Hotel du Lac was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984 and won the Booker Prize — defeating J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot in one of the prize’s most controversial years. The novel is deceptively quiet: nothing dramatic happens in it, and its power derives entirely from the precision of Brookner’s observation and the controlled perfection of her prose.
Edith Hope writes romance novels under a pseudonym and lives a life that contradicts her fiction: she is single, sexually involved with a married man, and socially awkward in ways that her characters — confident, desirable, triumphant — never are. She has been sent to the Hotel du Lac, a genteel establishment on Lake Geneva, to recover from an unnamed social disgrace (gradually revealed to be her failure to go through with a respectable marriage she had accepted without love).
At the hotel, Edith observes the other guests with the novelist’s eye: Mrs. Pusey and her daughter, performing a mother-daughter relationship of monstrous narcissism; the Comtesse de Bonneuil, elderly and alone; and Mr. Neville, a wealthy man who proposes to Edith a marriage of convenience — companionship without passion, security without love. Neville’s proposal is the novel’s moral test: it offers Edith everything that conventional wisdom says a woman of her age and situation should want, and her response defines the novel.
Brookner’s prose is the prose of a woman who has looked at Henry James and Anita Loos and Balzac with equal attention and drawn from all of them: elegant, composed, slightly formal, and devastating in its ability to capture the gap between what people present and what they feel.
Collecting Hotel du Lac
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150
- Signed: $200–$500