Synopses & Reviews
The Booker Prize—winning author of The Bay of Angels and Hotel du Lac, “one of the finest novelists of her generation” (The New York Times), now gives us a masterly new novel about the self-discoveries that come with maturity, and the eternal question confronted by people of all ages: What will I do with the rest of my life?
In this richly written, emotionally revealing novel, Brookner once again “works a spell on the reader” (The Washington Post Book World), as a man finds himself contemplating the difficult life questions: How is it all going to work out? What shall I do before the end? As Herz ponders proposing marriage to an old friend, making a trip to Paris to see a favorite painting, selling his home, moving, starting afresh, he knows that he must do something with his remaining years. But what?
Brilliant, funny, profound, Making Things Better captures the quandaries of aging: the misunderstanding of an increasingly modern, alien world; awkward conversations with passersby; even more awkward encounters with longtime friends and acquaintances; the anxieties posed by age and uncertainty—and the bizarre, magnificent self-knowledge that perhaps only age, reflection, and experience can bring.
Review
"Brookner's early novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac, are frothy and girlishly confessional, but the tone of her fiction has darkened. For those who, like me, prefer the fizzier Brookner, Making Things Better offers plenty of compensations. Always an elegant stylist, she has grown steadily more refined in her writing; she artfully captures ideas that change in the course of a single, unhurried sentence. Her vocabulary, too, has evolved, metamorphosing into something frumpish and exacting, even inbred, and the fastidiousness suits her hermetic world." Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Synopsis
In this brilliantly written, emotionally revealing novel by the incomparable Anita Brookner, a man finds himself contemplating the difficult life questions: How is it all going to work out? What shall I do before the end? As Herz ponders proposing marriage to an old friend, making a trip to Paris to see a favorite painting, selling his home, moving, starting afresh, he knows that he must do something with his remaining years to make the rest of his life meaningful and satisfying. But what? Funny and profound, Making Things Better explores the anxieties and illuminations posed by age and uncertainty -- and the bizarre, magnificent self-knowledge that perhaps only age and experience can bring.
About the Author
Anita Brookner is the author of twenty-one beautifully crafted novels, including Fraud, Undue Influence, and Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University. She lives in London.