THE NEXT BIG THING
By Anita Brookner
Penguin, £6.99, 256pp
ISBN 0 141 00992 6
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“THE NEXT big thing” is a phrase that is normally associated with the glamorous ephemera of youth, but at 73 Julius Herz is hoping for a last burst of excitement before the biggest thing of all — death.
As in Brookner’s Booker prize-winning Hotel du Lac, we find a solitary protagonist at a crossroads in their life. Living a monotonous existence in a small London flat, Herz has an affecting dream about the “love of his life”. Appropriately for a follower of Freud, the dream reawakens memories of youth and a desire for future fulfilment.
Herz reflects on a past that reads like a catalogue of frustrations and disappointments. After his family was exiled from Germany he lived in cramped proximity with his parents while they neglected him and fretted over his ill brother. He married, but his wife left him when cohabitation with his parents became stifling. In an attempt to compensate for past regrets, Herz wonders how to squeeze some last drops of delight from what remains of his future. He considers travelling abroad, selling his flat or focusing his romantic attentions on his cousin Fanny. The different letters that he writes and rewrites to her demonstrate both his indecision and, characteristically for Brookner, the variant paths that fate can take.
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Brookner’s fine prose captures superbly the combination of dull precision and gnawing loss that afflicts Herz in his old age. However, while The Next Big Thing is immediately engrossing, Herz’s boredom and regret gradually become oppressive. He enjoys reading books by Thomas Mann, which seems appropriate to his unrequited longing for a much younger woman. Brookner comments of his collection of Mann short stories that they were “very sad” and “it would be wise not to read further. . . lest the dread that came off the page communicated itself too vividly”.
Brookner’s novel is a subtle and intimate portrait of a repressed life, but despite its pockets of optimism and humour, the warning against Thomas Mann could be applied to her own work.