LIT REVIEW: Pulse by Julian Barnes

I'm normally more of a novel reader than a short story guy; I like plotlines and characters that stay with you for many pages, so that a book becomes a world unto itself. But despite the fact that Julian Barnes' Pulse is a batch of stories, the book as a whole seems remarkably unified.

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LIT REVIEW: Pulse by Julian Barnes

POSTED: Friday, May 27, 2011, 2:00 PM

I’m normally more of a novel reader than a short story guy; I like plotlines and characters that stay with you for many pages, so that a book becomes a world unto itself. But despite the fact that Julian Barnes’ Pulse is a batch of stories, the book as a whole seems remarkably unified. It’s not just Barnes’ latest stories collected in a single volume. Instead, it’s the literary equivalent of a concept album like Sgt. Pepper, with all its pieces built around common themes.

The primary theme here is human relationships. Sure, every book is about human relationships. But Pulse is particularly insistent on examining the details of how people forge and maintain intimate connections — particularly romantic ones, but also among friends and family. Barnes uses the short-story format to examine a wide array of different kinds of relationships. Though some of the characters are fairly eccentric, there are no real “psychopaths” here, to borrow a word often used in the book. The stories emphasize how wildly different each relationship is from every other, even within the range of what we call normal.

There’s the story of the English man who meets a German woman at a restaurant. Against a beautifully-painted backdrop of the bleak English coast—“the bored sky and the lifeless sea” — their relationship develops despite a language barrier, even as the woman reveals little about her past. There’s the love-hate relationship of two authors, whose words to each other only scratch the surface of what they’re feeling. They’re viciously competitive yet deeply admiring of one another. And there are relationships acted through a medium of some pastime: gardening for one couple, hiking for another.

The first half of the collection is also linked by a single storyline interspersed between the others. “At Phil and Joanna’s” is a four-part story revealed in sections among the other tales. It’s the transcription of a progressing conversation held on various nights among a group of friends. They chat, often wittily, about various tipsy dinner-table topics, from sex to politics. There’s hardly a word in “At Phil and Joanna’s” that’s not dialogue. The idea is an interesting one, but I found myself groaning a little each time I came to the next “Phil and Joanna” section. Sitting through dinner parties with people I actually know is hard enough.

The second section is largely united by a secondary theme: each story deals with a different one of the five senses. There’s the story of a painter who can’t hear; a musician who can’t see; a man fascinated by the touch of a hand. And while the first half of the book appears to be set entirely in modern England, the second half occasionally darts around in time and place. The painter might be a 19th-century Englishman, while the pianist lives in 18th-century Austria. The fascinating latter story is an imagining of a real historical medical event—though in accordance with a “routine literary mannerism of the time,” the names of its characters are never given in full.

The second-to-last piece isn’t so much a story, it seems, as an autobiographical essay about love. Barnes breaks through the fiction to speak directly to the reader about his personal history and thoughts. Suddenly, in a book about intimacy, we’re provided with an intimate glimpse into the head of the author himself. It’s an honest account, sentimental without being saccharine, that helps tie the whole book together. (Barnes even refers to some of the preceding stories.)

In the essay, Barnes calls falling in love a “moment of passionate taste.” Though all the senses are represented here, taste might be the most relevant: in each story, Pulse delivers a taste of another intimate bond—tastes that might help us reflect on our own human connections.

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