Anita Brookner's smartly written novels sell briskly in England, where the author lectures on neoclassicism and the Romantic movement at London's Courtauld Institute. She is definitely not a romantic. Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac (1984 winner of Britain's Booker Prize) take dim views of grand passion. Says the heroine of Hotel du Lac, a successful author of romances, "The facts of life are much too terrible to go into my kind of fiction." The narrator of Look at Me takes this sentiment to the extreme: "It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of...
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