From Publishers Weekly
Booker Prize winner Brookner excels at rendering the stoic, muted lives of lonely people. In another of her coolly rendered but immensely absorbing novels, she trains her keenly observant eye on the fear of facing old age alone. Her 16th novel (after Incidents in the Rue Laughier) is also a stunning study of obsessive passion and of the ways one man's promising life is irrevocably altered by an unwise but irresistible attraction. Narrator Alan Sherwood, a conventional, dutiful London solicitor, now in his mid-50s, looks back on events that shaped his life over 15 years earlier: his reckless, mad lust for and one-night liaison with scornful, self-centered Sarah Miller (granddaughter of his father's first wife); his loveless marriage-on-the-rebound to prim, clinging Angela Milsom; the still-birth of their infant daughter, which Angela unfairly blames on Alan's absence (he was off secretly pursuing Sarah); and Angela's subsequent suicide. Using Alan's soul searching as the framework of her narrative, Brookner explores the discordant ways men and women view each other and the world. Alan, who mythologizes calculating, ruthless Sarah as a "passively demonic" pre-Raphaelite vision, later comes to understand that childishly dependent Angela, who inhabits the other end of the spectrum, is as aberrant a personality as Sarah. Indeed, it is a little disconcerting that Brookner's view of female nature here seems essentially uncharitable and extreme. All the women in this book, including Alan's mother and his uncle's new wife, create some sort of havoc in trying to balance their needs for intimacy and independence. Yet Brookner makes them credible, and her story of a decent man forever adrift in "intense and hopeless longing" is alive with tension and heartbreak. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Brookner (A Family Romance, Audio Reviews, LJ 5/1/95) offers a study of the havoc that obsession, loneliness, and guilt can inflict on the course of a life. Her observant and intuitive novel presents Alan Sherwood, a middle-aged London solicitor, who leads a singular existence. A brief, obsessive relationship with Sarah Miller in his youth leads to a disastrous marriage to Angela Milsom, who seems to want to be needed but who is actually emotionally troubled. The resonance of the resulting tragedy reverberates through the course of Alan's life and affects all those important to him. This moving look at loss and isolation is well matched to reader Steven Crossley; he capably conveys the emotions of the characters' dialog and Alan's interior thoughts, produces very effective female voices, and expresses the quiet desperation in the story while holding the listener to the end. Recommended for fiction collections.?Melody Moxley, Rowan P.L., Salisbury, N.C.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Alan Sherwood is living an orderly life with enough money, a caring mother and a companionable law partner when he becomes besotted by the intriguing Sarah Miller. Because Sarah eludes him, he marries the unremarkable Angela. And then his mother remarries. Steven Crossley deals with all of these people equably, finding as much substance in each character as the author intended. Although the book is populated by a swarm of unsympathetic beings, Crossley gets high marks for not strangling them even though the listener might wish otherwise. J.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
The "altered states" Brookner depicts in this lugubrious yet weirdly fascinating tale are not hallucinatory or Dionysian as one might expect, but rather feelings of profound resignation and guilt. Love is dutiful, lust and ambition short-lived yet (and here's the rub) permanently debilitating. As Brookner writes one highly polished and, frankly, unnervingly morbid novel after another, she seems to be moving inexorably toward a peculiar form of transcendence, a cosmic plane of acceptance distressingly close to what would ordinarily be considered defeat. Her gloomy characters ponder their fates with such ferocious concentration they can barely stand the company of others, or any divergence from their strict, all but monastic routines. Here, in her newest drama of dashed hopes and thwarted dreams, two embittered sisters choose to live in an old people's home long before it's necessary; a lonely, kind, destitute woman marries a dreary, unmanly man to secure a home and family but is nearly denied both; and Brookner's hapless hero Alan (she enjoys writing from a man's point of view, particularly if they're weak, lonely, and long suffering) becomes enthralled by a sexy, capricious, and cruel woman only to marry, by default, her mousy, fearful friend, a mismatch with tragic results. Dullness is cast as a virtue as Alan discovers that "there are no rewards, and few consolations." His altered states are all forms of loss and compromise, intrinsic aspects of life that Brookner analyzes with brilliant intensity and surprising suspense. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
Another only slightly marred but once again precise study of loneliness and the long aftereffects of intemperate love, by the prolific Brookner. Like many of Brookner's 15 previous novels (including, most recently, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, 1996), this one focuses on particularly bright, despairingly self-aware members of the British upper-middle class and upper class caught unawares in hapless romances. The retrospective narrative is told by Alan Sherwood, a successful, discriminating middle-aged barrister who looks back at the defining moment of his life: the suicide years before of his young wife, Angela. Her death is assumed, by Alan and most of his circle, to have been at least partly triggered by Alan's pursuit of the fey Sarah, a woman as heartless as she is beautiful. Alan, who had met, pursued, and lost Sarah before courting the clinging Angela cannot, despite the dictates of reason, put Sarah aside. And when she shows up after a long absence and seems to suggest a rendezvous in Paris, Alan tells the pregnant Angela that business calls him away. Sarah doesn't show up, and Angela miscarries in Alan's absence, beginning a decline that ends one night when she overdoses on sleeping pills while the exhausted Alan sleeps nearby. Brookner's protagonists are distinguished by the unblinking, analytical manner in which they regard their follies and by their clear inability to avoid them. Alan crosses paths with Sarah once again, when she is on the point of putting an elderly (and rather unlikable) relative out on the street. He intervenes, saves the relative, and breaks with Sarah. All of this is conveyed in a prose of great precision, its emotional power heightened by the cool distance from which calamitous events are described, and an otherwise deeply disturbing and convincing tale is only faintly diminished by the cryptic figure of Sarah: It's hard, from what we're told, to understand why Alan is so totally infatuated with her. Still, Brookner remains our great poet of loneliness and loss. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Engrossing-- a brilliant X-ray of obsession." -New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant.... In a category of its own." -The Globe and Mail

"Altered States -- is among [Brookner's] best. Its spare, gripping narrative and sombre, yet illuminating look at the power of passion is extraordinary." -The London Free Press

"Brookner's vision of human behaviour is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel-- a gem of revelation." -Chicago Tribune



Review
"Engrossing-- a brilliant X-ray of obsession." -New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant.... In a category of its own." -The Globe and Mail

"Altered States -- is among [Brookner's] best. Its spare, gripping narrative and sombre, yet illuminating look at the power of passion is extraordinary." -The London Free Press

"Brookner's vision of human behaviour is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel-- a gem of revelation." -Chicago Tribune



Book Description
Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative--only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah's clinging, childlike friend Angela.

With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.

From the Inside Flap
Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative--only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah's clinging, childlike friend Angela.

With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.

From the Back Cover
"Engrossing. . . a brilliant X-ray of obsession." --The New York Times Book Review

"Novels like hers are why we read novels." --Christian Science Monitor

"Brookner's vision of human behavior is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel. . . . A gem of revelation." --Hilma Wolitzer, Chicago Tribune

"Brookner draws characters and settings beautifully; but her best attribute is a finely calibrated understanding of longing trapped in convention." --Wall Street Journal

About the Author
Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928. She received a B.A. from King's College, University of London, and a Ph.D. in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute. Brookner taught at the University of Reading from 1959 to 1964, and since 1967 has been a Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld. From 1967 to 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman to hold that position.

Since her first novel was published in 1981, Brookner has had a dual career as an art historian and a novelist. She has been remarkably successful in both fields and has published fourteen novels in as many years. Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel, won the Booker Prize, England's highest honor for fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative—only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah's clinging, childlike friend Angela.

With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Booker Prize winner Brookner excels at rendering the stoic, muted lives of lonely people. In another of her coolly rendered but immensely absorbing novels, she trains her keenly observant eye on the fear of facing old age alone. Her 16th novel (after Incidents in the Rue Laughier) is also a stunning study of obsessive passion and of the ways one man's promising life is irrevocably altered by an unwise but irresistible attraction. Narrator Alan Sherwood, a conventional, dutiful London solicitor, now in his mid-50s, looks back on events that shaped his life over 15 years earlier: his reckless, mad lust for and one-night liaison with scornful, self-centered Sarah Miller (granddaughter of his father's first wife); his loveless marriage-on-the-rebound to prim, clinging Angela Milsom; the still-birth of their infant daughter, which Angela unfairly blames on Alan's absence (he was off secretly pursuing Sarah); and Angela's subsequent suicide. Using Alan's soul searching as the framework of her narrative, Brookner explores the discordant ways men and women view each other and the world. Alan, who mythologizes calculating, ruthless Sarah as a "passively demonic" pre-Raphaelite vision, later comes to understand that childishly dependent Angela, who inhabits the other end of the spectrum, is as aberrant a personality as Sarah. Indeed, it is a little disconcerting that Brookner's view of female nature here seems essentially uncharitable and extreme. All the women in this book, including Alan's mother and his uncle's new wife, create some sort of havoc in trying to balance their needs for intimacy and independence. Yet Brookner makes them credible, and her story of a decent man forever adrift in "intense and hopeless longing" is alive with tension and heartbreak. (Jan.)

Library Journal

With predictable regularity, Brookner (Incidents in the Rue Laugier, LJ 11/15/95) produces a brooding, atmospheric novel every year or so. And with equal predictability, her quaint, old-fashioned characters tend to aging parents, take unexciting trips abroad, and conduct unsatisfactory love affairs. A loyal reader may be forgiven for feeling that, over time, Brookner's plotlines and characters begin to merge. Her latest protagonist is Alan Miller, a middle-aged widower who works as a solicitor, pays dutiful visits to his mother and her new husband, and pines away for an unrequited love. His obsession with Sarah, a distant cousin and a callous free spirit, progresses from admiration to stalking. After he accepts that she is out of reach, he settles into an unhappy marriage with her friend, Angela. But Sarah continues to drift in and out of his life, and Alan remains besotted with her, eventually putting his marriage at risk. Despite similarities to previous Brookner novels, expect a demand and purchase where necessary. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/96.]-Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario

AudioFile - Jocelyn Pollard

Alan Sherwood is living an orderly life with enough money, a caring mother and a companionable law partner when he becomes besotted by the intriguing Sarah Miller. Because Sarah eludes him, he marries the unremarkable Angela. And then his mother remarries. Steven Crossley deals with all of these people equably, finding as much substance in each character as the author intended. Although the book is populated by a swarm of unsympathetic beings, Crossley gets high marks for not strangling them even though the listener might wish otherwise. J.P. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Deborah Mason

Brookner presents a brilliant X-ray of obsession. -- Deborah Mason, New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Another only slightly marred but once again precise study of loneliness and the long aftereffects of intemperate love, by the prolific Brookner.

Like many of Brookner's 15 previous novels (including, most recently, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, 1996), this one focuses on particularly bright, despairingly self-aware members of the British upper-middle class and upper class caught unawares in hapless romances. The retrospective narrative is told by Alan Sherwood, a successful, discriminating middle-aged barrister who looks back at the defining moment of his life: the suicide years before of his young wife, Angela. Her death is assumed, by Alan and most of his circle, to have been at least partly triggered by Alan's pursuit of the fey Sarah, a woman as heartless as she is beautiful. Alan, who had met, pursued, and lost Sarah before courting the clinging Angela cannot, despite the dictates of reason, put Sarah aside. And when she shows up after a long absence and seems to suggest a rendezvous in Paris, Alan tells the pregnant Angela that business calls him away. Sarah doesn't show up, and Angela miscarries in Alan's absence, beginning a decline that ends one night when she overdoses on sleeping pills while the exhausted Alan sleeps nearby. Brookner's protagonists are distinguished by the unblinking, analytical manner in which they regard their follies and by their clear inability to avoid them. Alan crosses paths with Sarah once again, when she is on the point of putting an elderly (and rather unlikable) relative out on the street. He intervenes, saves the relative, and breaks with Sarah. All of this is conveyed in a prose of great precision, its emotional power heightened by the cool distance from which calamitous events are described, and an otherwise deeply disturbing and convincing tale is only faintly diminished by the cryptic figure of Sarah: It's hard, from what we're told, to understand why Alan is so totally infatuated with her.

Still, Brookner remains our great poet of loneliness and loss.