and other louder, more expansive novels for the 1984 Booker, a decision some critics greeted as the prize rewarding a miniature over the big historical canvases it usually favors. That reaction rather proves Brookner's point: a small, exact novel about a woman weighing solitude against a comfortable marriage was read by some as a lesser subject than war or empire, exactly the hierarchy of seriousness Edith herself has spent her career quietly, professionally exploiting and resenting in equal measure.