Dolly
By Anita Brookner
Random House, 256 pages, $22
Imagine the emotional and psychological texture of a 19th Century novel by an Austen, a Bronte or a George Eliot-the acute ear for flutters in conversation and their shaded meanings, the minutely observant eye for expression and gesture. Now infuse this writing with a razor-sharp late 20th Century sensitivity to the underlying dynamics of family life: a feminist’s insight into gender relations, a post-Freudian grasp of the love between mothers and their children. But even such a formula does not approach the achievement of Anita Brookner’s entrancing new novel, “Dolly.” For Brookner writes in three dimensions: two on the page and a third that reaches deep into time. The result is a riveting family portrait that implicates all of us in its drama.
The story begins with the narrator Jane recalling her first childhood encounter with Dolly, whom she calls “the Aunt” because “anything more intimate would have implied appropriation, or attachment.” In fact, Dolly is imperious and charming, wily and irrepressible-and stupendously self-absorbed. But from the outset, the young Jane’s intense dislike of Dolly also comes mixed with a fascinated admiration for her aunt’s uncanny ability to land on her feet, despite the considerable social obstacles thrown into the paths of women like Dolly.
The story that follows pulses with a wisdom far beyond young Jane’s years. For this is also a coming-of-age novel-Jane’s coming of age in the strange light of this aunt, who has exerted an unwelcome but undeniable pull on Jane’s consciousness.
Jane has thus researched Dolly’s life to know better her own. She found that Dolly was born in Paris to Jacob and Fanny Schiff, a poor, unworldly young couple who had left Frankfurt for Paris two years after the end of World War I. There they hoped to become more prosperous, he as a relatively unskilled watchmaker, she as a dressmaker. But like almost every other man in this story, Jacob proves to be a wholly unreliable and ineffectual figure who came and went, came and went and finally just went. In the bleak years that followed, Fanny eked out an existence as dressmaker of choice for the young streetwalkers on the Rue Saint-Denis. Dolly, meanwhile, grew into a dark-eyed and beautiful teenager, “with a taut faintly gleaming French complexion.”
Described by Jane as too simple to know that as Jews, she and her daughter might have been in danger during the German occupation, Fanny fairly prospered under the protection of her loyal clientele, many of whom had joined up with German officers during World War II. Dolly learned the prostitutes’ social wiles, if never their profession, and absorbed her mother’s industriousness, if never her craft.
At the end of the war, young American soldiers rewarded Dolly’s beauty and charm with declarations of love but no commitments; she in turn learned to speak their English and dance their wild dances. Before long, Fanny and Dolly knew it was time to leave Paris, which was in no mood to abide the friends of collaborators and whores. They made it to England to start over again, and practically within hours of their arrival, Dolly met and wooed both the woman who would be Jane’s grandmother and her son, Hugo, Jane’s uncle.
The great-granddaughter of a Viennese Jewish ophthalmologist and the granddaughter of his daughter, Jane is anything but plain. Indeed, as she grows into womanhood and Dolly grows into that “certain age,” the narrator’s voice becomes subtly wiser and more psychologically penetrating. As a minutely observant little girl, Jane seems to have gleaned most of her insights well before she understood their implications. Because she is so wise before her time, Jane’s coming of age is also a catching up with the significance of things she already knows.
Jane’s eye continually skews her descriptions to reveal herself. Both a perceptive and gentle judge of her parents, in their time, Jane loves her father deeply precisely because he seems to have been the first person to truly love her mother. When she imagines their courtship, she is perfectly aware of the tension between her girlish idealism and her womanly skepticism:
“By contemporary standards their courtship was slow, archaic: for five years they went to concerts, took their walks. I think well of this, although my generation is more cynical, less hopeful of a good outcome, and tends to be derisive of such obvious chastity.”
Those are the words of a woman who cannot look into the faces of her mother, father or grandmother without seeing the march of lives that arrived there. At the same time, Jane seems to realize that even her own face can reveal, if properly interrogated, the loves and losses suffered by her great-grandmother, who died giving birth to her grandmother.
In this sense, Jane is both a product of her parents’ origins and alienated from them. Hence, the simultaneous sympathy and revulsion she feels for Dolly’s female professionalism:
“Led by her need for money (Dolly) had perhaps overlooked or even buried that longing, that desire for fulfillment, for obedience, for a man’s protection, archaic female longings which will not be banished, but which survive long after compromises have been reached and reality acknowledged.
“Many a woman knows that on the level of her most basic imaginings she has not been satisfied; hence the look of cheerful forbearance which is the most recognisable expression on the face of the average woman….”
Beyond the Englishwoman’s charm that Dolly has worked so hard to cultivate also lay the nimbleness of a woman on her own:
“Her accent was English, her good sense was English, her endurance was English. Yet she had a look of readiness, of adroitness that was not English, and which led back to her early need to make her way in the world.”
Though she never makes the allusion explicit, Brookner pays a kind of post-feminist homage to Virginia Woolf-not to Woolf’s prose style or method but to her revolutionary call, as a woman, for “a room of her own.” In the case of Jane, however, this quiet room for a writer’s work has not been achieved so much as bequeathed to her by a family whose members, one by one, have died and left her alone at age 18. Now alone and desperately lonely, Jane writes as if to fill the house of her mind again with family. And now that she has the room of her own, she fills it with a roomful of women.
But like the men of this novel who either abandoned their wives or life itself, these women also take their leave, until all Jane has left is Dolly. And Dolly also finds herself alone, abandoned by an older generation of women friends who have become absorbed in their own lives.
By the end of the novel, Jane can finally begin to confront directly the ambivalent power of Dolly’s story on her life. Now a feminist scholar of fairy-tales, she entertains decidedly unfeminist thoughts but cleaves to them anyway out of sympathy for a generation that bore the brunt of their truth:
“I do not tell (feminist friends) that my views have perhaps been influenced by the most unreconstructed woman I have ever known, for although this is true I now see that Dolly belongs to another epoch, another world, a world in which the support of women could not be taken for granted.”
Indeed, this may be a subtle reversal of what Thomas Hardy once called in Tess “the ache of the modern,” in which an archaic vocabulary seemed insufficient to express newly perceived truths. In “Dolly,” Anita Brookner has brilliantly revealed what might be called the ache of the postmodern, postfeminist era: the incapacity in a liberated lexicon to grasp a woman’s seemingly archaic, outdated needs. It is this that Brookner’s dextrously wrought parable lays out in painfully rich detail, the struggle of a contemporary woman to grasp fully the impossible plight of her foremothers.
