This week she publishes The Next Big Thing Viking £16

This week, she publishes The Next Big Thing (Viking, £16.99), the 21st in a sequence of increasingly challenging novels which dramatise small, tight lives of iron control with an extravagant intensity of language and nuance. Luxuriant in detail, ascetic in design, her books stage orgies of inhibition, and riots of repression. With phenomenal consistency, they have flowered every summer since 1981, when the then reader in art history at the Courtauld Institute made – at the age of 53 – her own fresh start with A Start in Life.The stories arrive, she says, ready-cooked: “encoded” from some unconscious source. Could she reduce her staggering productivity? “I hope so.” And will she ever decide to resign from her extraordinary second career? “I won’t make a definite decision.

But it’ll be made for me.”Small, intense, dressed in a neatly tailored suit, with luminous piercing eyes, Brookner sits at her dining-room table and answers questions with a frankness and exactitude that make most of her literary juniors seem like evasive wafflers. As befits an eminent scholar and teacher, she is direct, precise, forensic. A bone-dry wit lurks behind her thrillingly cheerless obiter dicta on morality and mortality. With marriage, for instance, this celebrated singleton believes that once should never be enough. “I think that one should marry several times, just to find out” about the nature of the beast Would one, eventually, strike lucky? “There’s no guarantee. I think it’s a worthy line of enquiry, shall we say.” Eat your trousseau, Bridget Jones.Did she, seriously, wish for marriage? “Of course All the time.

I wanted children.” So the right person failed to show up at the right time? “There’s been more than one right person, I’m afraid. I made bad choices, and ignored what was probably near to hand.” Yet in the Brookner orbit, character fixes destiny. If she had married, “I doubt if things would have been very different. I think I should have been a very poor wife, and a terrible mother Full of anxiety. I just think children are so entertaining.”As for mortality: “I think we should promote euthanasia: as quickly as possible, as universally as possible”. Does she fear a disabling prelude to the final act? “That’s the terror. The stroke that’s going to deprive you of one faculty or other It’s unimaginable.

It’ll come.” Neither can this self-described “pagan” turn to faith for consolation. As a child, she read the Bible “from cover to cover” but decided, about the age of seven, that “there were going to be a lot of questions and no answers”. Yet she still hankers after belief: “I yearn for the whole package But I’ve been disqualified in some way. Also God’s doing, no doubt.” Her gloom – irradiated by the odd flash of sheer mischief – is exhilarating, a dose of salts in a literary landscape soaked with schmaltz.Over the past decade, Brookner’s zestfully melancholy art has outpaced her detractors. Especially after Hotel du Lac won the Booker in 1984, smug and lazy put-downs branded her as fiction’s cracked record, a one-trick turn who snuck back over and over to the airless apartments of forlorn spinsters, left alone with their heartaches and their Harrods accounts.There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies “I hate those early novels I think they’re crap Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I’m doing now.” Yes, she does use the Ratner word It’s like hearing a duchess cuss.