Anita Brookner's first novel, "The Debut" [published in Great Britain as "A Start in Life," is less in the Romantic tradition than ironic]…. Its English heroine, Ruth Weiss, is a 40-year-old academic whose timid attempts to seize life are overwhelmed by her aging yet childish parents and by the weight of European culture they impose upon her. In her childhood world, youth was the anachronism. Her parents and the books that surrounded her embodied the vitality of the past, the perverse appeal of decay (the chilling portrait of Ruth's deliquescent mother is right out of Christina Stead). The wisdom and folly of the past seem to mock her efforts toward a new beginning; what's the use, it's all been done. An omniscient weary narrator watches with pity and irony as Ruth tries to fuel her brief rebellion with literature. Balzac was right, she decides, Dickens was wrong; the...