Publishers Weekly
02/19/2018
Barnes’s deeply touching novel is a study of heartbreak; like his Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending, it includes fading reminiscences, emotional complications, and moments of immeasurable sadness as an aging Englishman remembers his first and only love. Bored 19-year-old Paul meets 48-year-old Susan at the tennis club when they pair up for mixed doubles. She has a husband and two daughters older than Paul, but it is the 1960s, Paul’s first summer home from university, and he is impervious to social correctness, parental disapproval, or long-term consequences. Paul and Susan share a satiric view of their suburban surroundings that turns into a secret romance, then a not-so-secret affair. Together they move to London, where, over the next decade, Paul studies law and becomes a law office manager while Susan deteriorates into alcoholism and depression. Fifty years later, Paul looks back on the relationship in an account strewn with unanswerable questions and observations about the nature of love. As painful memories mount, Paul’s narration switches first to second person and then builds more distance by settling into third person. By revisiting the flow and ebb of one man’s passion, Barnes eloquently illuminates the connection between an old man and his younger self. 75,000-copy announced first printing. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Beautifully done. . . . Heartrending.” —NPR
“Brilliant. . . . [Holds] a commitment not only to great storytelling but also to exploring how stories are told.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Written with crystalline retrospection. . . . The youthful missteps that give shape to life is Julian Barnes’s great theme.” —Vogue
“Exquisite. . . . Devastatingly convincing. . . . A definitive account of how romantic love becomes trapped in its own frame.” —The Guardian
“Much of the pleasure in The Only Story comes from the wit and verbal precision that Barnes allows his narrator. . . . Barnes’s switch from voice to voice is at once understated and dazzling.” —The New York Review of Books
“Vivid. . . . Mr. Barnes is a master of the novel that unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet interrogates itself as it is told.” —The Economist
“So sad and so powerful.” —Anne Tyler, The Guardian
“A bleak and brilliant novel about memory and what ultimately matters most.” —Financial Times
“The prose master paints a lovely, elegiac portrait of a young man’s disruptive love affair . . . forgoing the easy literary clichés of May-December romance for something much sadder, deeper, and more resonant.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Haunting. . . . A brilliant, rueful look at love—what we do for it, how we experience it and what makes it die.” —People
“Beautiful. . . . Profoundly enjoyable. . . . Through his precise attention to the marvels of love and his perfect stylistic accompaniments to each state—Barnes has once again shown himself capable of transforming the mundane and ephemeral into the lyrical and lasting.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Heartbreaking. . . . It’s a cliché to say the love is inexplicable, but the strength of The Only Story is Barnes’s willingness to explore the nature of that inexplicability, how it makes for honeymoons and tragedies alike.”— Newsday
“One of the best works of his career.” —Houston Chronicle
“A thought-provoking meditation on memory and the seemingly endless complexities of love. . . . Barnes’ prose is quietly elegant and adroit. . . . [The Only Story] has strong, memorably drawn characters and a keen sense of time and place.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Shows a novelist at the height of his powers. . . . A book that quietly sinks its hooks into the reader and refuses to let go.”—The Times (London)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-02-06
A May-September romance devolves into dysfunction and regret.Much like Barnes' 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, this one involves a man looking back at a youthful error in judgment and considering its consequences. Paul, the narrator, recalls being 19 and falling for 48-year-old Susan, who's in a loveless, sexless, and abusive marriage. Cocksure about their relationship in spite of others' judgments—Paul's parents and Susan's husband are righteously indignant, and the duo are kicked out of the tennis club where they began their affair—Paul decides to move in with Susan to pursue "exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove." The thrill of independence is short-lived, though, as Susan's nascent alcoholism intensifies; the first half of the book mentions Susan's drinking habit, but as if to mirror Paul's youthful ignorance, Barnes doesn't overtly signal how deep she's sunk until she's practically beyond help. Barnes also shifts the narrative voice across the novel to underscore Paul's callowness: The novel opens in first person, turns to second as if to shift blame upon the reader, then closes in a bereft, distant third. Barnes' characterizations of both Paul and Susan are detailed and robust, though given the narrative structure, Susan remains a bit of a cipher. What prompted her to drink? What kept her from pushing back against her husband? Most critically, what drew her to Paul? Paul, though, is mainly concerned with what made their romance distinct from the usual romantic clichés. In other words, he's narcissistic, and his rhetoric, in first person or not, often takes on a needy, pleading tone ("sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart"; "tough love is also tough on the lover.") But that's by Barnes' design, and it's consistently clear that Paul was in love, just tragically ill-equipped to manage it.A somber but well-conceived character study suffused with themes of loss and self-delusion.
