This Sudden Feeling of Displacement

This sudden feeling of displacement was radical; my life was circumscribed because I accepted that it should be. Occasional visits from a part-time lover were perhaps all that I could tolerate. Even those distant Sunday excursions with Michael were cherished because they came within safe limits, and those gardens I so faithfully studied were valued because they existed in a finite space and a time that could not be replicated.

Leaving Home, Ch. 17

Emma Roberts's feelings are radical indeed. There is, in late Brookner, from time to time a powerful and strange obscurity. What precisely is this feeling of displacement? And why so sudden? Why is Emma's life so limited, and why is she so accepting? Why can't she tolerate more? One thinks almost of late Henry James: it's the same gesturing at information - information that remains, even for the writer, just a little out of reach.