"The Sense of an Ending," by Julian Barnes

I like fiction about characters of any age, but I do sometimes especially appreciate novels about “grown-ups” in middle age or later, particularly since such novels seem to be much less common than those about youngish characters. Of course this has something to do with my own Baby Boomer generation status. The acclaimed English author Julian Barnes’ new novel, “The Sense of An Ending” (Knopf, 2011), for example, is narrated by Tony Webster, a man in his early sixties. In the first half of the book, Tony looks back on his youth (high school, college, marriage, divorce) and thinks about the meaning of his life and what he has learned. In the second half of the book, he finds that his past is not completely in the past when he is surprised by a call from a lawyer bringing his past into his present. He reconnects with an important romantic partner (although the romance ended badly) from his college days, Veronica, and with a legacy related to one of his long-gone best friends from school. There is upheaval, mystery, misunderstanding, and at the end, a new understanding that finally makes sense of several relationships and entanglements from the past. Although this disentanglement produces a small shock, what I really like about this novel is less the plot than Tony’s meditations on being at this point in his life, and on how the past does and doesn’t affect the present. He goes from his teenaged beliefs that “we knew that we grasped life -- and truth, and morality, and art -- far more clearly than our compromised elders” (p. 12) (and isn’t this what we all thought when we were young?), and “I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her…I shall live as people in novels live…passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance” (p. 102) to his adult statements that “There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life” (p. 103) and later, “I have achieved a state of peaceableness, even peacefulness” (p. 75). But, as noted earlier -- and this is the part I like -- life has a way of surprising us. Tony in his sixties is surprised by his renewed interest in, and fantasies about, a possible renewed romance and, by extension, a new life. His peace is disturbed, his senses are awakened, he is engaged in a new way. Some version of this happens to most of us, if we are fortunate: we achieve a certain calm as we get older, but we are still surprised by new experiences, new opportunities, new dreams, new relationships. I wrote earlier (e.g., 5/21/11 and 6/20/11) here about some of Barnes’ other excellent books, and this novel confirms my appreciation of this author. Barnes, by the way, won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending,” and I believe it is well deserved.