The French connection | 15 November 2012

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. His beguiling sympathy and infectious zest for Fitzgerald sent me scurrying to read her The Beginning of Spring, which proved as good as he promised. This essay is also self-revelation in cipher: when Barnes praises Fitzgerald for having ‘the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is’, he reminds one of his own aspiration. This trait of Barnes’s is pre-eminent in his ruminative essay on translations of Madame Bovary, and in a piece on Edith Wharton.

Three essays are about camouflaged novel-writing. Arthur Hugh Clough’s long poem, Amours de Voyage, a deliciously ironical study of prevarication and self-defeat, is (Barnes argues) ‘a great short novella’ in clandestine form. Chamfort, the 18th-century writer of maxims, he presents as ‘a shadow novelist’ whose pensées about human nature, motives, character and conduct comprise a dismembered satirical novel.