Rating: 
Summary: unique, and literary
Review: I think that the novel was over all very well written, but I wish there could have been more descriptions of Sarah. I enjoyed the way Brookner described the realtionship of the mother and son.
Rating: 
Summary: Conventional man longs for passion and spontaneity.
Review: In this stream-of-consciousness novel a modest, conventional man longs to have passion and spontaneity in his life. Although Alan, a lawyer, is often perceptive about other people's character and motives, when he is with them he prides himself on being inattentive -- the "trick of mental absence," he calls it -- in order to avoid being bored or inconvenienced.Preoccupied with fantasies of the seductive Sarah, he ends up married to dull Angela, who turns out to be afraid of sex. Their domestic 'contract' wears thin very quickly. "I was sent out every morning like a schoolboy, while Angela set to with Hoovers and dusters...." (p. 95) Then Angela becomes pregnant, and takes to her bed. Alan gets tired of cajoling her and dashes to Paris hoping to spend a few hours with Sarah, who doesn't show up. Angela has a miscarriage and slides into a suicidal depression. After her death, Alan manages to see Sarah, but she has no interest in him. At that he gives up entirely, feeling that alienation and passivity must be his fate. This book is rich in themes: old age, growing up, the extent of personal responsibility, the rigidity of social roles, what a real man or woman is -- and it is not hard to identify with Alan's wistful desire for love, happiness, and feeling truly alive. (Of course he goes about it all wrong.) "Altered States" is a witty and insightful book, filled with deft turns of phrase and flashes of dry humor, e.g. "For a moment I wondered what [my aunts] were doing at Angela's wedding, until I remembered that it was my wedding as well." (p. 104) or "...explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been...." (p. 30)
Rating:
Summary: tragic mistake
Review: This is another attempt by Ms. Brookner to chart the vagaries of the male soul in the first person. She does a pretty good job for that stratum of stiff-upper lip Brits that she knows best - this time a "solicitor" or as we would say a "damned lawyer". Alan tries so hard to be "good" that we can almost laugh at his keeping-up-appearances missteps. To believe that a real person would shred his soul so completely simply to do the right thing is a bit much, and Ms Brookner can't quite give us the reason why. This is because the female characters with whom Alan gets involved are so utterly charmless that it is hard to see why he persists with them, let alone marries one (Angela) and pursues another (Sarah). Angela becomes so intolerable right after the marriage (and was essentially intolerable to Alan before it!) that few men would sustain the relationship. Sarah is intolerable all the way through. While she obviously provides Alan with the only decent sex he's ever had in his life, Sarah's inability to utter a single empathetic sentence would give any man pause in the pursuit of more complex interpersonal relations. Alan's pathetic adventure to Paris to meet his "mistress" is thus a foregone conclusion: it will be a disaster (and is particularly well described). The responses of the family members is quite hilarious - particularly Aubrey, representing some stereotype of the tweedy banker phenotype so beloved by British humorists - poor Alan is held responsible for his wife's miscarriage! "I say old chap, one doesn't do that sort of thing..." sanctimonious claptrap. In a way I was reminded in this book of "Damage", a much more melodramatic but paradoxically more believable tale of adultery among the brit middle class. Of course, Ms Brookner is a better writer than Ms Hart yet the literariness of "Altered States" (an unfortunate title, given that it was already taken for a markedly different work) works against it in the end. The audio tape is well read by Crossley who does a very creditable job with the voices - note there are a few unforgivable slips and aberrations with the miking in spots. Even so he must have been wishing. as did I, that Ms Brookner's publishing house would have exercised better editorial judgment over this overblown tale.
Rating: 
Summary: Where has Brookner been for the last century?
Review: While I have enjoyed many of her books, this was astonishingly poorly written and sappy. She cannot decide which of her unattractive, uninteresting, self-absorbed characters to concentrate on. She is writing about modern people in present-day England, but it may as well be Victorian times; the notion that passionate sex (not true passion) will be punished through the death of the innocent (though obnoxious) spouse of the main character and their unborn child. It all has been done before--long, long before, when it would have fit the age--and much more competently. I will be wary of my next book by Ms. Brookner.
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