Songs in A Minor Key

By Paul Gray

BRIEF LIVES

by Anita Brookner

Random House; 260 pages; $20

A gentle irony rests in the title of this novel, Anita Brookner's 10th, for the lives portrayed in it are anything but brief. Fay Dodworth, the narrator, is approaching 70 at the time she tells her story; her reminiscences are set off after seeing an obituary of Julia Wilberforce, who was nearly 80. Both women had achieved a certain fame when young, Julia as a sophisticated cabaret performer and Fay as a singer of ballads on the BBC. Their friendship did not begin then or, in truth, ever. They were thrown together because both married men who belonged to the same law firm and were forced to socialize. "I never liked her," Fay muses about Julia, "nor did she like me."

Within a few pages, Brookner's devoted fans will feel at home. For this is another exercise in the author's specialty, the weaving of a story that is much longer on atmospherics than plot. Thinking about Julia prompts Fay to begin thinking about herself: "I am a simple woman, and always was." She gave up her singing career to marry; unlike the haughty Julia, who was pushed out of the spotlight by age and changing public tastes in entertainers, Fay has no regrets about her diminished standing in the world. She does wonder why she and her husband were not happier together: "Now I realize that it is marriage which is the great temptation for a woman, and that one can, and perhaps should, resist it." But the car accident that left her a widow also took the resolution of this problem out of her hands.

To some tastes, Brief Lives will lack the salt of irony, the sense that the narrator is deluding herself about the past or revealing more about herself than she imagines. Such moments of surprising revelation never occur; Fay is without guile. Her resentment at Julia's imperious way with other people seems perfectly straightforward: "Why did she, without doing anything for anyone, inspire such devotion, while humbler, clumsier people like myself seemed doomed to do without?"

But in the end, Brookner turns her modest narrator into a figure of considerable strength and poignancy. Fay thinks of her old performances: "Only Make-Believe, runs the song. And You Are My Heart's Desire. And I'll Be Loving You Always. But though the words are affirmative the melodies are in a minor key, and sadder than they know." Life has not passed her by. It has simply not given her enough time to learn how to live it.