Hotel du Lac
by Anita Brookner
Summary
Edith Hope writes romantic fiction under a pen name and has been sent away to a quiet hotel on Lake Geneva at the end of the season, by friends, in disgrace. What she did is withheld for a long time and is worth waiting for.
At the hotel are the other women left behind at the end of a season: a rich and imperious widow travelling with her grown daughter, both given to ostentatious consumption, an elderly woman quietly abandoned by her son, and a thin woman in retreat from a marriage. Edith watches them, writes letters to a married man in London that she may or may not send, and works badly on a novel.
Then a Mr Neville, urbane and entirely unsentimental, makes her a proposal that is not a proposal of love, and sets out an argument for marriage without illusion that is the sharpest passage in the book.
It is short, precise and very quiet. Nothing happens outdoors. Brookner is writing about the specific position of an intelligent single woman who has declined to make herself convenient, and the comedy is dry to the point of desiccation.
Readers who want event will find nothing. Readers who like Barbara Pym, or Henry James in a minor key, will find one of the most perfectly made small novels of the century.
It is under two hundred pages and can be read in an evening. Brookner's reputation for gloom is largely earned and slightly misleading: this is a funny book, provided the joke lands where she intends it, which is on the world rather than on Edith.
Historical Context & Significance
Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize in 1984, Anita Brookner's fourth novel. She was fifty six and had published her first at fifty three, having spent her career until then as an art historian, the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship at Cambridge.
The result caused a row. J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun was the favourite, Brookner herself expected it to win, and the judges were accused of playing safe by rewarding a modest and traditional novel over a more ambitious one. The argument recurs whenever a short, quiet book takes the prize.
Brookner went on to publish roughly a novel a year for the next quarter century, most of them concerning solitary and intelligent women, and her reputation has risen steadily since her death in 2016.