segunda-feira, 25 de junho de 2012

Julian Barnes on Not Talking About Love By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY


Julian Barnes on Not Talking About Love
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY

PULSE
By Julian Barnes
227 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25

Couples are the beating heart, the systole and diastole, of “Pulse,” Julian Barnes’s diverting third collection of stories. Author of the best-selling “Arthur & George” (an odd-couple historical novel in which “Arthur” is the creator of Sherlock Holmes) and the unclassifiable masterpiece “Flaubert’s Parrot,” Barnes is among the most adventurous writers — in style, versatility and narrative structure — of his Amis-McEwan-Hitchens generation. Another of his beguiling novels, “Talking It Over,” was about a loquacious love triangle, and what the characters mainly talk over in “Pulse” is what makes couples tick. “What do we look for in a partner?” the puzzled narrator, who was “still unmarried at 30,” asks in the title story. Someone who “matches us”? Perhaps. But is it possible that “we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?”
“When I first became part of a couple,” the narrator confides in the labyrinthine story called “Carcassonne,” “I began to examine with more self-interest the progress and fate of other couples.” The story opens with the Italian freedom fighter Garibaldi, “one of the last romantic heroes of European history,” falling in love, during the summer of 1839, with a young Brazilian woman glimpsed through a telescope across a lagoon. “Is there a more romantic encounter than this?” Barnes’s narrator wonders. The story promptly branches out in a tangle of tangents, both erotic (the possible “correlation between interest in food and interest in sex”) and literary (“Life’s astonishments are frequently literature’s clichés”), before circling back to Garibaldi’s lightning bolt of love.
For Barnes, “Carcassonne” turns out to be code for coupledom. “I just wanted to marry her,” says a character in Ford Madox Ford’s “Good Soldier,” quoted by Barnes, “as some people want to go to Carcassonne.” If Garibaldi’s grandiose passion is partly the invention of historians massaging the facts, so, in its way, is Carcassonne, the fortified cathedral town in southern France that looks so “solid and enduring” but is “mostly 19th-century reconstruction.” Happiness in coupledom, Barnes’s narrator concludes, consists of more mundane achievements: “A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.”
Among the earliest stories in “Pulse” are four called, with diverse subtitles, “At Phil & Joanna’s.” Variously attached British baby boomers, with a “token American” thrown in, lounge contentedly around a dining-room table, prying a morsel from “the cliff-face of cheese” and making jokes about aging, politics, Englishness and sex, always sex, with a verbal dexterity that sometimes recalls Oscar Wilde and sometimes a gross-out stand-up comic. (“Bum cancer’s got to be the bottom of the pile.”) These four stories are interleaved with other tales about, mainly, more couples, similarly anxious and eloquent.
The ghost of John Updike, that master delineator of couples and how they talk, haunts many of these stories. Barnes is both beneficiary and victim of Updike’s own double-edged gift: a dazzling facility of phrase that sometimes feels like an end in itself. Updike himself makes a cameo appearance in a story called “Sleeping With John Updike,” in which two aging female writers try to remember whom exactly they have gone to bed with over the years. “I can’t remember,” Alice confesses when a certain name comes up. “I can’t either,” Jane replies. “But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as well.”
“Men talk about sex,” someone says at Phil and Joanna’s dinner table, “women talk about love.” But when love is proposed as a topic, as in Plato’s famous symposium of philosophical revelers, the room goes dead, like this:
“Love.”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“ . . . ”
“It’s what we don’t talk about,” someone says, updating Raymond Carver. At Phil and Joanna’s, it’s always late evening, always England, extending from “the week Hillary Clinton finally conceded” to the time of “bankers’ bonuses and Obama’s continuing troubles.”
The aesthetic effect of these up-to-date dinner parties is to render the intervening stories, which could almost be movies the guests are viewing, a bit old-fashioned, a bit lachrymose. In “East Wind,” a divorced real estate agent tries to uncover, like Sherlock Holmes, details about the early life of the Eastern European immigrant he has been dating (“If you fall in love, you want to know”), only to find that their relationship can’t survive the revelation. In “Marriage Lines,” a widower flies back to the “jigsaw edges of the island” in Scotland that he used to visit with his wife. He is reminded that certain sweaters knitted by the local women have a zigzag pattern representing the predicted “ups and downs of marriage.” He also is faced with the crushing but rather familiar truth that “he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him.” One can imagine the clever diners at Phil and Joanna’s saying, “Next.”
When he leaves Phil and Joanna behind, Barnes ventures into more challenging territory — in a suite of five stories that mostly delve into the past, and into less traditional varieties of couples. “Carcassonne,” the collection’s standout, is a welcome reminder that Barnes can still weave together historical reconstruction, biographical acuity, personal essay and sheer oddball association with the verve he achieved in what remains his best book, the wondrous “Flaubert’s Parrot.”
But I also liked “The Limner,” about a deaf-mute itinerant artist who plans to paint, as his crowning work, a portrait of his trusty mare. “She had been his companion for 12 years, understood him easily, and took no heed of the noises that issued from his mouth when they were alone in the forest.” In the strange tale called “Harmony,” reminiscent of Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark” or Oliver Sacks’s neurological case studies, a mesmerist (perhaps Mesmer himself) seeks to cure a young piano prodigy of her seemingly psychosomatic blindness. “M— sought, like Doctor Faustus, to master all forms of human knowledge.” With returning sight, alas, comes mediocrity at the keyboard. “In my darkness, music was my entire consolation,” she laments. “To be brought into the light and then lose the ability to play would be cruel justice.”
This Faustian thread is woven into several of the other stories in “Pulse” — the notion that happiness, in coupledom and elsewhere, doesn’t depend on more “knowledge,” on proofs of fidelity or secrets from a partner’s past brought to light. Certainty isn’t the aim. Rather, it’s something more like complicity (the title of another story): sharing an illicit cigarette or a raised eyebrow over “Lara’s Theme” as it “oozed” from the speakers in a Chinese restaurant. Or reaching agreement over something truly important, like what to have for breakfast.
Christopher Benfey teaches at Mount Holyoke College. His family memoir, “Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay,” will be published next March.

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