The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Love, etc., by Julian Barnes
reviewed by Philip Landon

Knopf, 2001. 240 pp. $23.00.

A decade on, the protagonists of Talking It Over return to talk some more. The familiar voices that narrate this sequel are witty, insightful, and pleasingly differentiated, yet a wary, millennial mood clouds their reflections. As Stuart, Oliver, and Gillian take turns to address the reader, we soon gather that their solipsism is little relieved by the intimacy of marriage and friendship. “Love” is the shifting reference point by which they struggle to give direction to their lives, not because they suffer from hopelessly romantic dispositions, but because there is nothing else going. Alack, love is not the remedy touted so successfully by romantic convention. “Examine your own life. Love leads to happiness? Come off it.” Love, like the soul, is pretty hard to pin down. An unbiased account of its vagaries lies beyond the reach of the love-struck subject, however articulate (Oliver), pedestrian (Stuart), or pragmatic (Gillian). In love, when the self reaches out most intently to another, it also manifests the most blinkered egotism. Love operates blindly, like market forces, and if you find the analogy sacrilegious, it is because you hold love sacred. Most of us do. Love is the last universal, a vestige of pure value at the millennium. Barnes has recognized that love is one hell of a problem. Love, etc. is a novel about self-examination, conceived in an interrogative mode. It stirs trouble to which there is no sentimental solution. “Would you rather destroy yourself by lack of self-knowledge, or destroy yourself by its acquisition? You have, oh, a lifetime to ponder that one.”