Quixotic Quest

By Alessandra Stanley

LEWIS PERCY

by Anita Brookner

Pantheon; 261 pages; $18.95

Lewis Percy yearns for the company of women. Too timid to expect them to love him, he aspires merely to their tolerance. Trusting and giving, guided by a "lasting conviction that women were a congenial and compassionate sex," he embarks on a quixotic quest for female companionship, only to experience shattering disappointment at the hands of those he seeks to love. Lewis' Bildungsroman is an ironic twist on the 19th century romantic novels he studies in his library carrel. This hero struggles for placid domesticity; it is the women who behave like cads.

Such a sensitive male is an unusual protagonist for Anita Brookner, the * acclaimed British novelist who won the 1984 Booker McConnell Prize for Hotel du Lac. Most often she focuses her exacting eye on women, solitary spinsters picking their way through uneventful but carefully examined lives. Lewis Percy is reminiscent of all of those awkward, hapless English twits, those Lucky Jims who comically court failure in the farcical novels of Kingsley Amis, William Boyd and David Lodge. But though it has brisk satirical asides, Lewis Percy is a halfhearted comedy. We cannot sympathize for long with so ineffectual a hero, but Lewis is too decent to be mocked.

He falls in love with an agoraphobic library assistant, Tissy, a delicate, nervous creature whom he hopes to nurse to a normal life. Abetted by her mother, a "Messalina of the suburbs," Tissy turns out to harbor the tyrannical selfishness of the very weak. Their marriage is a fiasco. Lewis falls under the spell of Emmy, a passionate and extraverted actress who is the opposite of his wife in every way except relentless self-absorption. Although he resists Emmy's advances, his wife leaves him anyway. He drifts passively through decades of wistful misery, unable to attain pleasure or please others; even his housekeeper treats him with contempt.

Brookner, who is often compared with Henry James and Barbara Pym, has written better novels. Her best works juxtapose exquisitely etched character miniatures against a larger canvas. In Family and Friends (1985) and Latecomers (1989), her protagonists interact with small gestures in narrow worlds, but in the background World War II looms as a haunting menace. Set in the '60s and '70s, Lewis Percy is buffeted by the winds of fads. Tissy becomes a support-group feminist ("Last week they got to know their bodies. This week they're getting in touch with the pain"), and his boss is a pedant of the new linguistics ("only deconstruct").

Out of love for Tissy, Lewis remains ensnared in the "tight, small circle of her limitations." Within the tight, small limitations of the novel, there are many grace notes. But Brookner's depiction of Lewis' times is not sustained enough to suggest any greater significance.