Love, Loss, Change and Being English
By Michiko Kakutani
PULSE
By Julian Barnes
227 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
As his many novels and earlier short stories have demonstrated, Julian
Barnes is one of those confident literary decathletes, proficient at
old-fashioned storytelling, dialogue-driven portraiture, postmodern collage,
and political allegory and farce. He’s a true literary professional whose most
compelling work showcases his musical prose, his ear for the chattering class’s
chatter (“Talking It Over”), his ability to create narratives
with both surface brio and finely calibrated philosophical subtexts (“Flaubert’s Parrot,” “The Porcupine”). His weaker efforts,
however, can be overly cerebral and contrived, with bloodless characters and
story lines that have been cut and pasted into pretentious blueprints (“Arthur & George,” “Love, Etc.”).
Mr. Barnes’s latest collection, “Pulse,” is filled with both gems and
should-have-been discards. The title story and “Marriage Lines” are beautiful,
elegiac tales about how marriages endure or change over time: stories that
attest to the new emotional depth Mr. Barnes discovered in his 2004 collection “The Lemon Table.” Unfortunately, many other entries in this volume are brittle exercises
in craft: a writer writing on automatic pilot, substituting verbal facility for
genuine humor or real feeling, a scattering of social details for a persuasive
sense of time and place.
Linked tales (“At Phil & Joanna’s,” Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) recounting
the inane conversations of a group of middle-aged yuppies, read less like
amusing satires than like cartoon snapshots of the sort of snooty, liberal elites
detested by Tea Party blowhards. The characters blather away pretentiously
about wine, sex and the disappearance of classical references and Shakespeare
quotations in crossword puzzles. One character says, “Did you see that French
Champagne houses are thinking of relocating to England because soon it’ll be
too warm for their grapes?” Another character (or perhaps the same one, it’s
hard to tell) declares: “We are looking at a vista of grand reversal and
inevitable, spectacular decline, whenhomo will become a lupus to homini again. As in the beginning so it was in the end.”
For that matter, most of the contemporary men and women in this volume
inhabit a high-altitude world in which people dine on fricassee of rabbit and
spend a lot of time worrying about things like the pH levels of their garden
soil. “Gardeners’ World,” for instance, depicts a battle of wills between a
husband and wife, arguing over what to plant. “I was wondering about a
trachelospermum jasminoides,” the wife says, “but suspect the soil’s too acid.”
Two tales in “Pulse” give us simplistic portraits of unpleasant,
controlling men. Vernon, the recently divorced hero of “East Wind,” copies his
girlfriend’s key so he can snoop around her apartment to find out more about
her past, while Geoff, the uptight protagonist in “Trespass,” grows
increasingly annoyed by his new girlfriend’s reluctance to abide by his rules
of the road for hiking. Geoff doesn’t “believe in coffee on a walk” and thinks
people ought to outfit themselves with the proper gear. “She’d refused all
offers of a walking hat,” he thinks, “despite having the pros and cons
explained to her. Not that there were any cons. Still, better a bare head than
a baseball cap. He really couldn’t take a walker in a baseball cap seriously, male
or female.”
The arc of love and romance is a favorite subject in these pages, as
it’s been in Mr. Barnes’s earlier books, and so are the themes of change, loss
and what it means to be English. His people talk about how England has traded
imperial confidence for self-consciousness, how attitudes — toward marriage,
the household division of labor, even smoking — have devolved over the course
of their lifetimes.
“The Limner” — about an itinerant portrait painter — addresses another
familiar Barnesian theme: the difficulty of understanding or capturing another
person’s life, the same theme that animated “Flaubert’s Parrot,” the author’s
masterpiece about the author of “Madame Bovary”. And “Carcassonne” uses the
same elliptical narrative techniques employed in “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” to create a glittering improvisation on the life of the Italian hero
Garibaldi.
Like the stories in “The Lemon Table,” several tales in this volume
concern old age and what life looks like in the rearview mirror. “Sleeping with
John Updike” creates a touching and sometimes very funny portrait of two literary
biddies named Alice and Jane, who have teamed up to go on the lecture circuit.
They have known each other for decades — one even had an affair with the other
one’s ex-husband — and have settled in to a friendship made up of equal parts
affection, rivalry and dependence.
While they are on a train trip together Jane flinches when “a great wind
blast from a train going in the opposite direction suddenly rocked them” and
her mind runs to “plane crashes, mass slaughter, cancer, the strangling of old
ladies who lived alone and the probable absence of immortality.” Alice, for her
part, thinks life “was mostly about the gradual loss of pleasure. She and Jane
had given up sex at about the same time. She was no longer interested in drink;
Jane had stopped caring about food — or at least, its quality.”
In “Marriage Lines,” the most affecting story in this imperfect
collection and a testament to Mr. Barnes’s full panoply of talents, he twines
the themes of marriage and time around each other, creating a melancholy portrait
of a widower who returns to the island he and his wife once used to visit on
vacation, only to realize — like so many earlier Barnes characters — that the
past is irretrievable, that memories cannot plug emotional holes in the
present.
“He had thought he could recapture” the past, Mr. Barnes writes, “and
begin to say farewell. He had thought that grief might be assuaged, or if not
assuaged, at least speeded up, hurried on its way a little, by going back to a
place where they had been happy. But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was
in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach
him many other things as well. This was just the first of them.”
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