Review by New York Times Review
IF ENGLISH LIFE, as Lawrence Durrell was fond of saying, is by and large a "long, slow toothache," then Julian Barnes is now perhaps its principal dentist. Over a period of more than 30 years, he has returned again and again to certain lugubrious and exacting English themes: suburban conventions, coming-of-age anxieties and the enigmas of bourgeois love. From his first novel, "Metroland," to "The Sense of an Ending," which won the Booker Prize in 2011, Barnes has applied a melancholy drill to a patient still confined to the chair. One could argue that in "The Only Story," Barnes's new book, he is taking his cue from Flaubert, as he did in his bestknown work, "Flaubert's Parrot." The older woman in this novel, 48-year-old Susan Macleod, stands in for Madame Arnoux of "A Sentimental Education," and 19-yearold Paul Casey could be seen as a version of Frederic Moreau. They are, after all, eternal archetypes. The revolutions of 1848 in Flaubert's novel become in Barnes's work the multiple revolutions of the 1960s, not least the sexual revolution. A passing reference to a Private Eye cartoon of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home situates the crucial action of the novel in the years 1963-64, a fateful era in Britain's own cultural upheavals. Flaubert stated that he wanted to write the moral history of his generation, to excavate passions that he declared were, despite the romantic pretenses of French society, "inactive." Barnes has set out to do much the same. "The Only Story" is justas pessimistic, with about the same satirical temperature and measuring the same ironic distance from what at first seems to be a love story that might generate some erotic heat. But "In the Mood for Love" this is not. In a small town in suburban Surrey, Paul meets Susan at the local tennis club, where they are assigned to be partners in a doubles tournament. Susan is married, with two daughters, and as Mrs. Robinsons go she is shy but ironic, seemingly insouciant but grimly trapped in a sterile marriage to Gordon Macleod, a nondescript British Empire type who is given all the most charmless attributes of both his generation and his race. The generation being that of World War II, described here as "played out" and traumatized, exhausted and sad, with no hint of the Greatest Generation mythology that has benefited its American counterpart. If one thinks back to the semi-forgotten satire of the British '60s, shows like "That Was the Week That Was" and the "Beyond the Fringe" skits helmed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, the first thing that is striking is the delicious comic tension between the wartime generation and the generation that followed. The comedy is driven by the onetime solidity of archaic British types: Colonel Blimps and academics with plummy accents, cap-tipping proles and Middle Englanders with lips so stiff they can hardly talk. But that seemingly solid tapestry of social orders melted away into nothingness almost overnight. Barnes sets his tale in its twilight, among what he calls "furrow-dwellers," the torpid English middle classes, but he refrains from deriving much comedy from it. His Gordon Macleod is a drunken brute who slams his wife's face into the doorjamb. Narrating the first section of the novel, Paul is filled with rage for this hateful caricature of a man, though this is entirely unsurprising since nothing complex or sympathetic is offered on behalf of the luckless and cuckolded Gordon. It might have occurred to Paul at some point that a 19-year-old doing the deed with your wife under your own roof might inspire a little chagrin, but Paul is himself - and purposefully, I think - a self-righteous adolescent who never quite sees it this way, for all his grandstanding about his own shame. When asking himself, in retrospect, how much he understood about love at 19, he intones, "A court of law might find - " No, sympathy and vitality are reserved for the women in Paul's telling, and indeed the author's. There are shades here of Sarah, Graham Greene's heroine in "The End of the Affair." Susan is, without question, the character linchpin of the novel, and she is rendered touchingly. Miraculously, she shines through her lover's philosophizing about love and memory, about which he has little original to say. She has spirit. The young man and older woman begin a hesitant and fumbling sexual liaison whose sacrilegious tenderness is, however, never quite incarnated by Paul's recollection of it. Take her ears, at which he marvels. In an early moment of their lovemaking, he remembers: "It wasn't until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every overexamined and underexamined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears." One wonders at his language here. Rummaged and rootled? Was she really enjoying such a feverish examination? This makes him sound like a stamp collector going over his latest finds rather than an awestruck adolescent losing his virginity. But this is Barnes's point, I assume. "Strange as it may seem," Paul implausibly reflects just before the episode of the ears, "I never reflected on our age difference." Teenage boys do lose their cherries to much older women (and they do so in the garden suburbs south of London), but it's rare that they never reflect on doing so with a woman nearing 50 with a husband and two daughters in tow. Nor do they tend to set up house with them. Still one could argue, after all, that this is the Emmanuel Macron story, with the cruel difference that Paul goes on to become not the leader of a major European nation but an obscure loser after eloping with his mistress and utterly failing to live happily ever after. For the darkness of the story only invades you in its last hundred pages. Years later, Paul settles down alone in the countryside to run something called the Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company and acquires a taste for reading lachrymose agony columns in the local newspaper. He also bakes. He not only loathes the memory of Susan's husband but most men to boot, finding them boastful, oafish and predatory, both beastly and comical. As for himself, he is by his own account an "absolutist for love." In other words, he is somehow less human than the man he still hates. As "The Only Story" proceeds, Barnes slips in and out of the first-, second- and third-person voices. Sometimes, but not always, with subtle effect. Near the beginning of the second section, which explores Paul and Susan's uneasy cohabitation, the slip into the second person heralds a nice gearshift into Paul's self-questioning; Barnes has a skillful command of tone and its moral implications, when he chooses to exert it. In the more hardened third person at the end of the book, the narrator has Paul recall a public service ad about AIDS in which it is suggested that when two people have sex they have sex with all their previous partners, and at once the ruminations become interesting. In that voice, the novel seems to find the right distance from its subject. I like the way Paul gradually forgets the very body he had overly fetishized, even the ears. "Things, once gone," we are told, "can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever." Of which we can say that this is both true and beautifully put. As Paul opines, "In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd." Which isn't true, but I like it anyway. There is much food for self-contemplation on the part of the generation that came to maturity in the 1960s, and it's a popular theme among British novelists born in the 1940s. But it has proved difficult to pull off. Love isn't the only story, as it turns out, even if, as Paul insists, "first love fixes a life forever." Barnes is aware of this, but to relate in some way the dark sides of the cultural revolution of the '60s and that of his coming-of-age story he would have had to let his characters emerge a little more from Paul's perspective and the look-at-me-inthe-dock exegesis of his poor treatment of a woman he never really understands. Here and there, all the same, Barnes's rapier wit flashes and glitters. At one point in his decline, Paul gets "punitively drunk to the point of sudden rationality." What a delicious phrase that is, and how much more Paul might have delivered on it. ? LAWRENCE OSBORNE'S latest novel is "Beautiful Animals."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 6, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In his newest mesmeric novel, Barnes, as in his Man Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending (2011), portrays an older man, Paul, looking back at his early life. The title refers to how we all have one love story we tell that defines our lives as well as to the old conception of the novel as a literary form that explores love. In this instance, Paul details how at 19, toward the end of the 1960s in leafy Surrey, just outside London, he fell in love with Susan McLeod, a 48-year-old married woman, at a tennis club. As Paul and Susan plunge ever-deeper into love, Barnes beautifully demonstrates that their romantic fantasy and, by extension, the novel as a genre focused solely on love struggles to survive in the face of violence, financial practicalities, and alcoholism. With a narrator every bit as intriguing as Stevens in Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), the novel slowly unfurls, and the reader drifts along on Barnes' gorgeous, undulating prose. Focusing on love, memory, nostalgia, and how contemporary Britain came to be, Barnes' latest will enrapture readers from beginning to end.--Moran, Alexander Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barnes's deeply touching novel is a study of heartbreak; like his Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending, it includes fading reminiscences, emotional complications, and moments of immeasurable sadness as an aging Englishman remembers his first and only love. Bored 19-year-old Paul meets 48-year-old Susan at the tennis club when they pair up for mixed doubles. She has a husband and two daughters older than Paul, but it is the 1960s, Paul's first summer home from university, and he is impervious to social correctness, parental disapproval, or long-term consequences. Paul and Susan share a satiric view of their suburban surroundings that turns into a secret romance, then a not-so-secret affair. Together they move to London, where, over the next decade, Paul studies law and becomes a law office manager while Susan deteriorates into alcoholism and depression. Fifty years later, Paul looks back on the relationship in an account strewn with unanswerable questions and observations about the nature of love. As painful memories mount, Paul's narration switches first to second person and then builds more distance by settling into third person. By revisiting the flow and ebb of one man's passion, Barnes eloquently illuminates the connection between an old man and his younger self. 75,000-copy announced first printing. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
At age 19, Paul meets 48-year-old Susan Macleod at the local tennis club and the two begin an affair that lasts for more than a decade. Paul reflects on the heady, happy early years of the relationship and then delves into its darker passages and eventual disintegration, which haunts him throughout his life. The specificity of the circumstances and personalities of Paul and Susan make it clear that this is not an "older woman schools young man in love and sends him into the world" tale. Overall, it is a story about memory. Man Booker Prize winner Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) skillfully plays with narrative form, turning the novel into something of a metafiction without making it ponderous or difficult to read. While Paul is decidedly the narrator throughout, the point of view shifts depending on how much he wants to distance himself from the emotional pain. He begins in first person, then moves to second person in the grimmest period, then third person when reflecting on life after Susan, only returning to first person in the final pages. VERDICT Absorbing enough to polish off over a weekend, this novel has a place in popular and literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A May-September romance devolves into dysfunction and regret.Much like Barnes' 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, this one involves a man looking back at a youthful error in judgment and considering its consequences. Paul, the narrator, recalls being 19 and falling for 48-year-old Susan, who's in a loveless, sexless, and abusive marriage. Cocksure about their relationship in spite of others' judgmentsPaul's parents and Susan's husband are righteously indignant, and the duo are kicked out of the tennis club where they began their affairPaul decides to move in with Susan to pursue "exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove." The thrill of independence is short-lived, though, as Susan's nascent alcoholism intensifies; the first half of the book mentions Susan's drinking habit, but as if to mirror Paul's youthful ignorance, Barnes doesn't overtly signal how deep she's sunk until she's practically beyond help. Barnes also shifts the narrative voice across the novel to underscore Paul's callowness: The novel opens in first person, turns to second as if to shift blame upon the reader, then closes in a bereft, distant third. Barnes' characterizations of both Paul and Susan are detailed and robust, though given the narrative structure, Susan remains a bit of a cipher. What prompted her to drink? What kept her from pushing back against her husband? Most critically, what drew her to Paul? Paul, though, is mainly concerned with what made their romance distinct from the usual romantic clichs. In other words, he's narcissistic, and his rhetoric, in first person or not, often takes on a needy, pleading tone ("sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart"; "tough love is also tough on the lover.") But that's by Barnes' design, and it's consistently clear that Paul was in love, just tragically ill-equipped to manage it.A somber but well-conceived character study suffused with themes of loss and self-delusion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
