Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes says goodbye to the novel

- By Adam Begley

“Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story,” E. M. Forster wrote. “I wish that it was not so.” Julian Barnes has confessed that as a young man reading Aspects of the Novel, he found this sentiment “feeble” and responded impatiently, “If you aren’t up to telling a story, why write a novel?” Barnes, who turned 80 in January, now sings a different tune, and anyway, Forster’s wish was long ago granted. The literary novel of today is quite free from conventional storytelling, and ironically (irony is one of his specialties), Barnes got busy loosening the bonds early in his career. He’s still at it: His brief new novel, Departure(s), offers only a sketchy storyline, mixed with memoir and thoughts on memory. An extended farewell, an author’s valedictory flourish, the whole package is a culmination of sorts, shimmering with his silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart.

The scant plot in Departure(s)—a “true story” the narrator swore he wouldn’t tell—tracks the two-part romance of Stephen and Jean, friends of his at university who fell in love, broke up when they graduated, then connected again in late middle age after Stephen asked Julian to reach out to Jean. Like many of Barnes’s 14 previous novels—including his most famous, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), and the Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending (2011)—Departure(s) tells a love story filtered through the consciousness of a ruminative, standoffish man preoccupied with something other than the love at stake.