Volume 39, Number 21 · December 17, 1992
Time of Indifference
By John Bayley
The Porcupine
by Julian Barnes
Knopf, 138 pp., $17.00
Julian Barnes's novels have always had about them a mesmeric charm and an air of dangerous simplicity. Don't be beguiled by our naive brilliance, the pages seemed to be saying: you may be missing something. And no doubt the reader often is, or at least the function of the fiction is to make him think he might be. The critical theorist Tzvetan Todorov remarked that Henry James's stories are based on a puzzle, which cannot be solved because the story is itself the solution. With Barnes, too, the reader is both fluttered and flattered by the sense of a mystery in which he is being invited to participate. The title itself of his new novel is teasing, and never fully explained.
Review, 2787 words
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