Alienated from Anita Brookner’s world of alienation

I’ve got to lay off the Anita Brookner novels for a while. I just can’t take all the alienation.

It’s a decision I make most reluctantly, because Brookner is a consistently exquisite prose stylist. (I’m constantly tearing off little scraps of paper and leaving them between pages, so I can go back and copy particularly felicitous phrases in a notebook of mine that carries this rueful title: “Writers I Wish I Could Write As Well As.”)

Last summer I read “Strangers: A Novel,” Brookner’s 24th(!) book, in which a retired British banker ponders the loneliness of life after he meets a freewheeling, much younger divorcee during a vacation in Venice. (Ah, Venice ... )

More recently, I caught up with Brookner’s earlier “Leaving Home.” Its protagonist — British doctoral student Emma Roberts — presents an outward contrast to “Strangers’ ’’ stuffy retiree Paul Sturgis, but in many ways, they’re practically the same character.

Or, more precisely, they have exactly the same effect on me.

In between my admiration for Brookner’s laserlike psychological insights and sentences as sharp (and sometimes as cold) as expertly cut diamonds, I found myself growing annoyed with, then intolerant of, protagonist Emma Roberts. Her extreme passivity and willingness (or is it eagerness?) to go along with what everybody else wants from, and for, her renders her poignantly, then puzzlingly inert.

Sturgis might be approaching the end of his life, while Emma’s still near the start of hers. But they’re both so mired in the muck of endless introspection that escape seems impossible. And even if they could escape, what would be the point? They’d still be stuck with themselves and their endless, friendless trudge through what passes for existence.

It’s a tribute, of course, to Brookner’s facility that these characters, frustrating as they are, emerge as fully formed, utterly believable people. I suspect Paul would be a perfect companion for an afternoon at a museum or a quiet night of chamber music; we could share an enriching experience without having to exchange anything but perfunctory pleasantries. As for Emma, I’d like to grab her and drag her to a disco. (As "Leaving Home” is set in the late ’70s, it would be quite possible.) She desperately needs to shake her booty.

For now, though, I think I’ll leave Emma and Paul — and all the rest of Brookner’s anguished protagonists — to their own lives of quiet desperation and read something a bit less soul-draining.

It won’t be as well written, of course, but you can’t have everything.