Baz's Reviews > A Start in Life

A tragicomedy that’s really mostly tragedy. But a self-conscious, almost tongue-in-cheek one. The protagonist Ruth’s absurd story was a fun one to read. It was self-aware in its dramatics. It was almost pulpy. Ruth is an academic, a lover of literature, and a Balzac scholar. Balzac was an author of darkly dramatic yet super entertaining novels full of moral conflict and scepticism. In this book Brookner immersed me in Ruth’s story, a story full of moral conflict and scepticism, and had me considering the awkward relationship between the things that make up the “stuff of literature”and the “stuff of life.”

Brookner has that maturity and knowing that I also experience in the voices of Elizabeth Taylor and Alice Munro – old-fashioned authors who weren’t all show and no tell, all spareness and ambiguity and suggestion. They were no Claire Keegan. They’re so satisfying to read because they do both, they’re showers and tellers simultaneously. I love them for their psycholgising, the clear experience and understanding that comes through in their sharp observations and articulate telling – their critical unsentimental eye and compassion. They broke down, neatly and clearly, and brilliantly, what goes on in the whirling dance of our relationships with one another. Thank the almighty whatever for the existence in fiction of the Keegans and the Brookners in the world, because I couldn’t do without the range.

Being a Balzac fan myself, and having read Eugénie Grandet—the Balzac novel most referenced in A Start in Life—added to my pleasure and was icing on the cake.