Providence Book

No one does loneliness like Brookner.

Providence feels more controlled than the other books of hers I've read, in the sense that it reads almost like an extremely well-choreographed play, each scene very tight and taut, each emotional shift in protagonist Kitty Maule's mind orchestrated with a very deft hand'most times omniscient, and other times delving directly into her thoughts.

Unlike some of the other lonely and socially-estranged protagonists that populate Brookner's novels, Kitty is more independent, self-willed, and self-governed: while her upbringing leaves her feeling alienated and unsure as to which culture or nation she belongs (her mother's side of the family is French; her father, whom she never knew, British), she seems to carve out a niche for herself in the academic world, researching the Romantic tradition.

Brookner intersperses scenes from Kitty's seminar on Benjamin Constant's Romantic novel Adolphe with Kitty's own struggles to gain recognition as an academic, as an individual, and also to gain the admiration and love she desires from another scholar, Maurice Bishop. Kitty has several female role models, none of whom seem to fit her own particular sense of being in the world: her neighbor, Caroline, who is fashion-conscious, divorced, and drags Kitty to a psychic; her colleague, Pauline, who is also lassoed in by family, caring for her elderly, blind mother, yet able to balance an academic career of her own; and her aging grandmother, who clings to Parisian ways and modes of fashion despite living in London, and who wishes to see Kitty married before she dies.

The love interest aspect of Providence is more interesting than ones I've encountered in previous Brookner's: Maurice is more accessible than the typical Brookner protagonist's object of obsession, and it is through the lens of aesthetics and academics that Kitty and Maurice can relate to one another on almost equal footing'apart, that is, from Maurice's faith and Kitty's lack of faith, and, too, apart from a past love affair that Maurice clings to stubbornly like an albatross and against which Kitty feels powerless to assert herself.

Despite its strengths in the very controlled way it's plotted, unlike the meandering Falling Slowly , Providence fails slightly with its abrupt ending: admittedly, it works, but it doesn't satisfy or bring the various threads with which Brookner is working to a pleasing denouement. There is less pathos here than in her other books, and, perhaps, this is why the ending left at least this reader feeling as if something was missing, or as if the ending was rushed without much thought... something made all the more glaring given the extreme composure of the novel as a whole. Indeed, more seems to happen in the discussions of Adolphe's considerations of love, individuality, and the Romantic hero's predicament than it does at the end of Providence when it comes to Kitty: the intertextual foregrounding doesn't altogether work, then.