Did Rumaan Alam manifest Hermione Lee’s new book?

In 2018, while reading his way through the novels of Anita Brookner, bestselling author Rumaan Alam wished that Hermione Lee would write her biography. Eight years later, he got his wish. Ahead of his conversation with Lee on Wednesday, November 18 about her new book, Anita Brookner: Art and Life, Alam chatted with us about why the biography constitutes “a front in the campaign for Brookner’s canonization,” how Brookner makes the quotidian details of life feel extraordinary, the thrill of chatting with one of the greatest living biographers, and more.

In a 2018 piece for The New York Times called “In Praise of Anita Brookner,” you wrote, “It’s invigorating to see the most quotidian things through Brookner’s intelligent eyes.” How exactly does this transformation from the quotidian to the extraordinary play out in Brookner’s writing?

Brookner’s work is strangely sensual, which is a word that we often associate with sexuality, but in Brookner’s case it’s something else: an attention to what it means to exist in everyday life. Eating a meal, drinking a coffee, walking around — it’s not high drama, and yet its depiction on the page is dead on. In her novel Dolly, the narrator goes for a walk on the beach in the rain after a particularly dreary Christmas — a mundane experience, but one many of us have probably had in some form or another. Brookner’s gift is her ability to bend language so precisely that the reader feels a shock of recognition. It isn’t flashy, but I think that is one of the marks of truly great writing. And it’s why I made a project of reading nearly all of her work.

The occasion for this event at 92NY is of course Hermione Lee’s new biography of Brookner. How has that book changed or deepened your perception of Brookner?

I’d like to say something for the record, because this particular record has vanished under my feet: I used to be on Twitter a lot, and in 2019, deep in the fever of my Brookner reading project, I tweeted something like, “Anita Brookner needs a biography, what is Hermione Lee doing right now??” And when this book was announced, I thought, Wow — I should have bought a lottery ticket. I manifested it! [Laughs] Hermione is the gold standard of biographers. Her imprimatur confers something on Brookner, a sense that this is a major writer whose reputation has been a bit neglected, which is a kind of reversal of what she’s done in the past; the subjects of Lee’s other biographies, like Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather, don’t really need that. By taking on Brookner, Lee is effectively saying that this writer deserves more attention. I came to Lee’s book already agreeing with that, but she persuaded me even more. It’s a master class in readerly attention. Brookner was quite reticent about her own life and destroyed a lot of the material that would have assisted a biographer; in a way, Lee’s book is as much an act of criticism as a biography, because the lack of source material means that she’s reading Brookner’s fiction very, very carefully. And she is an incredibly intelligent, vibrant guide.

Why did Brookner destroy that biographical material?

I wish I could tell you. But my theory is that she knew — she knew how good she was, and that this kind of attention was inevitable, and getting rid of this stuff was an act of authorial control. It says, in effect, that the books are all that matter. But Hermione Lee’s job as a biographer is to understand both the art and the life, and how one explains the other.

In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, you said, “Anita Brookner is one of my favorite writers, but some readers would say all of her novels are essentially indistinguishable from one another. Then there are writers like Jennifer Egan, where every novel is an experiment. I aspire to be like Egan, and then find myself writing like Brookner.” What do you mean by that?

Well I certainly didn’t meant to flatter myself that I’m as good a writer as Brookner! What I meant was that Brookner’s books are very consistent. You know what you’re going to get, and the narrators often seem to resemble the writer herself. I used Jennifer Egan as a counterexample in that interview because she does the inverse so well: an historical fiction, a Gothic, a novel in stories. Her imagination is so broad, always a surprise. Anita Brookner was interested in what it felt like to be alive, specifically what it felt like for her to be alive. And it is fascinating to me that I — decades younger, a gay man, living in the US and not the UK — can be so affected by it. In the description of a long walk through London, or the atmosphere of an art gallery, or the scene of a librarian at a minor research institution drinking coffee with her depressing coworker out of a Mickey Mouse mug, a whole reality comes into focus.

Brookner has gained a new readership in recent years. Why do you think that is?

In the same way that a book like Madame Bovary feels utterly of this moment, so does Brookner. The perception of the self, romance, family, the inevitability of death, the consolations of art: these are Brookner’s concerns, and they have always been salient. Brookner was an idiosyncratic, independent woman — it has never been easy to be that in a patriarchal society, but it didn’t stop her, and I think that is part of the reason that a younger generation of women has been taking her up in the last few years, bringing her into vogue. Lee’s biography is different from her previous biographies — to me, it seems to be a front in the campaign for Brookner’s canonization. And I hope it’s successful.

What do you hope the audience will take away with them after your conversation with Lee?

There’s something a little selfish about this answer, but on some level I just can’t believe that I get to do this. I get to talk to Hermione Lee, one of the best scholars of this art form, and just shoot the shit about a writer we both love? It is such a gift. The people who come to an event at 92NY are already interested in writing and art — they don’t need to be convinced — but of course I want everyone to leave and head to a library or a bookstore. When I love a book, I want to evangelize on its behalf.

Join Hermione Lee in conversation with Rumaan Alam about Anita Brookner on Wed, Nov 18.