NEW BROOKNER: At the Hairdresser's

I have a hairdresser phobia. Superficially, because who likes to pay to watch themselves make small talk for hours? Also i have problem hair: thick, curly and dyed. So i am not one of those people who experience the hairdresser as some sort of indulgent pampering - the hairdresser is a high-anxiety zone of alert. I remember being in a gym class once and we were all facing the mirror at the front of the room and everyones hair flowed downwards but my hair was heading up towards the ceiling. This is not friendly hair. I hate the hairdressers but actually i go to two different salons - one to get cut and the other to get coloured - and i guess now it's no secret that i'm a masochist. But this also comes from years of experience. My last cutter i saw as i was sailing past his salon. He had curly hair and i rang up that very day and said, 'who's the stylist with curly hair? i want an appointment with him.' Curly-haired people generally need to go to curly-haired hairdressers to get their hair cut. Simply they are the only ones who understand. Curly-haired people nod and smile at other curly-haired people in the street. We are a class and we have class consciousness. My colourist is a great colourist but she has straight hair and i would be more likely to get my hair cut underwater by a junky than entrust her with a pair of scissors. True story, was going to do that once. Moving along.

Exciting news last week from Penguin on the imminent Dec 1st publication of an Anita Brookner e-novella 'At the Hairdresser's.' The occasion will launch their new electronic series Penguin Shorts. Brookner is selected along with eight other authors. Details here.

At first i thought it might be a cruel joke, an elaborate literary hoax, another stereotype. Given that Brookner's name is often used to figure the impossible, the improbable, the incongruous and the uncanny, my response is not all that ridiculous. An Anita Brookner e-novella? That's about as unlikely as an Anita Brookner e-novella!

Case-in-point: In Sam Leith's discussion of Nick Cave's singing e-book he states 'I can't see a huge market for an iPhone edition of Hotel du Lac, with Anita Brookner improvising scat jazz accompanied by a steel band.' Yet what's so ridiculous about this, really? Brooknerines know that Brookner's mother was a professional singer. Additionally, in Brief Lives, Fay is a singer and the novel has quite a few musical references. Brookner is basically set in opposition to anything that signifies as contemporary which is undermining when the contemporary is a euphemism for the real or relevant. Anachronism isn't about ignorance or a lack of friends, it's about contesting the idea that reality is self-evident and not constructed. It's about contesting the way in which empirical formations are constructed as natural. The anachronistic is not about being boring, it's about questioning fashionability. Not only is it irritating that Brookner is not appreciated for this, it's also annoying when her oeuvre is dredged up to underline the contemporaneity of other people's projects. Here, the implication of Leith's comment is that Brookner's novels are one-dimensional and have no contemporary (or futuristic) application. Those of us invested in Brookner's historical art criticism, in Romanticism and in reading the nineteenth century, understand that Brookner's novels problematise temporal determination, are fascinated by the interdependence of temporal categories such as the anachronistic, the contemporary and the future and by extension in historicising these very categories through the nineteenth century. The woman is an historian goddammit! And a member of the avant-garde.

Brookner's immersion in questions of the historical and the contemporary etc, make it especially interesting that she's been curated by Penguin in this first round of their new e-technology venture, Penguin Shorts (similar to their inclusion of Latecomers for Penguin 70th birthday editions.) It's a brilliant reinforcement of Brookner's commercial viability, popularity and cult status.

She's never published a novella before.
Did Penguin commission this e-novella? Or was it just lying around waiting to be handed to someone? While many of her books are now available for download, Brookner has said she writes in longhand, that she doesn't own a computer. Correct me if i'm wrong... Graeme?!

Penguin describes At the Hairdresser's.

I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.'

Solitude is a familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner. She lives in a basement flat near Victoria and leaves the house only to go shopping and to have her hair done - until a chance encounter at the hairdresser's brings unexpected change. At the Hairdresser's is a deeply moving, unflinchingly observed story about trust and betrayal by one of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction.

The hairdresser does crop up in Brookner novels. It's the public confrontation with the mirror, the production of the historical. Julia's page-boy is maintained by 'Bobby' - in Brief Lives. In Strangers the hairdresser is an Australian.