capsule reviews

anita brookner, ju-on

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Fraud (Anita Brookner, 1992)

Anna Durrant cared for her ailing mother until that mother’s death; then, cut loose in her fifties, she suddenly disappeared for four months. Where? How? Why? Most of Fraud covers the months before Anna’s disappearance, drifting in and out of the thoughts of her loose network of acquaintances as well as her own. It’s not exactly about the mystery of what will happen: it is very possible to forget while you’re reading Fraud that Anna is going to disappear. (I did, more than once.) That said, her disappearance does give the book very doomed feeling as you approach the end. You feel you already know that this story doesn’t end well; you just don’t know how.

Rather than a mystery—a “howdunit,” let’s call it—Fraud is an examination of a social world in which people are perceived, accommodated, and managed, all without being loved. Characters, internally, silently, perform accurate and usually unflattering analyses of themselves, of others, of the silent trade-offs and deceptions at play, but they do all these things in ways that have little relationship to their behavior. An old woman feels the way she’s merely tolerated by her children, while merely tolerating Anna herself;¹ Anna has a quasi-flirtatious encounter at a party with a man she instantly dislikes, but can’t ignore:

What she was looking for was a man to whom explanations of her position would be unnecessary, for he would be so interested that information would flow between them, with no effort required on either side. Instead she was presented, as if he were a treat, a prize, with this Nick, whose costive utterances and implacable reserve she was supposed to find rewarding, as she supposed some other women might, women to whom a man resembled a safe waiting to be cracked, and the reward all that the safe contained. But that kind man, that teacher, lover, friend, who remained indistinct, would be generous with words; she imagined their life together as a long conversation, equally shared. For it was many years since she had spoken freely. She had grown up with the knowledge that she must protect her mother from hurt, and that meant from the truth. They had lived in a pleasant collaboration of unrealities, each secretly knowing that she was making a sacrifice for the other.…

Within that carapace she was an adult woman, but one who had no voice because of her lifelong concealment, which no-one now would question. She was represented by an exterior manner which she herself found burdensome, as if she were only just learning what other women had always known, so that she made too many efforts, and all of them inept. This strenuous task of engaging the attention of a man who secretly appalled her filled her with sadness, yet she was bound to persevere with him, as another woman might.…

Sometimes I think I should not really be allowed to read books about extra women, boring women, women whose life has passed them by, women who lead a “tortoise existence” (as the heroine of Brookner’s Hotel du Lac puts it). They encourage me in my vague belief I should get to the Grey Gardens phase of my life as quickly as possible. But I quoted this long passage partly because I love that image of the carapace. Anna has a social self that protects her but also imprisons her; it lets her have a private life that is truly her own, but also creates a gap such that intimacy of the kind she desires seems impossible. In general, Fraud questions how much “self awareness” is really worth in a person’s life; everyone in it is, in fact, highly self aware, but they might be better off if they weren’t. Being self aware isn’t the same thing as being wise or even having self knowledge: it may just be the ability to look at oneself as a particularly interesting sort of bug.²

We do find out what happened to Anna eventually and Brookner takes the story in what was to me an unexpected direction, though I wonder if that might just be because I haven’t read very much Brookner.³ As it was, it was a bit too unexpected: Fraud has many superb moments, but it doesn’t quite hang together. Brookner simply tears everything she’s built up down: Anna walks out of her unsatisfying life and chooses a new one. It turns out that leaving the carapace was always an option. But Anna’s change is dealt with so briefly that it doesn’t feel that convincing.⁴ She more or less says directly to the reader: the real fraud is living a false life. That’s probably true, but in a book where whether or not to give somebody a phone call can be endlessly turned over, I feel Brookner could have been a little more subtle.

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Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

There’s a house in Tokyo. Some bad stuff happened there: a man killed his family, then died. Now the house is cursed. Unfortunately you will only learn about this once you go inside the house, at which point you are also cursed and you will die. There are no exceptions to this rule.

This movie is deeply unfair, almost as a dramatic principle. Did you die a horrible death? Now you remain as a raging psychic imprint that just exists to kill people. Is that true even if you’re a literal child? Yes. If you’re a cat? Yes. Did you step into this particular house for even a second? You are going to die.⁵ Did you get the hell out of there as quickly as possible? Doesn’t matter. Did you not step into this house but unknowingly happened to stand between an angry ghost and its prey? You will also die. Are you brave? You will die. Are you smart? You will die. Do you have a plan to burn the house down? Ha ha ha. Yeah, you’ll die too.

There’s something to the way an act of family annihilation turns this one house into a kind of sinkhole into which all of Tokyo is slowly disappearing. The people we see the house draw in are mostly the people who are public stand-ins or replacements for family: care workers, teachers, police. They go in because they’re worried about somebody and then they don’t come out. As far as the ghosts in the house go, the concern of all these state family proxies comes too late. Nobody saved Kayako. So everybody has to die.

1. “When had it all disintegrated, so that now at eighty-one, nearly eighty-two, she sat alone in a gloomy flat on a quiet street, with children who were no longer children but complex adults, whose secrets she sensed but could not understand?”

British women of the twentieth century sometimes seem to have specialized in novels that are one hundred different ways of playing this scene from Tokyo Story:

2. Because

Sorbie

had a post about it, I read the first third or so of Marsha Linehan’s Building A Life Worth Living and am reminded of how Linehan’s breakthrough came when she thought of herself as “I” rather than “her”:

After I descended into hell in the institute, I had always thought or spoken of myself in the third person, as if there were two of me, split somehow. I hadn’t been split like this before I went to the institute, but during that experience, and until this moment in the chapel, I had been somehow split.

3. I read Hotel du Lac right after reading Fraud and it swerves in a thematically similar way in its final pages, but in the case of that book it’s just done a bit better.

4. On an unrelated note—looking up “Anita Brookner” yielded:

Anita Brookner was a talented writer, a monument to hard work and discipline. She smoked a lot, read five newspapers a day, wrote in longhand, and her favorite novel was Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, a satiric story about a ne’er-do-well nobleman.

5. As this reviewer on Letterboxd says: “What I love about this film is that everyone here is just utterly screwed once they set foot in the house.”