DEPARTURE(S)

An autofictional remembrance from the Booker Prize winner, keeping an eye on the exit.

“This will be my last book,” writes Julian Barnes, the narrator of this novel, early on. Age and illness are deciding factors; diagnosed with a manageable but incurable blood cancer, he fills many of the pages with matters of mortality and the deaths of his literary friends Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. But he’s also questioning the merits of novel-writing as an endeavor, the way it prompts the writer to exaggerate and betray. As Exhibit A, he points to his role in the relationship of two friends, Stephen and Jean, classmates at Oxford who would later split and then (with Julian’s assistance) reconcile. “You fucking novelist, couldn’t resist, could you?” Jean snaps when she’s ambushed by the two men, resentful of his determination to turn life into a story. Julian had also promised not to use their relationship as novelistic fodder, but his life is a trail of “your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed.” Late Barnes has been a mix of tart domestic dramas (The Only Story, 2018) and gentler, Proustian reminiscences (Elizabeth Finch, 2022); this shades closer to the latter, intensified mainly by the pressure created by death’s inevitable approach. The story, such as it is, meanders, but it’s clear that Barnes is writing with a certain urgency, not to take a victory lap but to quit on his own terms, though even his cheer is cut by darkness. (“Let me thank you for your sturdy presence—invisible yet lurking, like my cancer,” he writes to the reader.) Does he mean it when he says he’s done? A book so concerned with a novelist’s urge to lie and betray suggests it’s at least an open question.

If it’s indeed the end, Barnes has closed his career gracefully.