Balzac’s Lives

Brooks (Reading for the Plot), a Yale professor emeritus of comparative literature, aims to uncover fresh insights into Honoré de Balzac in this enjoyable but puzzling work of literary criticism. He picks nine characters out of the estimated 2,472 in Balzac’s interlocking “90 or so” books and stories, collectively known as The Human Comedy, an epic depiction of post-Napoleonic French life. Asking what “these invented lives tell us about Balzac’s inner life,” Brooks explores, among others, Père Goriot’s Rastignac, an ambitious young man from the provinces who arrives in Paris to make his fortune; the morally complex moneylender Gobseck, who figures into both Père Goriot and, from a different angle, Gobseck; and The Duchesse de Langeais’s heroine, a love-spurned noblewoman who runs off to a Spanish nunnery. Unfortunately, Brooks gets so caught up in recounting Balzac’s creations that the writer himself gets lost. Only in the final chapter does Brooks recenter Balzac, discerning “certain obsessive patterns” in his work corresponding to his own early years: “boys [who] are unloved and abandoned by their mothers, confined to boarding schools or student boarding houses, deprived of comfort, food, adequate clothing, and always of love.” Even if Balzac’s motivations remain murky, Brooks’s enthusiastic study makes a good case for diving into the author’s works. (Sept.)