When novelists write essays, they often boom through megaphones, aggrandise the importance of their views and inflate their stature. Julian Barnes, however, seems to be a novelist who enjoyed feeling special when young, but now finds increasing rueful comfort in reminders of his own insignificance. Certainly there is no swagger in his 17 essays about truth and fiction collected in Through the Window.
The book relies on stylish intelligence and cool calm to accomplish its mastery. Barnes sees novelists as solitary truth-seekers and public truth-tellers. ‘The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well,’ he writes. Novels inquire about the purpose, discipline, pleasures and value of life, and the meaning of its loss. Novelists should interrogate (rather than bully) readers about how to survive solitude, group pressure and adversity.
Through the Window opens with an essay on Penelope Fitzgerald, whom Barnes considered ‘the best living English novelist’ when he knew her in the 1990s.
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