[ed. I tend to avoid books that seem overly hyped and/or have conflicting reviews, so I came late to The Sense of an Ending, but it's a wonderful (if somewhat short) novel that you almost want to read twice once you've finished it. It resonated with me, anyway. I have the habit of dog-earing the left-hand corner of pages in sections that contain particularly poignant or insightful passages (so I can find them again). After dog-earing nearly every other page of this book, I finally gave up. See also: Life in Smoke and Mirrors]
The new book is a mystery of memory and missed opportunity. Tony Webster, a cautious, divorced man in his 60s who “had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded,” receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier. The mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has bequeathed him £500 — a legacy that unsettles Tony, pushing him to get in touch with Veronica (their relationship had ended badly) and seek answers to certain unresolved questions.
Had he loved Veronica? (At the time, it was an emotion he had lacked the spine to own up to.) What had happened to the energetic boy he used to be, “book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic,” who thought of himself as “being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released” into an engaged adult life of “passion and danger, ecstasy and despair”? And what ever became of the friend he and Veronica both knew back then, a brainy, idealistic boy named Adrian Finn? Gradually, Tony assembles his willfully forgotten past impressions and actions, joining together the links that connect him to these people, as if trying to form a “chain of individual responsibilities” that might explain how it happened that his life’s modest wages had resulted in “the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss.” (...)
Adrian’s indifference to playing it cool somehow made him the leader of the boys’ clique when they were teenagers; he became the one they looked up to. Yet Tony never emulated Adrian, and was guilty of the pose Adrian deplored: pretending not to care. He pays for this failure again and again, from his 20s to his 60s. “Does character develop over time?” Tony asks himself, wondering at the “larger holding pen” that has come to contain his adult life. Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30, he speculates. “And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also — if this isn’t too grand a word — our tragedy.” (...)
But who does Tony enfold into his “we”? His agonized analysis is entirely self-referential, as solitary and armored as the man himself. Decades earlier, Tony had accused Veronica of an “inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life,” but it was he, not she, who was incapable of looking outside his own head. Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, “whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost,” and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.”
The new book is a mystery of memory and missed opportunity. Tony Webster, a cautious, divorced man in his 60s who “had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded,” receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier. The mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has bequeathed him £500 — a legacy that unsettles Tony, pushing him to get in touch with Veronica (their relationship had ended badly) and seek answers to certain unresolved questions.Had he loved Veronica? (At the time, it was an emotion he had lacked the spine to own up to.) What had happened to the energetic boy he used to be, “book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic,” who thought of himself as “being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released” into an engaged adult life of “passion and danger, ecstasy and despair”? And what ever became of the friend he and Veronica both knew back then, a brainy, idealistic boy named Adrian Finn? Gradually, Tony assembles his willfully forgotten past impressions and actions, joining together the links that connect him to these people, as if trying to form a “chain of individual responsibilities” that might explain how it happened that his life’s modest wages had resulted in “the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss.” (...)
Adrian’s indifference to playing it cool somehow made him the leader of the boys’ clique when they were teenagers; he became the one they looked up to. Yet Tony never emulated Adrian, and was guilty of the pose Adrian deplored: pretending not to care. He pays for this failure again and again, from his 20s to his 60s. “Does character develop over time?” Tony asks himself, wondering at the “larger holding pen” that has come to contain his adult life. Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30, he speculates. “And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also — if this isn’t too grand a word — our tragedy.” (...)
But who does Tony enfold into his “we”? His agonized analysis is entirely self-referential, as solitary and armored as the man himself. Decades earlier, Tony had accused Veronica of an “inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life,” but it was he, not she, who was incapable of looking outside his own head. Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, “whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost,” and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.”
by Liesl Schillinger, NY Times | Read more:
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