Man Booker Prize 2002

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The Next Big Thing
Anita Brookner

Lawrence Hopper

Anita Brookner's The Next Big Thing is an old-fashioned novel with an old-fashioned theme - namely that Hardyesque dislocation between human expectation and human experience.

We follow the protagonist Hertz (the exemplum Heart) on a post-mortem of his failed quest for a raison d'etre, for true love. Brookner delicately terms this the 'reality of the flush'.

In this novel, the 'resort existence' of Hotel du Lac is the 'style de vie' of modern life; we are all exiled hotel dwellers. As Hertz's meaningful ties with family, lovers and familiar places are gradually severed, the day-to-day structuring of his life ultimately handed over to others, he is left with a dubious extended freedom which feels like bereavement. Freedom or bereavement, the ties that bind or the familial obligations that suffocate a life - each side of the coin and its flipside balance on the issue of choice, of free will.

The question that dogs this novel is whether Hertz could ever have chosen better, whether the modern world can ever be so accommodating to the individual life, provide that authentic moment of experience Hertz determines the younger generation should grasp.

Leaving aside this Romantic conundrum, Hertz's problems remain essentially Brookner's. Her prose, like her protagonist, lacks the vigour to transform the petty and quotidian, to transfigure this autopsy of a failed life. Both ultimately return to an albeit delicately observed Hotel du Lac of yesteryear, which as Brookner herself shows, is the fate of all 'Hertzon' without a certain inspiring passion.