The story, of course, is concerned instead with Neil’s obsession, the eponymous Elizabeth Finch. Though, as I may have said, this is not my story.” But, as with his predecessors, he does have an explanation for the lack of biography: “I live alone, and have done for some years. He has another failed marriage somewhere, and manages to eventually name his children, whom we never actually meet. So that was that, really.” And that is about that, really, in terms of his history. Some details are provided about his background: he was once a fairly average actor, before moving on to growing “mushrooms and, later, hydroponic tomatoes,” and working various odd jobs his first wife, a better actor, “decided it would be better for her career if she lived in London. Neil is multiply divorced, a distant father to adult children, and floating in the anesthesia of his later life.

Take Neil, for example, the latest iteration and the narrator of Barnes’s new novel Elizabeth Finch. “xcellent in its averageness!” was Geoff Dyer’s conclusion in a review of the latter for The New York Times, but the phrase is better applied to this recurrent Barnesian man, whose averageness is his excellence. This man is the Barnesian narrator, one that has been appearing in mildly different shapes since Julian Barnes’s debut novel, Metroland (1980), and one that reached its peak in the Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). And somewhere along the way, he is going to tell you a lie. Whichever it is, the man - fastidious in manner and an incurable gossip - will linger on each reflection or artifact, until the obsession reaches its natural, anticlimactic ending. The obsession might be a memory, an object, or a person, but it will be enigmatic. See, the thing is, the man has become an obsessive of some kind.

He is safe, even - safe enough at least to seem like a reliable narrator.īut as he will come to explain, the story he is telling is not about him, not really. The man is, for the most part, commonplace. If he has been married, the marriage is described by its ending and not a lot else. If he has children, they are counted and sometimes named. In the retelling of his own life, he is reticent: the details of his situation are offered to us like pulled teeth. He is privately educated, well spoken, and unassuming.

The man is British, naturally, with a careful name like Christopher or Paul, though he often dabbles in Francophilia. A MAN, comfortable in both wealth and middle age, is living alone.

Elizabeth finch julian barnes