Look at Me by Anita Brookner

First published: 1983

Type of work: Romantic satire

Time of work: c. 1983

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Frances Hinton, the protagonist, an aspiring writer who works in the reference library of a medical research institute
• Nancy Mulvaney, her elderly housekeeper
• Olivia Benedict, Frances’ friend, who also works in the library
• Nick Fraser, one of two doctors funded by the institute
• Alix Fraser, his wife
• James Anstey, who is divorced, the other doctor funded by the institute

The Novel

Handsome, charming Dr. Nick Fraser enlivens the dull, peaceful atmosphere of the library where Frances and her crippled friend Olivia work. Nick is always in a hurry, full of meaningless endearments and light banter, exuding glamour, adventure, and success. The two young women willingly serve him, though he is quite unattainable, as they realize when his wife, Alix, visits the library one day. She, too, has an undeniable aura of power, commanding attention and subservience.

When Alix invites Frances for dinner (at the instigation of Nick, it seems clear), Frances feels that her lonely, isolated, and stifling life is about to undergo an exciting change. She falls in love with the Frasers as a couple; to her, they represent an ideal of pleasure, freedom, selfishness, and imperviousness to the feelings or needs of anyone but themselves. It is an ideal that Frances wants to observe closely and to emulate.

Hardly believing her good luck at being included in the Frasers’ group, Frances quickly becomes uncritically avid for their company; they, in turn, enjoy having her as an audience during their hilarious evenings together, usually in a restaurant, where they attract the amused attention of everyone. Always the observer, Frances studies the Frasers, not always approvingly yet captivated by their absorption in each other, their willingness, even eagerness, to display suggestively their intimacies. Alix is incessantly curious about other people’s lives and exhibits a flattering interest in the facts of Frances’ life. Later, when Frances returns to her spacious, old-fashioned flat, empty except for the silent presence of old Nancy, she writes in her diary and makes notes for a novel.

One evening in October, the three friends are joined by James Anstey, the other doctor at the institute. At first, Frances is somewhat repelled by his distinguished good looks and haughty, unapproachable manner. Yet she senses that they have something in common: shyness, good manners, moral rectitude, and inexperience in certain areas of life with which the Frasers are obviously very familiar.

As the friendship between Frances and James develops, she loses interest in her writing, even though an American magazine has just accepted one of her stories for publication. To some extent, she even loses interest in the Frasers, or at least she becomes less infatuated with them. At the same time, Alix begins to show coolness toward Frances as she resists Alix’s constant, prying questions and accusations of secrecy and duplicity. Alix is annoyed and puzzled by Frances’ good-humored and polite denial that she and James are having an affair, as indeed they are not, though James does seem to be in love with her.

When James moves in with the Frasers to rent their spare room, a turning point in his relationship with Frances takes place, although she does not realize this at first, thinking that nothing has really changed. She proceeds with plans to take a trip with James during Christmas but gradually becomes aware that he is uncomfortable with her. Suspecting that he may no longer love her as he had once seemed to do, Frances is perplexed, distressed, and confused. Once before, Frances experienced a debasing affair which she remembers but of which she never speaks. After one last evening alone with James, when he repulses her without explanation, Frances realizes that she must seek a resolution to what may be a simple misunderstanding. Not yet quite ready to concede defeat, she is determined to be lighthearted and tactful at dinner with Alix, Nick, James, and a striking, bold Italian woman named Maria, with whom Alix enjoys trading uproarious insults, accusations, and intimate information. Maria has often in the past been one of the group. The dinner turns into a hellish scene as Frances observes that James is not, as she had suspected, in love with Alix but with Maria. Characteristically, Frances maintains a calm, smiling exterior while being almost numb with shock and terror.

Finally, walking home alone in the silent streets and through the dark, deserted park, Frances becomes increasingly terrified. Cold, wet, ill, she wonders if she is going mad. Like the preceding scene, this account of the long, frightening walk has the quality of a nightmare; it ends only when she finally reaches home. Under Nancy’s loving, unquestioning care, Frances begins to recover. The following day, she assesses her situation, resumes her writing, and contemplates her future life. Nevertheless, terrified that nothing will change, that she will become old and disabled by her lonely solitude, Frances realizes that she is still hoping that one of the group will call and invite her to their Christmas celebration.

Almost immediately, however, she also faces the truth. The episode with the Frasers and their friends is over. Frances welcomes the thought of the other people who used to throng into her mind, whose stories entertained her mother so much in her last years. Now she thinks of those eccentric, amusing, sad, discarded people. She sees herself among them, and she begins to write.

The Characters

As the first-person narrator, Frances tells her own story; thus the reader sees her, and everyone else, through her selective but very perceptive viewpoint. Because she presents herself so unfavorably—shy, sharp-tongued, socially awkward, offended by bad manners—the reader may be inclined to think that she is also prim, too polite, and colorless. Yet she is much more than that, as she herself reveals: She is thoughtful, wryly good-humored, courageous, and kind to the lost or lonely, people with lives that are of no interest at all to the convivial and gregarious Frasers and their friends.

Frances yearns to be noticed, to discover new possibilities, to make changes in her life. She is, however, the daughter of two people who did not like changes; after their death, she continues to live in their apartment with its tasteless, outmoded furniture and decor, her only companion a devoted, ancient housekeeper who also resists change, still thinking of Frances as a child and feeding her the tiny meals that she used to prepare for Frances’ invalid mother, whom she adored.

When Frances becomes involved with the Frasers, new possibilities do open up, but Frances does not really change, although she feels different. She takes more care with her appearance and feels attractive. She tries hard to accommodate herself to the Frasers, to amuse and please them, but she continues to be the quiet, private observer, not the rowdy celebrant that the others are. She enjoys her calm, innocent relationship with James as they hover between affection and love.

The sudden revelation that James lusts after Maria is obviously staged by Alix, but Frances refuses to respond as she knows Alix, and probably the others as well, expect and want her to respond. By not making a scene, by remaining calm and pleasant, she disappoints the “audience,” and in so doing, she later realizes that her association with all of them, not only James, has come to an end.

No other character stands out above the rest, except for Alix, whose manipulation of everyone she encounters, sometimes to their degradation and humiliation, provides the impetus and context for the action of the novel. Although Alix is beautiful and fascinating, she is also vain, egocentric, demanding, and cruel. It is hard to understand how Frances can think, after all she has observed and experienced, that Alix was always kind to her, yet her thought does suggest how Frances has been blinded by Alix’s flattering attention.

Nick Fraser, who formerly embodied for Frances the ideal male principle, comes to seem merely passive and content to go along with whatever Alix proposes. To retain Alix’s apparent devotion to him, he has paid a great price: autonomy and self-respect. James, at the end of his brief friendship with Frances, seems to return to his original persona—distant, wary, and stiff, except when he looks lustfully at Maria in the final scene in the restaurant.

Critical Context

Anita Brookner once said in an interview that love is her subject and that real love happens without strategy, a rare circumstance because almost everyone is a strategist in one way or another. She pointed out the slightness of the chance that two nonstrategists would ever meet, and that, even if that should happen, they might be deflected by the strategists. Although she was speaking generally about the topics and ideas that interest her, her comments can easily be applied to Look at Me, in which two nonstrategists—Frances Hinton and James Anstey—are brutally deflected by a strategist and her cohorts—Alix Fraser, her husband, Nick, and her friend Maria.

Critics in general admire Brookner for her “spare, felicitous prose” and for the balance she maintains between irony and compassion. One critic called Look at Me “a horror story about monsters and their victims told in exceptionally elegant prose.” Brookner sees herself as “a marginal person” whose function as a writer is “to reabsorb and redirect all the attention that has been wasted by too much listening and watching.” Commenting on Look at Me, Brookner claims to have “despised” Frances Hinton “for her susceptibility, her lack of divination, her stupidity,” but this confession may strike the reader as being rather disingenuous, for, in spite of the claimed antipathy toward her main character, Brookner did create a memorable “unclaimed woman” unlike those of her other novels, appealing and admirable in many ways, unremarkable only to the “monsters” who were too self-centered and insensitive to look at her except for their own selfish purposes. A few critics have expressed impatience and annoyance with Brookner’s “curiously frozen protagonists,” but all acknowledge the deftness and wit with which she tells their stories.

Bibliography

Cantwell, Mary. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVIII (May 22, 1983), p. 14.

Duchene, Anne. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. March, 1983, p. 289.

Harper’s. CCLXVII, July, 1983, p. 75.

Listener. CIX, April 14, 1983, p. 32.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 3, 1983, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII, March 4, 1983, p. 91.

Roston, Annie. Review in Harper’s Magazine. CCLXVII (July, 1983), p. 75.

Stephen, Kathy Field. Review in The Christian Science Monitor. October 19, 1983, p. 24.

Wiehe, Janet. Review in Library Journal. CVIII (April 1, 1983), p. 756.