From Publishers Weekly
To read Brookner is to be reminded of fiction's potential to stun, with full, complex characters in a richly imagined world, as she draws on her insights into human nature to explore the strained yet enduring friendship of two women of "the last virginal generation." Born in 1948 and friends from childhood, the open, eager-to-please Betsy and the cooler, analytical Elizabeth appear to have little in common. But they share many things, including stubbornness, strength and, dangerously, the same married lover. Seen through the eyes of 50-something Elizabeth, the novel chronicles the often devastating choices the two women make as they age; as such, it is more a book of thought than action. The reclusive Elizabeth, conscious of the mysterious "virtue attached to being a witness," dissects the minutest of human interactions, imposing elaborate rules of self-governance with which she often does battle. Her gaze is ruthless but brilliantly illuminating. "I saw our childlessness as an indictment, a reproach to what had been our folly," Elizabeth observes of herself and Betsy. "We had seen ourselves always as lovers, whereas sensible persons, or perhaps those with greater understanding of the world, make their peace with existing circumstances.... we had chosen, she and I, to stay within the limits of this exalted and fragile condition." Within those limits, in Brookner's skilled hands, vast worlds of human possibility exist. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Anita Brookner, who has just published her 22nd novel, The Rules of Engagement, was, before she became a novelist, a distinguished scholar of 18th-century French art. It's interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, to learn that she focused on both Ingres and David -- artists whose work is elegant, static, beautifully composed, highly controlled and exquisitely finished, sensuous but oddly without passion. Ingres once said that the surface of a painting should be "smooth as a [peeled] onion." All these comments might be made of the immaculate style of Anita Brookner. The Rules of Engagement is set in a world that has become familiar to her readers, after 21 versions: upper middle-class London. Elizabeth and Betsy are classmates who meet on their first day of school. Their relationship over time -- intricate and nuanced, composed of affection, competition, envy and support -- is the focus of this book. Elizabeth, the protagonist, is worldly, unintellectual and unambitious. Her place in the world seems secure: Her family is well off, her father successful, her mother a beauty. Betsy, by contrast, is unsophisticated, intellectual, earnest and impecunious. Her place in the world is perilous: Her mother is dead, and her father dies soon after. She is raised by a dim and colorless aunt. Betsy timidly longs for inclusion into Elizabeth's family, but Elizabeth's cold and snobbish mother has other ideas. " 'Can't you find someone more suitable?' she would say, meaning someone richer, more fortunate, more useful." When Betsy visits, Elizabeth reports of her mother, "I could intuit exasperation in the way she tapped her cigarette on the lid of the silver cigarette box before lighting it with a flourish. 'Do you want to show your friend your room?' she asked, after a brief silence. 'And show her round the garden, why don't you.' We were dismissed."Secrets, however -- and we know by now that withheld information plays an important part in Brookner's work -- are present even in those early days: Elizabeth's apparently peaceful life is a sham. Her parents "do not get on," and after years of acrimony they divorce. Elizabeth never revealed this information to her closest friend. "I was sufficiently ruled by my upbringing and the codes of my class to know that I must lodge no complaint, express no dissatisfaction, and carry on as if all were for the best in the best of all possible worlds." After school, Elizabeth and Betsy go their separate ways, Elizabeth to a cooking course, then a dull marriage with Digby, a wealthyish older man. Betsy goes to university on scholarship, then to Paris, where she takes up with a young revolutionary. The novel starts after the two friends reconnect -- when Elizabeth is settled into her stultifying marriage and Betsy returns from Paris with the free-spirited Daniel. Daniel, says Elizabeth, "was beautiful, with a lithe mythical beauty that brought to mind certain classical statues seen in reproduction, as if only now was I face to face with the real thing." But Daniel walks around the room, humming rudely, while the two women sit and talk, and Elizabeth passes judgment. "Nevertheless I found him repellent. His activity, his humming deprived him of ordinary accessibility and removed any possibility of normal exchange of the kind practised in the circles in which I moved."Elizabeth has chosen Daniel's opposite. Her husband, Digby, "was not a young man. He was twenty-seven years my senior, but for that very reason seemed to promise an extension of the parenthood and guardianship which my father appeared to have relinquished without regret." Kind, conscientious and worn out, Digby has veined hands, and likes to nap after dinner in front of the TV. Elizabeth married him, she says, "because I was bored and unhappy. . . . And because without him, or someone like him, I had no future."Elizabeth has a flexible moral code and feels no compunction at taking up at once with one of Digby's closest friends, a fleshy, handsome cad called Edmund. Edmund's wife, the worldly and lethally cold Constance, has always despised Elizabeth. The situation is one familiar to Brookner's readers: a passive, undemanding woman who feels herself an outsider, bored by her soporific husband, uncherished by her heartless lover and despised by his powerful and sophisticated wife. Betsy, having shed Daniel, returns to London. Once Betsy meets Edmund, Elizabeth watches fatalistically as the toils of life engulf them both.Though friendship seems to be the subject of the story, the underlying motif is its opposite -- a self-willed and inexorable solitude. This is a tale of helplessness, subjugation and renunciation. Elizabeth has always felt isolated, an attitude reiterated throughout the book. "In my empty stoical days," she says, "knowing myself to be excluded from more strenuous pleasures, I had at least formed a notion of how life might be, whether or not I managed some sort of admission to it." Later she says, "I felt at one with all those people on the sidelines of life, forced to contemplate the successful manoeuvres in which others were engaged, obliged to listen politely and to refrain from comment."Elizabeth, like many other of Brookner's protagonists, resists connection, intimacy and emotional risk. Turning away from both friendship and love, she holds fast to a fatalistic and inexplicable belief that she is doomed to solitude and silence. This melancholy assumption of exclusion, this incapacity to ask anything of life, reverberates in The Rules of Engagement, as it does in much of Brookner's work. The story is told, however, with such elegance and polish that its surface -- satiny, flawless and smooth as an onion, as always -- holds a fascination equal to its content. Reviewed by Roxana RobinsonCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
Joanna David's precise and luxurious reading does much to enliven Brookner's text, but this story of two friends reunited takes a long time to get started. Told from the perspective of a judgmental and discontented narrator, the story meanders as she sometimes repeats herself, telling the story rather than showing the episodes themselves. The action picks up in places, enough to provide some conflict and interest, but overall the novel is slow. David's enthusiastic reading and attention to delivery are delightful in an audiobook that needs that kind of energy. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Two London girls born in 1948 and both named Elizabeth start school on the same day. One is asked to choose an alternative, and she opts for Betsy, a bid for cheerfulness in light of her dim orphan life. Elizabeth appears to be far better off, but her seemingly glamorous parents' marriage is wretchedly unhappy. Lacking in imagination and fire, Elizabeth marries Digby, a dull man 27 years her senior. Betsy goes to Paris, falls catastrophically in love, and returns to London, where Elizabeth has embarked on a chilly affair. Digby dies; Betsy meets Elizabeth's selfish lover at the wake; the women's guarded friendship becomes even more strained; and, as time drains away, their lives become studies in purposelessness. Each year Brookner presents a morbidly fascinating inquiry into the nature of stoicism and "circumstances of bleak rectitude" as though issuing an annual report on the psychology of helplessly solitary and obscenely idle individuals. Shrewd and idiosyncratic, these tense interior dramas offer piquant pleasures thanks to Brookner's mordant wit, gorgeous language, and acute understanding of the axis between pride and shame, loneliness and misanthropy, integrity and cruelty. She also offers sterling insights into the differences between men and women and the peculiar voluptuousness of obsessive self-regard. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
?If Henry James were around, the only writer he?d be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner.?
?The New York Times Book Review

?Anita Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight.?
?The Washington Post Book World

?Brookner is a writer of great skill and precision. Passages of brilliant writing abound, hard-won insights
that startle us with Brookner?s clarity and succinct intelligence.?
?Los Angeles Times Book Review

?Few contemporary novelists can match Ms. Brookner?s consistently high level of achievement: the penetration of her vision, the sense of conviction in what she is doing, and the unforced elegance of her writing.?
?The Wall Street Journal

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Elizabeth and Betsy knew each other as schoolchildren. When they meet again later in life, one is safely married, the other most unsafely partnered. Together, they discover that despite their very disparate lives, they still have in common the capacity for making dangerous choices. Ultimately, their inclination to implement these decisions reveals the fate that was spelled out in their characters from the start.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Brookner's spiritual and syntactic masters are Jane Austen and Henry James, and The Rules of Engagement contains, in places, passages worthy of these august forebears. Indeed, she pays specific homage to the shades whose style and concerns suffuse her prose. — Catherine Lockerbie

The Washington Post

Elizabeth, like many other of Brookner's protagonists, resists connection, intimacy and emotional risk. Turning away from both friendship and love, she holds fast to a fatalistic and inexplicable belief that she is doomed to solitude and silence. This melancholy assumption of exclusion, this incapacity to ask anything of life, reverberates in The Rules of Engagement, as it does in much of Brookner's work. The story is told, however, with such elegance and polish that its surface -- satiny, flawless and smooth as an onion, as always -- holds a fascination equal to its content. — Roxana Robinson

Publishers Weekly

To read Brookner is to be reminded of fiction's potential to stun, with full, complex characters in a richly imagined world, as she draws on her insights into human nature to explore the strained yet enduring friendship of two women of "the last virginal generation." Born in 1948 and friends from childhood, the open, eager-to-please Betsy and the cooler, analytical Elizabeth appear to have little in common. But they share many things, including stubbornness, strength and, dangerously, the same married lover. Seen through the eyes of 50-something Elizabeth, the novel chronicles the often devastating choices the two women make as they age; as such, it is more a book of thought than action. The reclusive Elizabeth, conscious of the mysterious "virtue attached to being a witness," dissects the minutest of human interactions, imposing elaborate rules of self-governance with which she often does battle. Her gaze is ruthless but brilliantly illuminating. "I saw our childlessness as an indictment, a reproach to what had been our folly," Elizabeth observes of herself and Betsy. "We had seen ourselves always as lovers, whereas sensible persons, or perhaps those with greater understanding of the world, make their peace with existing circumstances.... we had chosen, she and I, to stay within the limits of this exalted and fragile condition." Within those limits, in Brookner's skilled hands, vast worlds of human possibility exist. (Jan.) Forecast: Brookner has established a dedicated readership through such books as the Booker-winning Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better. This elegant, thought-provoking novel will surely increase it. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

There is a predictable formula to Brookner's novels. Start with a middle-aged female heroine of modest wealth, genteel breeding, and solid education: in this outing, it is Elizabeth Wetherall, who may live in an era of email and text messaging but would still seem at home in the pages of a Victorian novel. Give her a lonely history: Elizabeth has escaped her parents' fractious marriage to a quieter one of her own-to a man many years her senior who spends his days at work and his evenings asleep in front of the television. Throw in some minor complications: she becomes estranged from her only friend when the childhood schoolmate takes up with her lover. Finally, end with disappointment: it is a rare Brookner heroine who exits buoyant and hopeful. Verdict: well crafted but soulless. Purchase where demand warrants.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile