"I had become what people wanted me to be....I decided not to be that person anymore....I rather think I have stopped being one, a fraud I mean. Fraud was what was perpetrated on me by the expectations of others. They fashioned me in their own image, according to their needs. Fraud, in that sense, is alarmingly prevalent."

Anna has devoted her life to caring for her invalid mother. Her social circle is small--her mother's few friends, and her mother's doctor, who her mother fantasizes that Anna will one day marry. Several months after Anna's mother's death, the doctor (married to someone else, a fact Anna hid from her mother) realizes that no one has seen or heard from Anna for weeks, even months. The police are brought in, though there is no evidence of foul play.

The book opens with Anna's disappearance, and most of the book is the long flashback describing Anna's life with her mother. This is not a crime novel, but an exquisite character study of a woman who has lived her entire life subjugating her needs to the wants of others.

Recommended.

3 1/2 stars ( )

I have read somewhere that Anita Brookner was a somewhat overlooked master stylist and so I decided to read one of the novels. Fraud was written in 1992 and it is ostensibly about Anna Durant, a mature woman, single, and now living alone, as her mother whom she cared for throughout adult life had died. She goes missing, but is not missed for weeks. She has few friends and she appears to have just disappeared.

It sounds like a mystery, but it is really a story about choices and opportunities taken and not taken. Brookner writes clean clear prose in a style I’m not used – she seamlessly floats from one characters’ point of view to another.

The story is all told in flashback before Anna disappears. There is some great understated humor. In one scene Anna is invited to dinner by the wife of the man she should have married. She spend three pages fulminating on what she wants to say to this woman and then responds, “I’d be delighted.”

The New York Times tagline was “An immensely satisfying novel with unsettling insights.” I agree.
( )

"She had noticed old people in supermarkets, hesitating over their frugal purchases, treating themselves to something sweet, an indulgence remembered from remote childhood, and smelt their careful poverty as she passed them. She had put this down to poor diet, poor hygiene, to the fatigue of old age, but now she knew that what she had witnessed was ineluctable decline, that inching nearer to the abyss against which one had no defense. She had, at the time, felt closer to the poor old men, the pugnacious old women, with their woolen hats, without knowing why. Now...she realized that both she and her friend were at one with those old people, instantly recognizable to the young, who would wrinkle their noses and long to escape from them." (Page 181)

Anna Durant is a spinster of sixty who has spent her life looking after her mother until her death. She's a wanna be clothing designer but hasn't worked a day in her life. And she's left to wonder what am I going to do with all this time on my hands? She'll need to take bold steps if she really wants to remedy the situation but does she really have the courage to do so?

Anita Brookner depicts loneliness better than any author I've read. She is an absolute master at creating the sense of desolation and depression that often accompany it. And she does it with the smoothest, most beautiful prose that often has me rereading passages on a regular basis. This was her thirteenth novel and I've enjoyed them all, but this one really resonated. ( )

Enjoyed AB's astute ruminations but not the ending's tangential feel. ( )

Once again, Anita Brookner delves into the lives of unattached and isolated women with the parallel story lines of Anna Durrant and Vera Marsh. Anna, the only child of widowed Amy is left with the shards of her life when her mother dies. "They had loved one another despairingly: that was their undoing. And despair in love merely prolongs its intensity, as well as its duration which is forever". Vera on the other hand has had a satisfying marriage but with the death of her husband and old age beginning to take its toll, she must cope with loneliness and loss without falling into the trap of dependence on her adult children. Neither of the women are memorable characters but the mysterious disappearance of Anna and the final unfolding of its mystery did not seem to to fit in with the behavior patterns which Anna had developed from half a lifetime of practical and emotional dependence on her mother. ( )