[In the following review, Wheeler lauds Barnes's Talking It Over.]

Julian Barnes is an extraordinary writer. In this novel [Talking It Over,] he takes an old love story, the triangle that leads from marriage to divorce and remarriage, and applies a skewed narrative geometry. He then leads a reader to illogical proofs and theorems. But paradox is nothing new to Julian Barnes's books—five novels in the last decade—or to his admirers. What he does with so apparently simple a story is all the more impressive when measured against the books which have brought him acclaim.

“Real questions were limited to those questions to which the people you asked already knew the answers … it was these questions, the ones that weren't real, to which you wanted to know the answers most pressingly.” So observes a character in Barnes's Staring at the Sun, but the notion drives the novelist as well: Barnes looks for answers to questions that aren't real. In doing so, he writes novels which break the realist frame, get the reader to ask is this a “real” story? Is the man telling the truth or is he playing at writing fiction? To be sure, there is little in Barnes's work which gives us the reassurance of “Once upon a time. …” Take Flaubert's Parrot, a story of a retired doctor's pursuit of the literary and real-life significance of the great French novelist Flaubert. We have pages of the narrator's “real” biographical details of Flaubert, clear “factual” descriptions of Rouen, quotations from a nineteenth-century English traveler to fill out the facts (are these real quotations?), and then the question that stands in the novel's title. Is there a real Flaubert's parrot? In the fiction the stuffed bird is the grotesque but beloved manifestation of the Holy Spirit for one of Flaubert's most remarkable creations. And Barnes insinuates another question: is the parrot also a sign of the realist fiction writer's spirit, the transformation of the everyday into the grotesque imaginative world of art? And what then is the relationship between art and life? An unreal question? O, the head spins in following the plot which isn't really a plot but an imaginative and thoroughly satisfying monologue, the voice of a man who you very much wish would continue talking. He takes us from the discovery of a real, but non-existent correspondence between Flaubert and his hitherto unknown fiancée to a set of mock university examination questions on the novelist which naturally demand answers to questions which aren't real.

Nothing of the jejune or academic here really—if thoughts of these convolutions worry you. Flaubert's Parrot is immensely readable, which makes the sleight of hand, the deft transformation of attention from the strings to the frame of the harp, such an imaginative answer in itself. Staring at the Sun although more conventional in narrative does similar things with lists. Gregory, a character developed during the last third of this brief book—how does Barnes get away with this?—plays a form of verbal chess with a computer data base called TAT. The time setting is some not too distant future, the grave end of “cradle to the grave” socialism. The result is a list of propositions about the existence of God, set among the recorded dialogues of Gregory and TAT. Barnes has already traced the life history of Jean, Gregory's mother, through a century. The quirky details of her childhood in thirties' London and her awful wartime marriage reemerge three-quarters of a century later invested with a symbolic power that seems to be the manner of Barnes's genius. Jean's golf games with her Uncle Leslie and the story of hurricane pilot Prosser and his loop into two sunrises show themselves as real signs only as the novel shifts gears into the future, as if Barnes realized what sort of dive his hurricane imagination got himself into. That is the pleasure, in part, staring at the aerobatics which mean something more than aerial display.

But the most artful bit of “frame breaking” must occur in The History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters (a title which denies closure or symmetry) where a color print of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa is interleaved with an extended commentary on the monumental canvas (without frame) as a metaphor of the human condition. This, of course, comes after a woodworm's narration in the first chapter about his adventures as a stowaway on the ark. By the time we get to the end of the novel, we have already been to heaven (who tells us that story anyway?) and then to the moon to find God—that after an account of a nineteenth-century English spinster's journey to Mt. Ararat for the same purpose. The book is contrived, it teases, and it offers an extraordinary vision of life—asking of course, the ultimate in unreal questions, those about God and death. So when Talking It Over was announced, any Barnes fan would have had to ask yet another question: What will happen next?

Naturally, this is not a conventional novel. The structure of the book again breaks the frame; there are three principal voices, supplemented by others to shift the first-person narrations and thus the “shots” we get of the conflict and characters. We have “talking-heads” and the form of the book most resembles a television play done in narration and voice-over. The reader is “you” and the various voices hypothesize that one or all of the others have also been talking to “you.” Hence the language is rhetorical, manipulative. This is realism which says “I have designs on you!” and yet does it with a convention that both announces and hides itself, rather as an epistolary novel does, with just as much a demand for suspension of disbelief. The conflict is the love triangle, and Barnes is working over the terrain he plotted with tragically bloody results in an early novel, Before She Met Me. Yet the tone here is more comic than not and certainly the forces of love never plunge into the psychopathic. There are two ways the men have of talking “it” or love over, just as there are two marriages. Gillian is wife first to Stuart, the banker, and then to Stuart's best friend, the “classical humanist of artistic bent and romantic nature,” Oliver. A zany, witty, and “riffing” monologist, Oliver provides us with the metaphors of talk. One comes from Gillian's occupation, restoring old canvases, and the other from Stuart's banking and currency exchange. Gillian confesses that the revelation of what could not be seen in a touched-up or dirty old oil painting is her chief delight: she waits for the revelation of what is to be discovered, if the right solvents are applied. And this gives Oliver a way to justify his pursuit of his best friend's wife. He is stripping the painting of their three lives and asserting his own truth with corrosive brilliance.

Oh effulgent relativity! There is no “real” picture under there waiting to be revealed. What I've always said about life itself. We may scrape and spit and dab and rub, until the point when we declare that the truth stands plain before us … but it isn't so! It's just my word against everybody else's!

In talking “love” over, Oliver says that he can apply the principle of “reversibility” and take away the problem of husband Stuart. But the relativity which helps, also hinders, and Oliver is forced to contend with more than Stuart's rubbed-out image. To do so he applies again the acid wit of his riffs:

[Love and money] both go where they wist, reckless of what they leave behind. Love too has its buy-outs, its asset-stripping, its junk bonds. Love rises and falls in value like currency. And confidence is such a key to maintaining its value.

Both metaphors make love a matter of confidence, of saying it is so. The conflict of the novel comes in the real problems of living with metaphors, of acting them out. Oliver and Stuart trade words and Gillian has a child. In a sense the words can't resolve the talk; indeed only action can. And in a harrowing fight concocted by Gillian in order to save her family, she forces Oliver and Stuart to play out a scene of closure. Oliver quips somewhere that if love is like money then marriage is the bill; Gillian knows that they are in Stuart's debt. Market forces push love down, out of the way; to save her marriage, Gillian corners the market on accusation and makes herself pay with deception and Oliver with two blows to her face. We, the we who are “you,” assume that Stuart takes this as proof that the market makes him better off. Gillian has both stripped down and painted in their old domestic canvas. Stuart never comments on what he sees. Where Oliver, Gillian, and child end up, we don't know.

The narrative method gives us no assurance that voices might not resume at another, later time. If the novel tropes on reversibility, then perhaps only the child, Sophie, can stop market forces from driving love the other way. This is not melodrama, cannot be. We find no easy allegiances with the wronged. Breaking the frame denies the assurance of climax. What is left at the end is the virtuoso voice, three voices really, not the sense that plot has recapitulated life. Artifice has made life like itself, contrived and only as conclusive as the words of the maker. We are left asking unreal questions for which there are no real answers.

All this seems to make the book bear a burden that never weighs it in the reading. Oliver's voice always entertains; Stuart's and Gillian's have growing and sympathetic dignity; perhaps the most remarkable achievement of all is the voice of Gillian's mother, a sibylline Anglo-French woman who takes the book into proverbial utterance. She initiates a rush of apothegms, many of them contradictory, from each of the voices. They suggest the stalemate of opposing absolutes: a world divided by points of view, by voices which cannot agree on premises.

The book's pleasures, beyond the “riffs” and maxims, lie in the directness of the realism: Stuart's complaint that what hurts him is that Gillian never realized that he depipped the grapefruit he served her every weekend; the deaf dog who is killed at the novel's end; the greengrocer who misspells with unnecessary apostrophe; the plaque in the pavement commemorating the destruction of a building by zeppelin raid in 1915. This carefully rendered world, so real even as it is chopped about with shifting perspectives, sounds within the broken frame. And that dissonance has its own meaning.

Julian Barnes is an extraordinary writer. What he does with the old story of love, marriage, and divorce is in its own way as much an achievement as History of the World. In this novel, less is more, and “you” are left giving answers to familiar and unreal questions.