The Sense of an Ending: Or Not!

By Victoria Looseleaf

Welcome to 2012 and please forgive us for not having posted earlier in the new year, but we were felled by some mysterious stomach bug after a magnificent trip to San Francisco.  That said, the short plane flights were perfect to catch up on our reading, specifically the latest from Julian Barnes. The Brit, who won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending, a slim-as-prosciutto novella (it was his fourth nomination, his 11th novel), is a beautiful writer. But much as we liked this tiny tome of memory and missed opportunity from Alfred A. Knopf, we felt a bit like the protagonist, Tony, who, according to an erstwhile lover of his, “Never got it.”

Be that as it may, there is much to admire about the book, as well as much to ponder: Told from Tony’s point of view, a middle-aged man who’s had an amicable divorce, a daughter and very little stress throughout his life, our protagonist must finally deal with a past he’s virtually never considered.

So: If you’re looking for action, this book’s not for you, with Ending instead plumbing psychological and emotional depths, though Tony, breezing through four decades rather effortlessly, has been far from introspective. Indeed, to him, “memory equals events plus time.” And hey – if these bon mots sound vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Woody Allen’s brilliant Crimes and Misdemeanors, (with Alan Alda, below) – that “comedy is tragedy plus time” – we’re not gonna quibble.

Seriously, what could be more subjective than memory, with the Rashomon principle generally the prevailing one, especially in an individual’s warped and ever-mutating brain.

(Oh: Speaking of the Booker and slim volumes, Philip Roth snagged the prize in 2010 for his equally slight manuscript, Nemesis, much to the dismay of feminist judge Carmen Callil. That whack job of a decider claimed that Roth, whose books don’t stint on sex – had any recently, Callil – didn’t deserve to be shortlisted, much less win the prestigious award. Oy! We worship at the altar of Roth, so click here for our coverage on America’s greatest living writer.)

But we digress: Coming of age in the 60’s, Tony was part of a male quartet whose golden boy, Adrian, seemed to have all the answers, or at least the pithiest classroom rejoinders. Herewith Adrian’s approach to the past: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” Hmm. Adrian’s brilliance, of course – or his obliqueness – makes his suicide as a young man all the more puzzling. (And we’re still musing over Adrian’s musings, go figure!)

But it wasn’t the first suicide to take place in this British tale, and, all those years later, when Tony is bequeathed money by the late mother of Adrian’s girlfriend, Veronica (she had canoodled with Adrian after Tony was finished with her), Barnes’ prose then takes on an investigative quality. The book, wrote New York Times’ critic Michiko Kakutani, “manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so.”

Circling back on itself, Ending practically demands a second reading, which is something we plan on doing after we’ve finished plowing through Steven Naifeh’s and Gregory White Smith’s fantastic new biography, Vincent Van Gogh: The Life, also from Knopf. And why not go back for more, seeing as we love all things Brits, save for the food, perhaps. (Click here then for our take on Ben Whishaw; here for Ricky Gervais; here for Keith Richards; and the list goes on, including our obsession with and addiction to…Downton Abbey, which we’ll be covering anon.

Reading Ending again will also slake our thirst for acquiring more insight into the human condition, something this book renders in a peculiarly exquisite fashion. So, bravo to Barnes on his Booker win (which comes with the tidy sum of circa $78,000.), and we promise we’ll let you know when we become less clueless and do finally, er, get it.