The shy Brookner by then had become an elegantly turned-out and confident woman. Her lectures were immensely popular.

Undue Influence; Random House, 2000; 240 pages; $24

Undue Influence is Anita Brookner’s 19th novel. Every June her newest book comes out in England (“a fixture,” an English journalist wrote, “of the English summer, like Wimbledon or the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.”). In January, that same book emerges in the United States. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, behind my family’s back, I begin to undress the tree. I take down a few silver balls here, an angel there. I tuck each ornament into its square in the partitioned cardboard box. While I do this, I inevitably think of the pleasure that will be mine, come January, when not a pine needle or silver tinsel strand remains in the house. Part of that pleasure will be throwing myself down on the striped couch and opening Brookner’s newest novel.

The pleasure, for me, is enormous. Brookner’s careful, scrupulous sentences break out from time to time into effusion over the varieties of green in a London park or a view out the window. “The sun,” she writes, “in a late burst of activity, shed a hectic radiance on the windows of the houses opposite.” The characters who warm themselves beneath that hectic radiance lead rather desperate lives. They seek out their faces in mirrors and discover “a drained countenance, its expression wary, as if at any minute it might undergo disintegration.” I have become embarrassed about the pleasure Brookner’s novels give me. I have become embarrassed because I am afraid that my fondness for these novels says more about me than I am willing to hear.

Although Brookner rarely grants interviews, she sporadically has permitted an English journalist into her Chelsea apartment. (“We sat at a roundtable bearing only an ashtray” in “a small, bright drawing room. It overlooks a long, pleasant communal garden, with a huge chestnut tree on one side. On the walls are a few pictures by Edward Lear, an etching portrait of Baudelaire by Manet, and rows of bookshelves.”) The ashtray was for Brookner’s cigarettes. Her brand is Silk Cut. She told one of her interviewers, “I reckon that at my age, all bids are off. You can drink, smoke, and lie in the sun because whatever is going to kill you is probably already in place.”

She seemed rather readily to answer questions, although she began, as do her characters, with bemused self-deprecation: “You want to know about me, and I have a terrible feeling there is not a lot to know.”

Brookner was born in 1928. Her father, as a teenager, had come from Poland to England. He quickly changed his name from Bruckner to Brookner — “like calling yourself Batehoven,” Brookner told one interviewer. Her mother was an English tobacco heiress who, before she married, had a minor career as a classical singer. Brookner was an only child. She grew up, financially comfortable, in suburban London. Nannies and nurses reared her. “I remember my parents as being in another room,” Brookner told one interviewer. And to another, she said, about her extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents, “We were an unhappy brood.”

She makes clear, though, in her chats with the occasional journalist, that her childhood was not entirely unhappy. Like one of the characters in her newest novel, her father walked miles round London; she often walked with him. He regularly took her to the National Gallery in whose halls she was first smitten by paintings. Her parents read. “Idiosyncratically,” she said, “for comfort, which I still do. I loved books because you can metaphorically shut your ears when reading.”

She was a teenager during World War II. “My parents weren’t religious, but you couldn’t help but be conscious of being Jewish at that time. I knew terrible things were going on and were coming close, and I suppose that couldn’t help but seem menacing.”

Brookner’s parents expected that Brookner would attend college for a few years and then marry. She had other ideas. She sat for entrance examinations at Oxford. In one of her more recent interviews, Brookner confided, “I walked out of the first one. A friend of mine had died; I had visited her almost daily in the hospital but didn’t know she wasn’t expected to live. Then it was somehow decided, in an atmosphere of failure, that it was to be King’s College, London.” So she attended King’s College, London, where she studied history. “I didn’t like King’s,” she said, “on aesthetic grounds. I’d come from a leafy suburb and it was in the middle of London; it seemed too workaday. I lived at home and couldn’t cope with the buses. I hated it so much that I used to go to the National Gallery instead, where a man named Charles Clare gave lunchtime lectures about specific pictures.” Charles Clare pointed Brookner toward the Courtauld Institute of Fine Arts, which, during the immediate postwar years, nurtured both a faculty and student body notorious for their eccentricities. Deputy director of the institute when Brookner entered was Anthony Blunt. Poor Blunt was doubly closeted — he was a homosexual and a spy for the Russians. (Blunt dedicated his first book to another English spy for the Russians, Guy Burgess.) Soon after Brookner entered the Courtauld, Blunt became its director (he also became the increasingly controversial curator of the queen’s art collection). That Blunt was homosexual and a spy, however, would little effect Brookner’s future. That he was a fierce and vocal Francophile did effect the young woman. Blunt disparaged English art as banal. The Courtauld, when Brookner arrived, was on its way to becoming one of the great study centers for art historians interested in French painters and sculptors.

Brookner’s graduate work at the Courtauld led her to painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who became the subject of her doctoral dissertation. “I found him fascinating,” she told an interviewer, “because he was so extremely bad, sentimental, and melodramatic but a marvelous draughtsman with a gift for unexpectedly good portraits.” Blunt helped Brookner acquire a French-government grant for study at the Ecole du Louvre. In 1950 she took off for Paris. “My parents,” she said, “were deeply shocked. They felt that I should stay at home and look after them.” Brookner’s parents cut off her allowance. Suddenly, she was poverty-stricken. She began to write articles for various art magazines and for the Times Literary Supplement while she worked at her Greuze project. Brookner remained in Paris for almost a decade. She returned to England, teaching for several years at Reading University. In 1964 Blunt arranged for a job for her as a lecturer at the Courtauld.

The shy Brookner by then had become an elegantly turned-out and confident woman. Her lectures were immensely popular. One of her students, who later became director of the National Gallery, told an interviewer, “She insisted that art historians must have the courage of their feelings as well as their convictions, that once you know David painted this picture in 1811, you must ask: ‘What did this do to his life? What does it do to my life? And to the lives of those who have looked at it in between?’ ”

Brookner’s father had died in 1964 and her mother died in 1969. They were reconciled with Brookner before their deaths, and Brookner, like many of her characters, cared for her mother during her last years.

Brookner never married. She has admitted to various interviewers that she

did receive proposals. But almost all the proposals, she said, “made me run the other way.” In a recent novel, she wrote, “The novels she had read in her studious girlhood all ended with a marriage, for that was how the reader wanted them to end, believing that marriage was the conclusion of the story. They gave no instructions on how to spend the time once the marriage was a thing of the past.” In interviews Brookner has indicated that this business of “how to spend the time” of a marriage, for her, had been an obstacle to ever marrying. She readily describes herself as a spinster. In Altered States, her 16th novel, she wrote, “Men can bury their past. An unmarried woman is her past. Whereas a wife has a social position, a spinster has none.”

In 1981, Brookner decided that rather than going abroad for the summer as she usually did, she would stay home and write a novel. “It was a sad moment in my life,” she recalled in an interview, “which seemed to be just drifting predictably. I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate. It was an exercise in self-analysis, but without self-pity or self-justification. Then I realized that self-analysis doesn’t lead anywhere — but it can become an art form in itself.”

The novel A Start in Life — was accepted. Brookner continued on, writing in summers. In 1984, for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, she received the prestigious Booker Prize. In 1989, she retired from teaching. She writes seven days per week. She takes long walks about London. She eschews literary parties and most social life. Like her characters, she eats take-out food and snacks off tidbits of this and that When she invites an old friend for a meal, they take the meal at a French restaurant After Brookner won the Booker, everyone I knew started reading her. Everyone sighed and carried on about Brookner’s wonders (although, in retrospect, I realize that no one ever quite dared say what those wonders were). Every year everyone I knew waited to read the newest Brookner book. To read these books was to make one’s annual pilgrimage to a shrine. This went on for a while. At mention of the fifth novel, the sixth, the seventh, even the eighth, the faces of my Brookner-reading friends still acquired that dotty, big-eyed expression that lusters faces of the faithful when gurus visit.

And then, along about the ninth or tenth Brookner novel, Lewis Percy and Brief Lives, these same readers began to say they weren’t finding Brookner as interesting. They seemed vaguely hostile toward Brookner’s stories. “Nothing happens,” one said. We argued a bit. I suggested that plenty happened; it was just that what happened, happened inside her characters’ heads rather than between sheets or on battlefields or in boardrooms. I suggested that this was perhaps precisely what I liked about the Brookner novels, that nothing much did happen between sheets or on battlefields. The contents of consciousness — thoughts, I said, interested me more than did deeds. At about this same time, reviewers also began to carp. “Still Life with Biscuits,” headlined one review, “A Game of Solitaire” headlined another. I recall that another friend, a man who had been initially particularly enthusiastic about Brookner’s novels, said that he had given up on Brookner because she was so depressing, that her stories and the characters whose lives drove those stories ended not far from where they began. I agreed. I did not go on to say that I thought this quite like life. I did not say that I thought this was quite like his life and mine.

Why I am embarrassed, at least a bit, at my continuing fondness for Brookner’s novels, is that I do find her stories so much like life. An interviewer asked Brookner what she would say to someone who said her novels were “gloomy and sad.” She answered, “I’d agree. I don’t intend them to be like that, but I think they’re an accurate reflection. Life is not a nightclub, and some of the reviews I’ve had, particularly from women, which assume that it is, seem to have been quite defensive. These women are angry. They believe they can get what they want from life. Maybe they’re just lucky enough not to have found out that they can’t.”