Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Act Two
By Gabriele Annan
Love, Etc.
Julian Barnes
Knopf, 227 pp., $23.00
A little girl lies in bed listening for the sound of her mother's lover leaving the house. 'I waited to hear the front door shut. You can always hear it because it needs an extra pull.' Fiction is full of vigils like this one (only think of Proust); but Julian Barnes's door makes the least noise and yet the most definitive closing sound of any fictional door I can think of. He is a writer who goes for perfection and mostly gets it.
Review, 1455 words
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