Pretense: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

This prize-winning novel examines an introvert’s dilemmas over social acceptability.

Someone who successfully keeps a consequential secret also despises the idea of pretending to be someone she is not. Isn’t that a contradiction? For an introvert whose watchword is reserve, the elements of secrecy and pretense may not actually be in conflict. That’s what emerged for me from Anita Brookner’s novel, Hotel du Lac, which won England’s Booker Prize in 1984.

Edith Hope, Brookner’s quiet and ironic main character, is a moderately successful writer of romance novels, age 39, who has been banished by her London friends to a once-genteel hotel in Switzerland, told to reflect on some “apparently dreadful” deed she has committed (You wouldn’t guess what!) until she is ready to come back “older, wiser and properly apologetic.”