LEWIS PERCY

by Anita Brookner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 1990

With this full-throated, gloomy, yet oddly eccentric portrait of a lonely man buying into the disappointing conventions of life, Brookner finally seems to have cleared her fictional nozzle of the priggishness of excessive distinction accompanying much of her work--and come to the clement (cheering, even) conclusion that all mistakes are equal and thus maybe small. Lewis Percy is the product of a widow-led home. A shy, bookish historian, he wants in to the safety of life that women seem to represent by his mother's example--but of course womanly mystery intrudes, and in bafflement he prepares for a life (when his mother dies) of bachelorhood. Then, however, a young, mousy woman who works at the library where he does his research calls out to him not through chemistry but by Percy's will: he must have a wife, he feels, and maybe this retiring (and, it turns out, agoraphobic) girl, Tissy, will do. They marry, even have a child, but Tissy is so manifestly damaged-goods--so distant from Percy and from the swells of life itself--that the union becomes insupportable; they separate. The bachelorhood Percy tried to avoid rounds back on him, but now in the worse limbo of the married-but-apart. He meets the vivacious, dangerously insouciant sister of a friend, who invites him into her emotional life with all candor--but he refuses her out of correctness and fear. His life then almost literally proceeds to erase him, until there is the chance to leave London altogether, for America, and with it the entrance to self-forgiveness: ""He had grown up, become a fully qualified member of the fallen world."" Percy stops suffering the fact, and life starts to meet him halfway. Brookner's focus on a male character is bold, convincing. The prose often has a gray rapturousness to it that is new to her work, as it picks its way through errors that seem inevitable. Very fine--Brookner at her most virtuoso.

Pub Date: March 12, 1990

ISBN: 0679729445

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION