Review: The Only Story

The Only Story by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m tempted to quip that this one is The Graduate meets Weekend in Vegas. And, at a basic plot level, it is something like that. Nineteen-year-old Paul falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, and they embark on a multi-year affair. Then, sometime later, Susan becomes an alcoholic, and Paul works in vain to “save” her from herself.

Barnes is a powerful writer, and describing the book as those stories well told does begin to do it justice. As this goes on, though, it becomes all that and something more.

Above all, this is a novel exploring the way the world looks to someone who has lived it. The frame narrative here comes from Paul, looking back on his own long life, and recalling what he has experienced. Early in their affair, Susan explains to him that everyone has a love story. It may be a failed one, it may even be one that never happened outside private imagination, but everyone has one such story. And it is, for everyone, “the only story,” the private and powerful experience of reaching out to someone else in a love he or she can’t then understand.

So, while the original love story comes with real grace and detail – their “court”-ship takes place over tennis and her husband is a three-dimensional boor – and her descent into alcoholism works as a powerfully sad story, what elevates this to the status of top-tier world literature is Barnes’s capacity for reflecting on the nature of story as self-definition.

It’s striking that this begins and ends in the first-person yet, for a stretch toward the end, it lapses into third-person. That feels like breaking the rules, but it works. And it works because Barnes insistently pushes us to consider the experience of how we narrate our lives to ourselves.

There are parts here that might be condescending in the hands of a lesser writer. Paul reflects on how, as an older man, he understands things he could never have understood in his youth. That could so easily be banal, but here it’s subtle and earned. As an older man, Paul is unfulfilled and idiosyncratic. He could not be the man he is without having experienced Susan. Susan is largely gone for him, though, and he can understand the relative disappointments of his later life only through story – as the titular only story.

It’s hard to say much more than that Barnes is justifiably one of the great writers working in our time. I understand him as one of those Booker-prize regulars, someone the British recognize as the best they have. I have admired a number of his earlier novels, and now I realize I have a real pleasure in front of me as I catch up on some of the others.


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