The Bay of Angels By Anita Brookner LARGE and 50 similar items

The Bay of Angels By Anita Brookner LARGE PRINT R. M. Peterson VINE VOICE 4.0 out of 5 stars "Life is a process of adjustment": A life minutely examined Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2011 Zoe Cunningham is the first-person narrator. Her story begins when she was a girl, living in London with her mother Anne, who was widowed shortly after Zoe was born and then became reclusive. When Zoe is in her late teens, her mother improbably meets Simon, who, as he says, is "nearly the wrong side of seventy". He seems to have money and they get married and move to Nice. Zoe splits her time between London and Nice, but out of loyalty to her mother she never establishes an independent existence. Then Simon dies and Anne retreats further inside herself, and her ebbing health forces her to be moved to a convalescent facility. Meanwhile, Zoe meets a possible male companion, but he is tethered to his sister, who seems destined to spinsterhood. Zoe is a very introspective and passive person. The novel essentially consists of her analyzing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the situations she finds herself in, none of which truly makes her happy, both because she feels caged by her loyalty to her mother and due to her extraordinarily quiescent personality. She inwardly rails against her lonely existence, but outwardly she does nothing about it, because that might entail giving offense to someone. So she grudgingly acquiesces in being buffeted about. And all the while she meditates on life's lessons, reaching the following conclusion by the end of the novel: "Life has brought me to this condition of acceptance, and at last I understand that acceptance is all. * * * The plot will unfold, with or without my help." I note that many other reviewers have criticized THE BAY OF ANGELS for its navel-gazing and lack of plot. Those are understandable reasons for dissatisfaction. One wants to give Zoe a kick in the duff and admonish her, "Stop thinking about what's happening to you and just DO something! Take a chance!" But, in truth, there are a lot of Zoes in the world, and I think THE BAY OF ANGELS captures their loneliness and passivity quite poignantly. It also is elegantly written. One of the blurbs in my edition of the book is, "If Henry James were around, the only writer he'd be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner." It has been decades since I have read any Henry James, but based on what I recall of James I find the blurb to be apt. The novel is sprinkled with gentle, rueful aphorisms. Here are two: "A peculiar innocence was gone for ever. By innocence I really meant ignorance of the world's demands." "One is never free. One has only the illusion of freedom. One is never free of obligations, whether explicit or implicit. The latter are the worst." Then there is this exquisite moment when Zoe briefly contemplates suicide (a la the much more assertive Virginia Woolf): "Late at night I found myself, as I knew I should, on the beach. The air was calm, the night particularly beautiful. It would have been entirely possible for me to walk out into the sea. That I did not do so was the result of a sense of duty to myself. I wanted to know the rest of the story, however it might turn out." THE BAY OF ANGELS (2001) was Anita Brookner's twentieth novel in twenty years. It is the third Brookner novel that I have read. It is quintessential Brookner -- in the sense that it is about a reserved, refined, intelligent but lonely British woman in the last quarter of the 20th Century -- but here that loneliness may be a little too concentrated, too solitary. In any event, the novel doesn't quite measure up to the two earlier ones I read. I would not recommend THE BAY OF ANGELS as anyone's introduction to Anita Brookner. Nor would I recommend it to anyone who needs plot and/or action in their fiction. But having expressed those caveats, I can say that the novel does have its merits and that when I reached the end I was glad I had resisted the impulse to give up on it.