Fallen in loveJulian Barnes and the narcissism of love

The Only Story. By Julian Barnes. Jonathan Cape; 224 pages; £16.99. To be published in America by Knopf in April; $25.95.

“ALL happy families are alike,” Tolstoy famously wrote; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opening lines of “Anna Karenina” are so famous, in fact, that their assumptions are broadly accepted. Write with conviction, and some people will believe anything. Julian Barnes plays on that suggestibility in his new novel. “Most of us have only one story to tell,” his narrator, Paul, says on the opening page, foisting another bold premise on the reader. “I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling.”

Paul’s story is that of his love affair with Susan. He is 19 when they meet and a student at Sussex University; she is a married woman, nearly 30 years his senior, the mother of two grown daughters, stuck in a loveless marriage. “The time: more than fifty years ago. The place: about fifteen miles south of London. The milieu: stockbroker belt, as they called it—not that I ever met a stockbroker in all my years there.” (Mr Barnes’s very first novel, “Metroland”, published in 1980, had a similar setting.)

One day at the local tennis club Paul finds himself in a mixed-doubles pair with Susan and offers her a lift home. Their relationship will consume his life, and is the subject of this deceptively simple book.

Mr Barnes is a master of the novel that unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet interrogates itself as it is told. His previous book, “The Noise of Time”, was a fictionalised biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. In it the Soviet composer recognises that it is “impossible to tell the truth here and live”. “I’m not trying to spin you a story,” Paul insists in “The Only Story”. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.” But over and again, he says that he can’t remember, or that he can’t be bothered to tell us, or remarks that he is simply incurious about some aspect of his life or the lives of those around him. He doesn’t even remember when he and Susan first kissed.

And so, as the novel shifts between the first, second and third person—Paul, looking back on his life, is sometimes “I”, sometimes “you”, sometimes “he”—this “only story” slips away like sand between the fingers, as does the object of Paul’s desire. Susan is a curiously elusive presence, evoked in a series of repeated phrases and images. The narrative voice remains resolutely focused on itself: “When I am with Susan, I’m not thinking what it’s like to love her; I’m just being with her. And maybe that ‘being with her’ is impossible to put into any other words.”

Some might view this as an imaginative failure on the novelist’s part, particularly in the era of #MeToo. But, as the tale spools out, the effect is a vivid and awful dramatisation of the narcissism of obsessive love. Paul claims a solemn “duty” to remember Susan as she was when they first met—a quick-witted, charming woman in a tennis dress—but finally this lover’s allegiance is to himself, and himself alone.