694
PARTISAN REVIEW
at home amid the settled verities of still life. Her loveliest effects are
painterly : "She saw the park at Versailles, always deserted in its far–
thest reaches, golden leaves settled in drifts around the bases of the
statues, the water in the stone basins still, undisturbed by the foun–
tains, and mirroring the slow clouds in their lofty movements." Mir–
roring the slow clouds in her lofty movements, Brookner excels at
decorative domestic touches, at catching flowers and curtains, fab–
rics and china, the play of light on lusterless London evenings . "A
shaft of sun struck through the window, as an almond biscuit,
essence of bourgeois sweetness, crumbled into sugary dust on
Blanche's tongue ." Such is a Brookner epiphany.
In a sense, indeed, Brookner has the style and sensibility of a
collector of antiques; her prose gleams with a burnished vintage
elegance, and her weighty, beautifully carpentered paragraphs re–
semble Chippendale desks in which the sentences are arranged like
impeccably organized drawers, each of them aglitter with bright
jewels. Socially too, Brookner moves almost exclusively within a
rarefied Jamesian domain of minute observations and fine discrimi–
nations, the small dinner-party world of the English upper-middle
class, untouched by anything needy, and unchanged since the age
of Bloomsburials. As a well-bred heir to the Grand Tradition,
Brookner is habitually loath to raise her voice. Indeed, the discretion
of her novel, and its distance from all vulgarities and headlines, is
announced in its very first sentence: "Blanche Vernon occupied her
time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay." The ambiguity about
where the emphasis should fall (on "most" or on "usefully"?), the nice
use of "usefully" to dissociate narrator from character, the scrupulous
vagueness of "feelings" (what kind of feelings are being kept at bay ,
and whose?) - all usher the reader into the most decorous of
drawing-rooms.
In a sense, then,
The Misalliance
itself ends up becoming very
similar to the plush, exquisitely appointed , somewhat narrow room
that Blanche inhabits; it is as lovely, as shuttered , and as sad. And
much in keeping with the Woolfian tradition , very little really hap–
pens in the book: its plot is as impalpable as the shift from spring
into summer; its moods develop as subtly as the changing light in
Monet's studies of the Thames. Blanche is never haunted by the wild
spirits that trouble her counterparts in Bowen or in Woolf; nor does
she even share very much, except for her costly innocence, with the
tea-cozy spinsters of Pym. Indeed, Blanche moves in almost no
