For the ‘Love’ of Intimacy and Good Manners

“Fiction,” says Julian Barnes, “is as intimate as sex.” Certainly his new novel, “Love, etc.,” pushes the relationship between the reader and the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers talking about their characters as if they were people one knows.

In “Love, etc.,” the characters ask us questions. They answer questions we haven’t asked, out loud, anyway. The characters change, the way people do (or do they?). They lie to us, giving us different versions of the same event. They lie to each other. They lie to Barnes.

The author likes a good gossip session about his characters as much as the next reader but feels, on this rainy L.A. afternoon, that he is not quite up to par. Every time Barnes comes to L.A., in fact, he gets sick. Let’s not take it personally. Here’s where steely British resolve, forbearance and good manners come in. Ask yourself: Could I do a book tour, involving interviews and readings, if I felt fluish, feverish and dizzy? He does, and with aplomb, turning completely ashen only when asked the personal questions he is famous for averting. He worries that his defenses might be down.

“Love, etc.” takes up the lives of characters he introduced in a 1991 novel, “Talking It Over,” and as before, they address the reader directly. Gillian, an art restorer, was once married to Stuart, a banker. Gillian left Stuart for Oliver, writer of screenplays, talker, incurable romantic. At the end of “Talking It Over,” we left Stuart, Gillian and Oliver in a French village. Gillian was bleeding where Oliver had hit her. Stuart was watching from a window nearby.

“After I wrote ‘Talking It Over,’ ” says Barnes, “a friend wrote me a note. At the bottom he mentioned that I most resembled Stuart, trying to be Oliver. I certainly don’t want to be identified as Stuart wanting to be Oliver.” Stuart, who moves to America after the scene in the French village, comes home for “Love, etc.” fit, well-dressed and wealthy. He works his way back into Gillian and Oliver’s life in a friendly, helpful and menacingly predatory way. He gives Oliver a job in his restaurant and green-grocer business. His manners are impeccable. Oliver, voluble, fragile, is perhaps our best friend and guide in the book.

“The story of our life,” Oliver says close to the end of this book, “is never an autobiography, always a novel.” Therefore, a reader might say, trodding off the page, this is a novel about Barnes. Barnes, the guileless reader might say, has something he wants to tell us about love.

No, he says, he does not. “Writers should not give advice,” he insists. “We present the conundrum.” A reader could, however, if lucky enough to meet Barnes, try bouncing some conundrums back into his court.

For example: “All relationships are about power,” Oliver says toward the end of “Love, etc.”

“This is one aspect of relationships that has been often denied,” Barnes says. A sip of mint tea. “Usually, it is arranged that A does this and B does that, in terms of practical things. There’s agreement and, therefore, some equality. But there are always dangerous areas of vacuum, demilitarized zones, where someone has to make a decision and declines, where one person has power and the other doesn’t.”

How about, there can be “no trust without betrayal,” something the love-cynic Stuart says early on. “That’s true, isn’t it,” says Barnes. “You can’t, after all, betray someone if they haven’t trusted you. Remember, he says, rising to Stuart’s defense. “He says that after being deeply trashed.”

Author With a Prized Past

Barnes, 54, has an almost perfectly proportioned face, completely oval, broad between the eyes, a straight nose that cuts the semicircle smile exactly in half. Cheekbones that stop the smile. Hair down in his eyes, which he sweeps back every 20 minutes. He wears a gentle gray wool jacket, a gray shirt, a black vest and black shoes that have such sturdy soles you think he might walk up the sides of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where we’ve met. They are a highly evolved form of the genus: British Walking Shoe.

“Flaubert’s Parrot” (1984), about a retired English doctor and his obsession with Gustave Flaubert, is perhaps Barnes’ most widely read novel. “Metroland” (1980) was his first, for which he won the Somerset Maughman Prize in 1980, followed by a Booker nomination in 1984 for “Flaubert’s Parrot,” a Prix Medecis for “A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters” in 1990 and the 1992 Prix Femina for “Talking It Over,” to name a few. He has also written several mysteries under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh but says he no longer finds that pursuit “economical.”

After “10 1/2 Chapters,” Barnes was often referred to as love’s anatomist, a veritable priest of love. Perhaps he will, in his weakened condition, tell us something about it.

Is love a game? “It is not a game,” he says gravely. “I believe in the distinction Oliver makes: There is love and there is etc., or everything else.” Is it genetic? “I don’t want to think so,” Barnes says, beginning to get uncomfortable. “The wife of a poet recently argued that love is extremely selfish, and I found myself unable to prevail. Apparently, it only disguises itself as self-sacrificing or generous.”

Is it better to be with someone you can talk to or someone you’re attracted to? “As Ford Maddox Ford, one of our greatest novelists said, you marry to continue the conversation.”

What is the appropriate response to infidelity? “I don’t know,” Barnes says. “Can you be prepared? On most occasions when one is lied to, depending on temperament, one doesn’t think, ‘What is my end game?’ If you are expecting a particular thing to happen, it will. I’m just an old romantic,” he says, resorting to good manners.

Yes, but don’t good manners get in the way of intimacy?

“We have the great English system,” says the writer. “No such emotional matters are discussed. Assumptions are never expressed. My parents, for example, did not even reveal who they voted for. I didn’t tell them who I took out, and I certainly didn’t take girls home. I didn’t want my mother looking at them. I didn’t want to see that moment of complicitness and intimacy she would extend that said, ‘You’re on my side.’ My mother,” Barnes says, and here I feel that I have pressed his good manners to the mat, “was certainly the dominant force in the marriage.”

From Journalism to Fiction

Barnes, born in 1946, grew up in Leicester, in a “broad brick semi,” the son of two French teachers. “We never spoke it at home,” he says. “That would have seemed pretentious.” He has one brother, Jonathan, who is three years older and teaches philosophy. In 1979, he married Pat Kavanagh, now a well-known London literary agent. “We met,” Barnes admits, “at an office party. In spite of that, we’re still together.” He went to Magdalen College at Oxford and graduated with honors in 1968. In 1977, he took a job as assistant literary editor at the British magazine the New Statesman, worked as a television critic until 1981 and was deputy literary editor, first at the Sunday Times in London, then at the Observer. From 1990 to 1994, he served as the New Yorker’s London correspondent.

Barnes speaks of journalism as “hard work.” He does not like to be rewritten; although he tries to appear game about it, it must have been difficult for him to work that career in between increasingly successful books. “Editors in England make it easier,” he says. “They tend to be less famously intrusive than they are in America. There aren’t many Max Perkins figures in England.”

Barnes feels up to some tomato soup and a roll. A very well-mannered young man taps him gently on the shoulder and asks, “Are you Julian Barnes? I’m a fan.” Barnes is pleased and says that sort of thing never happens in London. Why? Good manners, of course. “Americans,” he says, “are more unlike us than anyone.” “America,” says Oliver, “is just an exaggerated version of everywhere else.”

Oddly enough, Hollywood has yet to strike Barnes, though he loves movies (one of his novels, “Before She Met Me” is about a film buff). Several of his books, including “Metroland” and “Talking It Over,” have been made into movies in Europe. “The French are so good at making movies about relationships,” he says. Critics often say that his books are better suited to the theater, and many have been produced, but Barnes says “Love, etc.” is more like radio. “You have voices that seem to come from behind, instead of action in front of the viewer. Accounts of events overlap,” Barnes says, “like roof tiles.” It’s an entirely separate thing, he says, making books and making movies. “When I met the director of ‘Talking It Over,’ I said, ‘I hope you have betrayed me,’ and she said, ‘Of course.’ At that point I thought it might be a good film.”

Barnes admires John Cheever, John Updike, Philip Roth and Laurie Moore and is reading “Tender Is the Night.” (“So much of American literature is about failure, isn’t it?”) He is working on a collection of essays about France, on such subjects as novelist Georges Simenon, the Tour de France and Flaubert, and translating the 19th century French novelist Alphonse Daudet, who annotated his own decline from syphilis. “It is,” Barnes says admiringly, “exactly the way a writer should describe his own falling apart.” Barnes is also negotiating the sale of his archives, which strikes one, given his age, as a little maudlin.

As for Gillian, Oliver and Stewart, “I think they’ve gone now,” Barnes says when asked if the voices of these characters are still in his head, shaking it to make sure. “They weren’t still in my head from 10 years ago, but the possibility of their lives was there, and then there were readers who said, ‘What happens next?’

“I didn’t think I’d write a sequel,” Barnes says. “But I felt I could push the form further to an even greater intimacy with the reader. The first time I was learning its possibilities. There is a great freedom in this form, not the least of which is the potential for authorial abnegation. As the author, you don’t have to make any statement in your own voice, not even to say, for example, ‘It was a stormy day and the clock struck 11.’ ”

Might the characters reassert themselves yet again? And will Gillian get her comeuppance? “My reply,” says Barnes, who admits, for all his hatred of sequels, to leaving this ending open for another go, “would be, ‘you tell me.’ ”