Incidents in the Rue Laugier - Anita Brookner

 

      "I have reached the age," writes the narrator, "when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person whom she least plans to resemble: her mother."  So begins the story that Maffy creates from the scarce few words that survive in a journal written by her dead mother.  Maffy's memories of her mother, Maud, are of a woman who "read a lot, sighed a lot and went to bed early."  She knows very little of what her parents lives were like and she proceeds to invent a history to explain them.
     The young Maud lives a disappointing life as the daughter of a single mother who herself has led a disappointing life.  Forced once again into a summer at the country home of her mother's sister, who has fared better in life, she falls for a friend of her cousin.  David Tyler is the classic "golden boy" - handsome, charming, and also a cad.  Maud falls for him and is encouraged by her mother to go with him to Paris.  They have a brief affair that is, for Maud, life changing.  When he disappears and Maud thinks she is pregnant, Tyler's friend, Edward, is left to pick up the pieces.
     He offers to marry her and they proceed to marry even after Maud miscarries.  The problems are many.  Maud doesn't love him and continues to long for the passion she felt in Tyler's arm.  Edward desperately wants to win Maud's love but he is ill equipped to win her.  He also has led a disappointing life in which he longs for the dream of a sunlit garden of his youth that he strives to regain.  It is not surprising that together they live a slow, sad, disappointing life.  Maud holds on to the memory of Tyler even after she meets him at a wedding years later and realizes what a shallow, careless man he is.  Edward continues to long for something he feels he has lost but just what that is never comes into focus.
     The story that plods along is populated by precisely drawn characters that made me want to continue the journey in spite of the painfully sorrowful lives portrayed.  The themes of memory, what we choose to remember, how we creatively remember the past permeate the novel and are heightened by Maud's endless reading and reading of Proust.  They live their lives in search of lost time.
    This is my second Brookner.  I read Hotel du Lac last year and enjoyed the story much more.  However, the characterization in Incidents in the Rue Laugier were wonderful and I would recommend it for this if nothing else.