For the heroine of Anita Brookner's novel [Look at Me], life is a bitter pill, and no wonder. Endowed with private means, she lives with an elderly housekeeper in the London mausoleum/flat in which her mother expired after a lingering illness. For fun Frances has entombed herself in a medical library, where she curates a collection of prints and engravings depicting Disease Through the Ages. Her girlhood friend is a soft-spoken cripple, and her closest attachment is to a trio of vivacious sybarites who ignore Frances when they're not ridiculing her. But Frances's dreariest fate, if she only realized it, is to be trapped inside her own precious, suffocating self.

And since she is the narrator/protagonist of this introverted book, the hapless reader is trapped right along with her. Frances characterizes herself as a self-effacing observer, who longs to act and be noticed. "I needed to...