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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