Today reading Julian Barnes, Sense of an ending had several thoughts:
1: the central character and his friends have a set up similar to Gatsby or the other English novels of school chums....The narrator is intentionally dull as a brick, and opaque to a fault.....If he really were this slow witted he'd be a muggle, and if he isn't that slow, the author isn't coming clean.....I have the sense that the author is working very hard at avoiding any mitigating qualities, but in so doing leaves with a why bother issue.
Adrian we get approx 20 sentences about, and trying to relate to him is either emphatically not the authors intention, or not very good character development.
The three women are the interesting characters in the book ( I feel it is a short story pretending to be a novel) but they don't get but a few pages in the whole thing.....That leaves us with 100 pages of filler, like a movie where one sees a lot of the cars moving and airplanes flying....
The ending isn't worthy of any of the principals, with the possible exception of the narrator, who isn't a worthy type...
The finding one's way in the transition from pre adolescence to the first stages of adulthood.....settled for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, is of intense interest to me, and the fact that the narrator (and i think the author) are of same age with the same set of constraints as myself is a great place to start, and so to with the looking back narrative, since again the age is the same......but this vision is so colorless, that any random person from that era would be more interesting....I had a class mate in high school who had managed to find a girl friend and have a shared intimacy that was enviable. This narrator has a potentially closer relationship, and a most self possessed girl griend....so that they couldn't get any further defies reaAON...The classmate i referred to was a more solid, slightly stolid, quiet person, but I know he was finding out a lot more about relationships than I, and it wasn't because I had higher things on my plate, it was the barriers created by one form of shyness blocked moving to that level of sharing This narrator and the author leave us again with why are we bothering
....one of our friends from that era said of one of her male companions that he felt you couldn't really know someone unless you had slept with them...and I think she said she bought that reasoning to some extent...ie that revealing oneself is easier if you know someone that well..
In any event.....This is not his finest book, and it feels contrived in an intellectual way too much..at least for my taste
