Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...week ago at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, over sturgeon, chips and a magnum of champagne (or was it a cup of tea?), the British novelist, Julian Barnes, famous for his inscrutability, consented to let me interview him. The official photographs of Barnes show a darkly brooding, almost Mephistophelean presence. He is in real life, taller and blonder than one would ever dare imagine, inhabiting a room effortlessly and completely. He is neither tweedy like Michael Holroyd nor dandiacal like Tom Wolfe and sits coiled in a too-small armchair. His presence is gently mocking. We tacitly acknowledge...
...warned by his barristers in England that the novel was certain to offend several people, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth, Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan. Barnes is perhaps the only novelist writing today who could plausibly insert a reference to the torrid geriatric sex, in which the last two allegedly indulged, in a novel about post-communist Eastern Europe...
Barnes professes to live a reclusive life with his wife in North London but counts among his close friends, novelist and bon vivant Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and the gregarious Jay McInerney. He admits to being a part of the chattering classes as the London literary-intelligentsia is known. His Oxbridge credentials serve as his passport to this class. He attended Magdalen College, Oxford where he says he was terribly bored...
Barnes is frank about the brutal realities of living as a novelist in England. "It is difficult to make a living as a novelist in Britain, until one is about forty. The Donna Tartt scenario would be impossible in Britain. The ascent there is slower than it is here in America where a novelist, having achieved some measure of success changes his hair, his house, his wife, his entire life while in Britain, a successful novelist considers taking his publicist to lunch." He admires the work of Cheever and Updike but resolutely adheres to his ambitious (if brashly stated) mission...
...English novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote that the only human relationships he could abide were intimacy, formality and servility. "What is horrible . . . in America is familiarity." Americans will be seeing a lot more familiarity, horrible or not, because that is the religion of the Clinton Administration...