Amy Gentry's Blog - Posts Tagged "booker-prize"
Hot Spinster Summer
This is my first blog post, so hello!
If you don't already know me, I'm Amy Gentry, and I'm a novelist, reviewer, and ex-academic. My first three published novels are all novels of suspense (Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits), and my current work-in-progress is a slight pivot to horror. But honestly, I don't subscribe to strict genre divisions--they're helpful for readers, but can sometimes obscure what an author's really trying to do. Which, in my case, is to write whatever the hell I want! I also read whatever the hell I want, and that's mostly what this blog will be about.
Current Reads Corner (aka Hot Spinster Summer):
I just discovered Anita Brookner's novels, and I'm kicking myself for not reading her before. She died in 2016 and published a whopping 26 books in her lifetime--mostly fiction, though she was an art historian as well and published several academic works. She published her first novel at 53 (!!!!) and thereafter wrote ONE NOVEL A YEAR UNTIL SHE DIED (!!!!!!!). She won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.
So, while this is all a leeeetle bit intimidating for an author, it's nothing but glorious good news for a reader--especially a Henry-James-worshipping, Jane-Austen-fetishizing, Muriel-Spark-and-Barbara-Pym-fangirling lady like me. In other words, Anita Brookner is PEAK Spinster Lit. She excelled at acutely internal portraits of intensely guarded women who were too smart to fall for the traditional wifey role, but too cynical and self-protective to enjoy the romanticism of the '60s-'70s. One reason I love her is that her spinster heroines are not prudish about sex--they typically have lots of it, but only with married or otherwise unavailable men, as if to inoculate themselves from emotional disaster (which always comes anyway). In books like A Friend from England and The Rules of Engagement, her protagonists measure themselves against female friends who seem to have figured out how to somehow get the best of both worlds--libertinism AND the benefits of protection and companionship associated with traditional marriage--while they themselves seem to get neither.
Sometimes these portraits can feel dated, but honestly, they mostly don't. So many of the feelings she describes--the freedom and loneliness and subtle shame of singleness, coupled with the overwhelming feeling that within a patriarchy you're kind of fucked either way--made me wince in recognition. Brookner, though writing almost exclusively about white, straight, middle-class-ish women, is unusually clear-eyed about the unspoken role of privilege and wealth in love--the way a stable family background or heaps of money can buy a single woman self-respect and comfort, or a married woman autonomy and clout within her relationship.
Brookner herself rejected many marriage proposals, sensing they came from "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts." She called herself "the loneliest woman in London," and yet, reading her books, you can't help but feel that her spinster heroines are making the best choices available to them in the moment. But she's not sentimental about them, either. She's like a Jane Austen who unflinchingly turns the scalpel on herself--and, by implication, the reader.
There was a "modern literary authors rewrite Jane Austen novels" project a while back--I'm not sure if it's still happening--but I wish she'd gotten to take a crack at Persuasion before she died. I would have liked to see that.
tl;dr: If you, like me, are a sucker for a paper cut to the soul with a little squeeze of lemon, I'd recommend starting with Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.
If you don't already know me, I'm Amy Gentry, and I'm a novelist, reviewer, and ex-academic. My first three published novels are all novels of suspense (Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits), and my current work-in-progress is a slight pivot to horror. But honestly, I don't subscribe to strict genre divisions--they're helpful for readers, but can sometimes obscure what an author's really trying to do. Which, in my case, is to write whatever the hell I want! I also read whatever the hell I want, and that's mostly what this blog will be about.
Current Reads Corner (aka Hot Spinster Summer):
I just discovered Anita Brookner's novels, and I'm kicking myself for not reading her before. She died in 2016 and published a whopping 26 books in her lifetime--mostly fiction, though she was an art historian as well and published several academic works. She published her first novel at 53 (!!!!) and thereafter wrote ONE NOVEL A YEAR UNTIL SHE DIED (!!!!!!!). She won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.
So, while this is all a leeeetle bit intimidating for an author, it's nothing but glorious good news for a reader--especially a Henry-James-worshipping, Jane-Austen-fetishizing, Muriel-Spark-and-Barbara-Pym-fangirling lady like me. In other words, Anita Brookner is PEAK Spinster Lit. She excelled at acutely internal portraits of intensely guarded women who were too smart to fall for the traditional wifey role, but too cynical and self-protective to enjoy the romanticism of the '60s-'70s. One reason I love her is that her spinster heroines are not prudish about sex--they typically have lots of it, but only with married or otherwise unavailable men, as if to inoculate themselves from emotional disaster (which always comes anyway). In books like A Friend from England and The Rules of Engagement, her protagonists measure themselves against female friends who seem to have figured out how to somehow get the best of both worlds--libertinism AND the benefits of protection and companionship associated with traditional marriage--while they themselves seem to get neither.
Sometimes these portraits can feel dated, but honestly, they mostly don't. So many of the feelings she describes--the freedom and loneliness and subtle shame of singleness, coupled with the overwhelming feeling that within a patriarchy you're kind of fucked either way--made me wince in recognition. Brookner, though writing almost exclusively about white, straight, middle-class-ish women, is unusually clear-eyed about the unspoken role of privilege and wealth in love--the way a stable family background or heaps of money can buy a single woman self-respect and comfort, or a married woman autonomy and clout within her relationship.
Brookner herself rejected many marriage proposals, sensing they came from "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts." She called herself "the loneliest woman in London," and yet, reading her books, you can't help but feel that her spinster heroines are making the best choices available to them in the moment. But she's not sentimental about them, either. She's like a Jane Austen who unflinchingly turns the scalpel on herself--and, by implication, the reader.
There was a "modern literary authors rewrite Jane Austen novels" project a while back--I'm not sure if it's still happening--but I wish she'd gotten to take a crack at Persuasion before she died. I would have liked to see that.
tl;dr: If you, like me, are a sucker for a paper cut to the soul with a little squeeze of lemon, I'd recommend starting with Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.
