Ten years after the love triangle in Talking it Over, Julian Barnes returns to his central and supporting characters in Love, etc. I’ve always liked Barnes’ prose histrionics, the sort of meandering academic word-play that dominates Flaubert’s Parrot and Metroland. Yet with Talking It Over, it was almost as if there was no author, and he achieved this with an unmediated voice, that is, a complete lack of narrative or authorial dictatorship. Love, etc. also follows form. An example of the form, and also an indication of the three characters in the triangle:
“Gillian Actually, I don’t think I do put people into categories. It’s just that if there are two people in the world I understand, they’re Stuart and Oliver. After all, I have been married to both of them.
Stuart Logic. Did someone use the word? I’ll give you logic. You go way, and people think you’ve stayed the same. That’s the worst piece of logic I’ve come across in years.
Oliver Misprise me not about les Belges, by the way. When some jaunty little dinner-table patriot ups and demands, ‘Name me six famous Belgians,’ I’m the one with his hand in the air.”
Here’s the story: Stuart, dull, orderly, paunchy, married half-French, half-British art-restorer Gillian. Oliver, Stuart’s ruffled, literary pal fell in love with Gillian and her him. Stuart goes away, defeated, broken, to America. End of the first book. In Love, etc., he returns from Baltimore as a success, though divorced again from an American woman named Terri. Oliver and Gillian are still married with two little girls. She continues restoring, Oliver continues his work with cleverness and pretty much nothing else. You can see where this story is headed: A revenge game.
It’s difficult for me to read books purely for the story, and this seems like a fairly straight story. Through several clever by-ways into the meaning of love and life, the plot is linear and unobstructed. But what I take away is Barnes’ ability of verbal mimicry. He’s able to stay consistent throughout with not only the voices of the three, but of the supporting cast as well: Gillian’s French mother who struggles with English, her rambling twenty-two year-old co-worker, Stuart’s American ex-wife, Oliver’s old landlady, and countless others whose voices are so independent of the other, so unique and established that the strategy of the unmediated voice works to full effect, where, at times, it seems as if there is no author at all.
Of course, I’m the reader, artso Gregory Eggory (I hold firm that Beckett’s Watt is a page-turner), and I’m most attracted to Oliver’s fireworks display. In a pub, where, after ten years, he meets Stuart:
“Oliver So what do you think my portly chum is worth? …. We are not discussing the moral avoirdupois of the said individual, but requiring brusquer information. Stuart: is he replete with the long green? While quaffing and quenching with him I did not, of sheer tact, enquire too subcutaneously about his sojourn in the Land of the Free, but it did strike me that if the liquidity was sloshing around his calves like a Venetian flood-tide he might – to switch city-states – care to Medici some of the moolah in my direction. There are times when the artist is not ashamed to play his sempiternal role as the recipient of alms. The lien between art and suffering is a gilded cord which can bind a touch tightly. Another day, another dolour.”
And Barnes is smart, too. With this kind of character, he opts for scene with the lesser poetic Gillian and Stuart. Also, in dealing with Oliver’s language and obscure references, he introduces a book or a simple piece of information that Oliver then processes and obliquelifies in his diction. In looking up a St. Stuart, he comes across a St. Simeon, then repeats the history as if he were sole owner of the information. And we can imagine a similar situation where he has learned the names of six famous Belgians.
It’s somewhat a distraction, though, when a writer of Barnes’ caliber makes simple mistakes. When Terri, Stuart’s American ex-wife, is talking about the morning- after pill, about how she can’t find her “pills,” and that she goes to the drugstore and simply gets them over-the-counter. Any decent, irresponsible American knows that you cannot get the morning-after pill in a drugstore, but an abortion clinic, and that process and waiting and screening is a long one, and that they don’t come in quantities. Do your research, sir.
But this is hen-pecking. Love, etc is a gem.
