The Quotidian Side of Life
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
The Quotidian Side of Life Love, Etc. By Julian Barnes Knopf. 224 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Julian Barnes is sometimes called the cleverest...
...The formerly tongue-tied Stuart can now talk at length (and rather boringly) about the organic grocery business and boutique breweries...
...Oliver is as verbally dexterous as ever, yet he seems to speak in a more minor key: "In the meantime, the meantime, the only Greenwich meantime...
...He has learned he tells us, "that trust invites betrayal...
...My old friend Oliver...
...These novels are intimate, richly textured, earnest, and written in several different modes...
...You therefore need all the information you can get...
...In a thoroughly postmodern moment, the two men band together in an attempt to convince Barnes to kick her out of Talkinglt Over...
...At the heart of Barnes' structure there is the opposition between the philosophies of the two friends...
...Disregarded...
...In the earlier volume, Oliver's romantic Love, in its way, prevailed over the material stability offered by Stuart...
...Barnes makes it clear that his characters are not reliable storytellers...
...Dust on my fore edge...
...Drags her feet and pouts her lower lip most of your life, and then just for that brief happy hour, that margarita moment when pleasure seems to be on the house, she zooms past like a waitress on Rollerblades...
...Gillian's initial prudery creates a certain tension and expectation, highlighting the reader's voyeurism while whetting the appetite for the moment when Gillian will finally say, "Now listen to me...
...But perhaps we English speakers are just not sufficiently Continental...
...Barnes has a brilliant gift for mimicry...
...Although it is possible to enjoy Love, Etc...
...Barnes' greatest strength has been his facility in the first person voice...
...Oliver, an impecunious language teacher, is given to impressive riffs of chatter, some of it nonsense and some of it profound...
...Its almost murderous atmosphere recalls the surprisingly dark ending of Before She Met Me, a work so depressing that one could not help regretting having read it...
...I do not believe all of this, of course...
...It is a bit of a gimmick, but it is effective...
...To him, the phrase suggests that "the world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the brass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that everything else—everything else—is merely an etc...
...she had rejected in choosing to love Oliver, suddenly seems very helpful indeed...
...Moreover, his protagonists are not always forthright...
...What matters is how much of it Stuart believes...
...A disaffected florist thinks Oliver is "a poser," Gillian's fatalistic French mother has her doubts about Stuart from the start, and an ex-girlfriend has nothing but disparaging comments to make about both Oliver and Stuart...
...His second, Before She Met Me (1982), despite being told in the third person, was again dominated by the interior thoughts of a single character, this time a homicidally jealous husband...
...Wherever you turn nowadays there are people who insist on spilling out their lives at you...
...While this thesis seems credible enough to ascribe to the author, Barnes immediately deflates it by following with Stuart's bitter response, "Oliver...
...Granted he's not in bad company...
...not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration...
...Stuart gives Oliver a job, of sorts, yet almost inexorably begins to replace him as husband and father: cooking forthe children, putting up bookshelves and "comforting" Gillian...
...They marry and move to France, where Gillian gives birth to the first of two daughters...
...And Gillian's sage mother remarks, "Stuart tells me the friendship is restored...
...Why can't they simply get on with things...
...No wonder he's ended up giving conversation lessons.' Despite its sprightly stylistic high jinks, Barnes' Talking It Over describes a dark world in which language has the power to influence emotion to a sinister degree and the motivations of both love and reason are suspect...
...without having read Talkinglt Over, you can best appreciate their parterrelike formal structure by reading them sequentially...
...The power of words, the power of bullshit...
...Now "Etc.," rather than Love, holds sway...
...I haven't got anything to say...
...OUT...
...When told that he talks like a dictionary, his response is giddy and prescient: "What kind of dictionary am I? Do I have a thumb index...
...A decade after the events of Talking It Over, Love, Etc...
...and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the etc...
...If you help me, I'll tell you about their cocks...
...of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth...
...In fact, his obsession with tabloid stories of violent revenge suggests that he himself may not yet understand the end of his intentions toward the now-vulnerable Oliver and Gillian who hurt him in the past...
...What if nobody wants me...
...Stuart tells me that he is only anxious about Gillian, who seems to him to be under stress...
...But it matters not so much what I believe...
...His stateside ex-wife has something to add, but she mostly speaks in warnings that cast a distinctly ominous shadow over Stuart's intentions...
...The harsh light of adversity has faded their love into something closer to habit...
...Gillian continues to restore paintings, often for "pigs" who expect her efforts to reveal their flea market finds as lost works by the old masters...
...In Talking It Over the dashing Oliver develops a passionate fixation for Gillian, who has only recently married Stuart...
...At the center is the practical Gillian, who chose her work as a restorer of paintings because "there aren't any words involved...
...is, if anything, more bleak...
...Perhaps in an effort to use a conventional omniscient voice, Barnes larded the narrative with the occasional glimpses of what other characters were thinking, but couldn't get the balance right...
...Certain areas of his life, such as his brief second marriage to an American, are not open to discussion...
...Thus, while he tends to portray recognizable "types," their monologues are so cleverly constructed that they really do come to life...
...Open any newspaper and they're shouting Come Into My Life...
...Flaubert's Parrot, probably his most successful work to date, won the Prix Medicis in 1984, but some overly genre-minded critics found it more like an essay than a novel —a charge that has been leveled as well at his more recent books, such as A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989...
...His debut novel, the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980), was narrated by an intensely intellectual young Englishman who seemed to bear a close resemblance to Barnes himself...
...Barnes would no doubt argue that it is too much to expect both honesty and optimism from him, but one does feel forced to question the credibility of these plotlines...
...It may be that the sexual jealousy Barnes uses as a device in several of his books is a slightly crude excuse for closure...
...Look At Me, Listen To Me...
...She voices a distaste for fiction's stock-in-trade at the start of Talking It Over...
...The three primary protagonists are English...
...Time is mean, that's true...
...In Talkinglt Over (1991), and in Love, Etc., this new novel that is its sequel, the characters take turns addressing the reader directly, as if they were talking to a documentary filmmaker...
...At its climax, one of Barnes' triangle lies to the reader, and this betrayal—the imitative fallacy running amuck, if you like —breaks whatever is left of the novel's moral structure...
...can't rival Barnes' most intellectual and enjoyable work, Flaubert s Parrot...
...A tricky little soubrette, Time...
...Love Etc.'s darkness is more profound...
...Oh no, I'm going to be remaindered, I can see it, I'm going to be remaindered...
...Oliver has become a househusband, doing the occasional odd job when not writingunproduciblescreenplaysor fighting off debilitating attacks of the blues...
...Oliver sees the dichotomy in Love, Etc., the words sometimes usedjust before signing a letter...
...Novels are not about "getting on with things," of course, and it is extraordinary that Barnes is able to fashion a character who doesn't want to speak about herself yet does not come off as a cipher...
...It's her or us...
...What are they all doing it for...
...But Stuart, too, has been altered by time...
...Eventually, Oliver's combination of eloquence and vulnerability wins her over...
...The playful, polyphonic style also gives Barnes more room to explore a number of people with equal focus...
...In his laterworks, most notably the delicate, poignant Staring at the Sun (1986), which depicted the uneventful existence of an everywoman, Barnes combined his own and his protagonists' voices more skillfully...
...Stuart, a bluff and apparently uncomplicated entrepreneur, is by his own admission more a man of action...
...Am I bilingual...
...presents Gillian, Oliver and their daughters struggling to survive financially in a London neighborhood that is still on the very edges of gentrification...
...He has become rich, confident and cynical...
...Stuart's mysterious turn to evil brings to mind Iago, whose motivation for ruining the happiness of Othello and Desdemona remains frustratingly obscure...
...Poking fun at the novelist's voyeurism again, she bargains, "Help me...
...Stuart retreats to America to try to overcome his own jealous obsession with his "stolen" wife...
...Given its story, this can only be an example of Barnes' bitter wit...
...Nevertheless, it is stylistically inventive, clever and initially, amusing...
...To me" Oliver and Stuart, the two men who love Gillian, are the sort of mismatched friends who met in childhood and have defined themselves by their differences ever since...
...I'm an ordinary, private person...
...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Julian Barnes is sometimes called the cleverest writer in Britain, a compliment that can cut both ways...
...I'm not always very good at saying what I mean, except at work, that is...
...At the start of the new book there is some summing up of the earlier action, but Barnes wants to reveal the implications of character over time and one book is simply not long enough to see these trajectories...
...The meantime...
...They contradict themselves and each other, and secondary characters cast skeptical eyes on the proceedings...
...Out, you bitch...
...C'est un crime passionnel, non...
...The story remained essentially one-sided...
...Assuming the role of the man behind the camera, the author remains invisible, coyly dodging accountability...
...This practical assistance, the very "Etc...
...Her or us...
...It was released on February 13, the day before Valentine's Day...
...When Stuart calls them up after years of silence, announcing that he has moved back to London, it seems that the three may be able to become friends once more and declare the past "blood under the bridge...
...In addition to his serious fiction, Barnes writes gruesome detective stories under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh...
...they often delude themselves as much as anyone else...
...She protests that this is "against the rules" of the novel, a direct challenge to [Barnes'] authority...
...Please...
...Francophile, sophisticated, pessimistic, and relentlessly inventive, he has done much to challenge critical assumptions about contemporary fiction...
...He begins to assist Oliver and Gillian in material ways, taking great pains to establish them in the house where he and Gillian lived when they were married to each other...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
