Fraud

by Anita Brookner

Overview

At the heart of Anita Brookner's new novel lies a double mystery: What has happened to Anna Durrant, a solitary woman of a certain age who has disappeared from her London flat? And why has it taken four months for anyone to notice?

As Brookner reconstructs Anna's life and character through the eyes of her acquaintances, she gives us a witty yet ultimately devastating study of self-annihilating virtue while exposing the social, fiscal, and moral frauds that are the underpinnings of terrifying rectitude.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679743088
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/13/1994
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, was a lifelong Londoner. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She is the author of twenty-seven books, including the Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel Du Lac. She died in 2016.

Editorial Reviews

"Starts like a classic detective story and continues like a metaphysical mystery...fascinating [and] deeply satisfying. Brookner's most enjoyable novel in many years."— San Francisco Chronicle

"Sophisticated and intelligent...Although Brookner has often been compared to Jane Austen, Henry James is the author she brings most to mind. She is [as] responsive to mystery as she is to the mysterious inner matters of her characters' minds. Brookner has written a novel of...suffering and of momentary but somehow very large triumph."— Frederick Busch, Chicago Tribune

"Brookner's usual satiny prose is carefully disciplined, beguilingly smooth.... A study of character [that] skillfully evokes the vicissitudes of friendship."— New York Newsday

From the Publisher

A recluse vanishes from her London flat and a gullible professor dreams of love at a provincial British university in Brookner's two novels about discontented women. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The women in Brookner's quiet novels often lead narrow, circumscribed lives. Although they are usually financially secure and well educated, they are barely touched by the world outside their well-furnished walls. Anna Durrant is another such heroine. As the novel begins, the police are investigating her disappearance. The action then moves back through her life of dutiful companionship to her invalid, widowed mother and her disappointments in love, looking for clues to her whereabouts. We come to see how Anna and her associates have erected false facades to conform to society's expectations. Very little actually happens in Brookner's novels, yet the characters live such rich inner lives that her devoted readers inevitably come to care deeply about them, as they surely will about Anna Durrant and what has become of her. Recommended for all literary fiction collections.-- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario

Library Journal

Sophisticated and Intelligent…Although Brookner has often been compared to Jane Austen, Henry James is the author she brings most to mind. She is [as] responsive to mystery as she is to the mysterious inner matters of her characters' minds. Brookner has written a novel of…suffering and of momentary but somehow very large triumph.
—Chicago Tribune

Frederick Busch

Again, Brookner (A Closed Eye, Brief Lives, etc.) acutely limns the lives of women shaped as much by temperament as by circumstance, but this time she liberates her heroine—both from herself and her situation—in an uncharacteristically upbeat ending. Like a typical Victorian daughter, 50-ish Anna Durrant—kept in her place by "the habit of affection" and "the iron discipline to which she had subjected herself"—has devoted the best years of her life to taking care of her ailing mother. Anna seems incapable of breaking these old habits even when her mother dies. She tries to help Mrs. Marsh, an elderly widow of stoic independence, who is more irritated than gratified by Anna's well- meaning attentions. When Anna suddenly disappears, her family doctor, Lawrence Halliday, a once likely suitor, alerts the police, but Anna cannot be found. The events of the months leading up to her disappearance are then recalled by the earlier Anna and her few acquaintances in scenes that, like an indictment, accumulate to reveal how much of Anna's life has been a fraud. The precipitating moment is a ghastly dinner with Lawrence Halliday, whom Anna realizes she should—and could—have married, and his wife, attractive only because of her obvious sexual greed. Back home, Anna considers the lines of Val‚ry that describe "the strength born secretly out of idleness or inaction." Consideration is followed by resolve, and Anna returns to France, where she had once been a student, determined to go out into "the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street" of life. As she tells a friend surprised to find her in Paris after all: "I believed my mother, who told me that thebest things in life are worth waiting for. And I waited. That was the fraud....I blame myself....I shouldn't have been so credulous." A quietly powerful exploration of the insidious costs of the unrelieved self-sacrifices expected of—and so usually made—by women. Brookner at her best.

Kirkus Reviews