Literary Talk

Two recent books published by the University Press of Mississippi provide ample opportunity for the reader to listen to the novelists behind Atonement and Flaubert's Parrot. Ryan Roberts, joined by Vanessa Guignery for the Barnes volume, edits the conversations with both authors flawlessly, contributing revealing interviews of his own; and the press has produced two handsome volumes.

Barnes—or his character Geoffrey Braithwaite—asks in Flaubert's Parrot: "Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?" Good questions, but Braithwaite is not alone in his inability to leave well enough alone. We can trust the tale and still be curious about the teller. These volumes help to satisfy that curiosity.

Of the two books Conversations with Julian Barnes is better. Barnes gives a more interesting interview than does McEwan. He doesn't repeat himself so much, and he provides some fascinating insights into his own thoughts about the novel. Middlemarch is the greatest English novel, he believes (McEwan admires it, too). About satire Barnes says, "I don't believe in that traditional interpretation of satire.… Actually the purpose of satire or the real function of satire is to console the dispossessed, is to mock the mighty for the consolation of the weak and the poor." And "all novelists ought to write about love because it's what most people are most intensely interested in for at least some part of their lives." Finally, when asked the purpose of fiction by an interviewer for the Observer in 1998, Barnes declares: "It's to tell the truth. It's to tell beautiful, exact, and well-constructed lies which enclose hard and shimmering truths."

In the midst of a conversation with Vanessa Guignery about his use of pseudonyms, Barnes claims that Ian McEwan is one of his pseudonyms now; but there are many actual connections between the two authors. Barnes was born in 1946, McEwan in 1948, and they form the heart of the generation of British writers whom Granta named the Best Young British novelists in 1983 (others were Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Maggie Gee, and Rose Tremain). They are friends whose careers have burgeoned in parallel.

McEwan is just as intelligent and thoughtful a novelist; he just isn't as stylish an interview subject. He repeats the same items again and again—lower middle-class parentage, army father, charity boarding school, University of Sussex, University of East Anglia, early short stories, admiration for Bellow, Roth, and Updike. In conversation with Ryan Roberts he says that giving interviews, most of which he refuses, "feels more like a duty, part of one's professional terms of engagement," and that comes across to a reader. He's dutiful.

Among the revelations provided here is his assessment of his own changes over the years. To begin with he liked to deny any intention to shock, seeming surprised by his early "Ian Macabre" reputation; more recently he admits that, in his fictions about brutal violence, pedophilia, and incest, he actually was trying to be shocking. Early in his career he was dismissive of what he saw as the grayly realistic fiction dominant in the 1970s; more recently he celebrates Henry James's solidity of specification and suggests that "the nineteenth-century novel perhaps brought the form to its point of—or one point of—perfection." And when he says (in 1995), "it is at the level of empathy that moral questions begin in fiction," he might as well be quoting George Eliot who wrote in 1856 that art is "a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot."

So these fiery young turks, Barnes and McEwan, are no longer—and maybe never were—as interested in revolutionizing fiction as people once thought. Neither has much time for postmodernist...