An Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose

Christine Brooke-Rose is a British novelist who lives and works in Paris. Her writing career, the early part of which includes works she no longer wishes to stand by, took a sharp turn toward experimentation with the publication of Out in 1964 by the Michael Joseph press of London. Since then, with Such (1966) and Between (1968), her novels have continued to press the conventions of fiction and of language to their limits. Bilingual from early childhood, Ms. Brooke-Rose demonstrates a keen sensitivity to both the peculiar nuances of the English language and the often perversely flattening effect of its cliches and jargons. Her wit is nowhere more evident than in dialogue, perhaps most spectacularly in Such, when a man of cosmic proportions who is undergoing an interstellar operation converses with a "girl-spy" out to help him. One is tempted to say that all of Ms. Brooke-Rose's characters, like those of Henry James, speak alike-but then, the goal in the creation of such odd beings is certainly not typicality or verisimilitude but rather a choice and somewhat bitter melange of high irony and comic cunning. Her special gift is the ability to pinpoint and explore those aspects of narrative language that are generally taken for granted by other novelists. Her fictions abound, for example, with the dubious assertiveness of negative statements, as when, in Between,