Volume 34, Number 8 · May 7, 1987
The Home Front
By David Lodge
Staring at the Sun
by Julian Barnes
Knopf, 197 pp., $15.95
'You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people always go on putting in the same thing? Why is the vol-au-vent always chicken?' Thus spake D.H. Lawrence (in his essay, 'The Novel,' in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine). Julian Barnes is a writer worth watching because he seems to share Lawrence's wish to vary the ingredients of our fictional diet. After producing two fairly conventional novels and (under another name) a clutch of crime stories, he made a stir a few years ago with the highly original and idiosyncratic Flaubert's Parrot.
Review, 1509 words
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