Oh no, Anita, no

I've just read my fourth and last novel by Anita Brookner. Yes, I know, she's written far more than four. But I need someone to explain to me how she got her reputation as a writer, and how she manages to retain any readers beyond a few tries. Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize, I thought just about OK, and her last novel, Strangers, was nearly quite good if you've read nothing else by her. But the two others I've read - A Friend from England and Fraud - are both preposterous. And they concentrate what is a central and persistent sin of Brookner's as a writer, marking even her more tolerable fiction - which is that she seems not to have come across the advice 'Show, don't tell'. My, how she tells - and tells and tells and tells. On page after page we get told not only what her central protagonists are thinking about the content of their own minds but also what they are thinking about the content of other people's. They have the semi-miraculous power, each of them, of knowing other people's thoughts and moods and memories and wounds and dispositions, down to the finest nuance. How do they know all that they know about these processes going on within the minds of others? Search me. Sometimes they just infer it from a snatch of reported conversation - infer an entire life story or life situation. Other times they seem to know by virtue of being the creations of their author, and she (the author) of course knows the minds of all her characters and shares out this knowledge amongst them as convenient. So we get told and told what this one knows about what that one is feeling and what that one knows about what this one is feeling, and told and told some more. On top of all that the drawn-out, clomping dullness of the telling reinforces the essential dullness of the preoccupations of most of Brookner's characters. Day after day it's the micro-managing of their time simply getting through the day: dress, go for a walk, tell what she knows about what he thinks, have tea, get bored, go to Paris, look at other people in a restaurant or hotel, go home, get into bed, cook a meal, tell what she knows about what someone else thinks, look at the curtains, think about mother, sleep, go for another walk... aaaarghh. I think I'll give the other 20 books a miss.