The Next Big Thing (Hardcover)

As Hertz struggles with his self-induced dilemma, he looks back over his life, searching for an answer. If he can only think things through rationally, perhaps the way forward was always there, hidden somewhere in the past, waiting for him to finally realise its significance? With a mixture of pathos and mild distaste, he reflects on his distant, ordered childhood in pre-war Germany, his unrequited love for his beautiful, haughty cousin Fanny, to whom, in desperate middle age, he would rashly propose. He remembers the family's enforced exile to London, their role as polite refugees, obligated to kindly compatriots. And then the onset of his brother's "illness", precipitating the end of his career as a concert pianist, the crumbling of his mother's dreams and his own rise as family carer. And his brief respite marriage to Josie whose pragmatism could never dovetail with his own servility.

Anita Brookner has, herself, moved on with The Next Big Thing. Her 21st novel is a finely wrought, painfully elegant treatise on old age: the wearing loneliness, the reflections, regrets and recriminations and the occasional stirrings of now-fading desires. And instead of the familiar middle-aged Brookner women, the protagonist is a man, albeit a passive and docile creature, whose lonely life has been shaped at every turn by the needs of others. Reading The Next Big Thing is not an easy experience. Brookner has stripped her characters of their flesh and, with her unique insight, let us into the distant recesses of their minds, their hearts and their souls, so often revealing how each can harbour its own conflicting desires. The only certainty in life is the inevitability of our end--in the meantime our duty to ourselves must be one of brutal self-honesty and personal fulfilment.--Carey Green

Review
Julius Herz is an old man, to an onlooker no different from the numerous other old men who wander the streets of London. He has no purpose, no identity, no feelings and certainly no future. But, like it or not, he cannot just sit around and just wait for death - 'the next big thing'. He fills his endless empty hours perusing old bookshops, sitting on a bench in a public garden or, occasionally, meeting one of his few acquaintances for a meal. Herz is continually haunted by his past - his failed marriage with Josie, with whom he is still fairly friendly, his brother who died young following a nervous breakdown, his disastrous relationship with his parents, both of whom are now dead. When a threat arises of having to move out of his flat, Herz is forced to consider his safe but tedious existence and how, if at all, he intends to change it. This excellent novel does not only deal with the issue of old age - it is relevant to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. It is a highly comic affair, as well as being thought-provoking. Seen through the eyes of Herz, youth is a humorous thing, and is indeed wasted on the young. His attempts to involve himself in it have disastrous and embarrassing consequences yet his youthful hopes and dreams have not dulled. His is a difficult and contradictory time of life - he has all the free time in the world but nothing to do and no one to spend it with. The Next Big Thing is written in a more humorous style than that to which readers of Anita Brookner have become accustomed in her previous 20 novels. However, the story is as beautifully related and her characters as sympathetic as those which have made her one of England's most popular modern novelists. (Kirkus UK)

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