[In the following excerpt, Flower praises Barnes's Talking It Over, stating, “Few novels seem as authentic and lifelike as this one.”]

Fiction, especially modern fiction, licenses a certain amount of prurience. It invites us into the mind of a character or a narrator, and lets us indulge ourselves there rather freely. We are pleasantly exempt from the risks of any real intimacy. Readers are supposed to be eavesdroppers and spies, of a certain kind at least. Filmgoers have to confront their own voyeurism at some point, morally, but readers of Lambert Strether or Lily Briscoe or Quentin Compson are not likely to have that problem. Just looking, thanks. In the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom watches Gertie MacDowell on the beach while we hear by means of internal monologue the cliché-ridden contents of her soul come forth. Bloom watches her pruriently, and has an orgasm. We invade Gertie's privacy too, in a different way, remaining at what seems a safe aesthetic distance, since none of it actually happens—except by means of our looking at words printed on paper. We are supposed to be critically detached, having “participated” in the scene, if at all, only imaginatively and figuratively. No real Gertie MacDowell has been seen in actuality, hence no privacy violated. Still, I think Joyce may be offering a subtle lesson here about the potential for readerly prurience, a lesson usually ignored. Readers like to award him high marks for the relentless intimacy of his narrative, without asking what that intimacy might be for.

Obviously there's an undercurrent of something unsavory, something collusive, in the way modern fiction makes a commodity of what's usually kept private. So many novels cater so lavishly to our desire for intimate access to another. Really, of course, it's only the illusion of such access. But no matter: it creates a dangerous kind of appetite. Those fat books on the best-seller lists pander to it shamelessly. …

Julian Barnes's latest novel addresses the problem of intimacy head on and wittily.¹ He is probably the most brilliant inventor of fictional experiments currently writing novels in English, and Talking It Over is far and away the best book I have chosen to review. The story is told from three points of view (mainly), and it's about a domestic triangle: Stuart is a dullish young banker, Gillian is the somewhat withdrawn and very attractive woman whom Stuart marries, and Oliver is the neurotic sham-sophisticate friend who falls in love with Gillian. But they tell their stories in a series of spoken—rather than internal—monologues, as if to an invisible interviewer. They give verbal performances, then, meant for public consumption and so of course laden with rationalization, self-justification, and half-truth. Barnes's neat epigraph is a Russian saying: “He lies like an eyewitness.” Eventually it dawns on you that the person each character comes to confide in so privately is, simply, you.

Other characters address the reader too, occasionally, like Gillian's mother, Madame Wyatt, and a sweet old landlady who thinks Oliver “has the AIDS.” Then there's an unknown woman who forces her way into the text and is peeved at us:

What did you say? You want my credentials. YOU want MY credentials? Look, if anyone's got to provide documentation it should be you. What have you done to qualify for my opinions? What's your authority, incidentally? … Look, as far as I'm concerned it's a cream bun to a twopenny fuck whether or not you believe me. I'm giving you an opinion, not an autobiography …

Have you ever had your authority as a reader challenged so boldly as that? Come to think of it, what do readers ever do to earn their rights to voyeurism and eavesdropping? The above speaker turns out to be Val, an old flame whose lowdown opinions about everybody threaten to ruin their authority. So Stuart and Oliver simply gag her to regain control of the book.

As usual with Barnes, what begins as a clever entertainment grows progressively deeper and better. The characters evolve in complexity and pathos. Oliver who tried always to be the dazzling blagueur and wit falls into a painfully real love. The staid Stuart is fairly crazed with grief and split by contradictions—he learns a sardonic wit (of all things). Gillian emerges from her customary watchful reticence and, in a sublime imaginative act at the end, resolves the impasse created by the two men. The suspense is perfect. No formula will enable you to guess who wins whom or how it will happen. Few novels seem as authentic and lifelike as this one. My quick summaries fail, of course, to convey the fluidity and idiosyncrasy of Barnes's speakers. You must listen to them yourself: let them invade your privacy.

Note

1. Talking It Over, by Julian Barnes. Alfred A. Knopf.