Undue Influence

Claire Pitt, at 29 one of Brookner's younger alter egos, is financially independent, clever, emancipated but empty. When Martin Gibson comes down to the basement in the second-hand bookshop where she works, Claire is beguiled. Her desire to be part of the story she tells herself about Martin's probable life leads her to provoke the quiet crisis so indicative of a Brookner denoument.

Brookner, who is seen by some critics as the embodiment of Jamesian exactitude, as almost prissy, is really quite the opposite. An almost pathological writer, Brookner returns again and again to her notion of the inability of modern women to think of marriage as something that will rescue them--and yet who are pulled towards the ideal (an ideal they easily deconstruct) of a romantic saviour. The ubiquity of a particular, melancholic despondence saturates her work; disappointment dominates. Despite the humour, the erudition, the classical elegance of her prose, Brookner is a modern, bitter writer. Few writers have the ability to create such complete characters and then dissect their motives so clearly. Few writers have the skill to delineate the emotional complexity of the domesticated manners that mark our inability to communicate with one other. Undue Influence is another triumph of profound, psychological investigation from one of England's finest writers. --Mark Thwaite

What was wonderful about the way Anita Brookner writes is that it takes you through the character's range of emotions and at the same time does not require the reader to acknoledge her as a heroine. It allows room for one to accept that life is not Mills & Boons.


A truly dreadful book!   March 28, 2001
3 out of 8 found this review helpful

I was astonished to read the rave reviews on the book jacket - what on earth is all the fuss about?

This book was mind-numbingly boring and I couldn't wait to finish it. Claire was a completely unconvincing character, and that, together with no plot and a very over-indulgent style of writing, means this will be the last Anita Brookner novel I ever read!


gosh is that the time?   January 31, 2001
1 out of 8 found this review helpful

I was so looking forward to this, I loved hotel du lac but this was dire, boring, out of touch, what can I say? Claire kept on saying what a 'modern' girl she was but every time it was so obvious that she was the voice of an older lady. If this book had been set in the 1950's it would have read in a more sympathetic way. But a 90's girl? No way.