Content area
Full Text
Fiction Anita Brookner, The Bay of Angels London/New York. Viking/Random House 2001. 217/240 pages. L16.99/$23.95 ISBN 0-670-89662-4 / 0-375-50582-2
THE BAY OF ANGELS of Anita Brookner's title is the Baie des Anges of Nice, France, where most of the novel's action takes place. "I liked to think that the Baie des Anges was once inhabited by angels," says Zoe Cunningham, the story's protagonist. However, "There are no angels in Nice today." Nor are there any devils. Brookner's characters are neither extraordinary nor excessive. They are not even very interesting. Yet that is their chief interest: they are just like us.
Brookner's gift is to create a story in which people do nothing very different from what most of us do. We first meet Zoe when she is nearly seventeen, living in London. Anne, her mother, has...