Visitors: A Novel - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679781471 ISBN 13: 9780679781479

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

The extraordinary Anita Brookner, praised by The New York Times as "one of the finest novelists of her generation," gives us a brilliant novel about age and awakening.  In Visitors, Brookner explores what happens when a woman's quiet resignation to fate is challenged by the arrogance of youth.

Dorothea May is most at ease in the company of strangers.  When her late husband's relatives prevail on her to take in a young man for the week before an unexpected family wedding, Thea's carefully constructed, solitary world is thrown into disarray.  As the wedding approaches, old family secrets surface and conflicts erupt between the generations, trapping an unwilling Thea in the middle.  Confronted by the company of Steve Best, a carefree young wanderer, Thea's fragile facade of peaceful acceptance is pierced, forcing her to face in a new way both her past and her future.

Exquisite writing, richly drawn characters, and penetrating prceptions about people are here combined into another superb novel by the writer about whom The New York Times Book Review has said, "If Henry James were around, the only writer he'd be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner."

About this title

About the Author:

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. 

From Kirkus Reviews:

In another quietly brilliant gem, the incomparably subtle Brookner (Altered States, 1997, etc.) puts soft, revealing touches on the face of loneliness as only the elderly know it. As in her recent A Private View (1995), the predicament of the aging is highlighted through generational contrast and conflict, although here the protagonist is female, while the youth who rocks her boat is all but sexless. Thea May is a woman of propriety, from her neat hair down to her sensible shoes. Widowed for 15 years after having married late, she's lived much of her life alone in London, and contacts with her late husband's well-to-do family, to whom she was never close for a variety of reasons, have become so ritualized by her aloofness as to barely ruffle the surface of her existence. When sister-in-law Kitty calls to ask for help in an unusual way, though, by putting up--for a week at least--the best man before her granddaughter's unexpected wedding, still waters begin to churn. And when Steve, a polite drifter with no plans for the future, moves in, Thea feels a shift in the wind even as she struggles against it. Steve and his friends might as well be visitors from another planet, so entirely do their views differ from those of Thea and Kitty's generation. But the preparations go on apace, as Thea, in spite of herself, comes to see refracted in Steve's rootlessness something strangely familiar. By the day of the wedding he's out of her life, at her insistence, but the inner turmoil he's created remains. Impulsively, Thea plans to travel herself--only to change her mind as good sense and habit regain control. Signaling profound upheaval with the slightest turn of phrase and imparting wisdom through the most trivial detail, Brookner continues her long, nuanced look at human isolation. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679781471
• ISBN 13: 9780679781479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256