Reviews for Leaving home

The average rating for Leaving home based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-24 00:00:00 John Smith Set late in the 20th century in London with some sequences in Paris. Emma Roberts' father died when she was three. Her mother is a recluse who stays at home with her books. Emma cannot emulate this woman as a model in future life, she knows that, yet she has no other option. Her self-knowledge, her look back on her stilted upbringing, her account of mistakes made in early life because of this faulty early development, is heartbreaking to read about. It makes for a very moving opening, as powerful as anything I've read in Brookner. When Emma goes to Paris to do graduate work in classical garden design, a field whose elegant symmetry becomes a metaphor for the life she hasn't lived, for the logic she seeks to impose, she morphs into an evaluator of her own and others' motives. Her assessments are honest, but no less cutting for that: The rules of the game were apparent. John Charles was the prize, Françoise the sacrifice. Mme. de Lairac wanted the house, Mme Desnoyers wanted the money. The paradox of Emma Roberts' character is that even though she can see the deficiencies of her upbringing, she cannot for the life of her turn that knowledge into change. She's stuck. Everyone must be allowed to run roughshod over her, as they had over her mother. She can never knowingly assert herself. When in Paris, doing some scholarly work in the library, she makes a friend of Françoise. This friend is good at everything Emma Roberts is not. Brookner often works through contrasts like this, something she's very good at doing. Françoise is a handsome young woman adept in social situations who knows how to handle men. There's a very deeply moving moment when Emma, at an older friend's house, goes upstairs to use the bathroom and sees the friend's younger son lying naked in bed, fast asleep. I walked up the stairs as unobtrusively as I could. The doors on the right were open. Through one I caught sight of a rumpled bed, and on it the body of a young man. Unable to prevent myself from doing so I tiptoed in. He — Mark, presumably — was fast asleep. His sleep seem to me exceptional, total, his arms flung out, his face classical in its emptiness. For a moment I contemplated him, as Psyche once contemplated Cupid, raising her lamp, willing him not to wake and witness her transgression. At the sight of his surrendered nakedness I saw what had been missing from my life. It was another coup de foudre, information received, though not knowingly given. My shock was unwitnessed, but perhaps all the more profound for that reason. I would have welcomed some sign of comprehension, even of willingness to talk, but I was alone in this discovery, and perhaps one always is. I could appreciate the virtues of taciturnity, as I could with Michael, but now I had seen what was infinitely more desirable: the arms flung out, the expression of satiety. It was only sleep, I reminded myself, but I did not see how anyone could have enough of it. Sadly, she never achieves even the promise of this kind of rich physical and emotional life.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-20 00:00:00 David Fechheimer I love Anita Brookner, although her books are so old fashioned. So old fashioned, in fact, that I can barely figure out which decade they are supposed to be set in. Leaving Home is almost plot free, but the language is lovely, and some of the lines you want to read again and again.