Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
You Can't Take It with You
By Frank Kermode
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
by Julian Barnes
Knopf, 244 pp., $24.95
E.M. Forster, who was sometimes criticized for scattering deaths too wantonly over his own plots, complained of 'the studied ignorance of novelists' and advised them to 'recapture their interest in death.' He considered that interest to be a necessary element in true creativity. The novelist Julian Barnes easily eludes this criticism, being, as T.S. Eliot said of the dramatist John Webster, 'much possessed by death.'
Review, 4010 words
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