In my continuing effort to catch up with book reviews, I'm jumping back to April when we read Barnes' fairly short study on the aging and it effects on memory.
Tony, is 60-ish, a retired civil servant, living a quiet life in London. He spends the first part of the book reminiscing about his school days and the arrival of Adrian, an introspective boy who offers Tony and his two friends new insights on the philosophies of life. During university, Tony has a short fling with Veronica, then she takes up with Adrian, much to Tony's chagrin. Adrian commits suicide, much to everyone's surprise. Years later, Tony receives word that Adrian has left his diary to him. However, Veronica, now in possession of the diary, refuses to give it to Tony. Along the way, we learn about Tony's sexual escapes with Veronica, a flirtation with her mother (yes, weird), his average marriage and divorce, his earnest quest for the diary, and what he thinks about memory, regret, and the passage of time (the best part, given that our book group consists of "women of a certain age"). And we even get a lesson in genetic arithmetic with Adrian's mathematical calculations for life's events.
This book was hailed as "one of the best of the year," receiving glowing praise from everyone everywhere and winning the Mann Booker Prize. I agree, to a point. Yes, it is dense with philosophical ideas (The New York Times); it offers an examination of how memory works, compartmentalizes, and stores impressions away (Minneapolis Star-Tribune); it probes how we have an impulse to redact, correct, and sometimes erase our pasts (Vogue); it asks the question "Am I the person I think I am?"(The Boston Globe).
But it has its faults. Tony's somewhat milquetoast personality is kind of annoying and really out of character when he begins relentlessly harassing Veronica to give him the diary and even imagining there might still be a romantic attraction between the two of them. There is also way too much "wanking" (i.e., masturbation) going on. This over-wrought focus on sex by "serious" middle-aged authors of "serious" books is one of my big pet peeves (for example, take a look at "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth).
Barnes does offers great insight into memory and its flaws, but he also throws out a few weird notions. At the beginning of the second chapter, he suggests that the young think they can predict "the pains and weaknesses that age might bring," even considering their own "approaching death." Hogwash! I may be of a certain age now but I was young once. I never stopped to consider what middle or old age would be like; I lived for the moment. But probably the most annoying aspect of the book, despite the Los Angeles Times claiming that "it finishes with a sense of satisfaction," is the vague, wishy-washy ending that leaves everything more or less unexplained, although it did make for a great debate about what really happened. Ultimately, our group liked the writing and ruminations about aging but most of us would have liked a better "sense" of the ending.
Check out Andrew Blackman's blog for a very interesting and very lengthy debate about this whole ending business.
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