DEPARTURE(S), by Julian Barnes
If I were king, or Zohran Mamdani, I’d require that every restaurant in New York City have a lemon table. Julian Barnes wrote about the idea in a short story, “The Silence,” published in 2004. Lemons, he explained, are a symbol of mortality; a lemon table is one where it is “permissible — indeed, obligatory — to talk about death.”
In his work, Barnes has presided over such a plain wooden table from the start. Old age and death, as topics, are preset frequencies on his dial. As far back as his first novel, “Metroland” (1980), the young narrator felt himself to be 65.
“Artists are unreliable, whereas death never lets you down,” Barnes has written. “You would buy shares in death, if they were available.” He probed the “appalling fact” of human mortality most directly in “Nothing to Be Frightened Of” (2008), a brisk, bleak, funny and erudite memoir.
Barnes wrote “Nothing to Be Frightened Of” when he was 62. He just turned 80. This briny English writer, author of “Flaubert’s Parrot” (1984) and a winner of the Booker Prize, for “The Sense of an Ending” (2011), now has a rare form of blood cancer, treatable but exhausting and uncurable.
His new book, “Departure(s),” he says, is his last. He’s here to write about his illness and to lay some final logs on the fire. This is a slim and stark testament. Barnes’s prose is largely stripped bare — it resembles a tall ship that, in the face of a storm, has taken down and stored its sails and rigging to better endure punishment.
“Departure(s)” brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired. Barnes’s powers of observation and comment may have diminished, but his appetite for playfulness and detail, for bedrock human stuff, remains unslakable.
In the face of awfulness, writing can help. It’s the consolation prize. In the fall of 2008, when his wife was dying of a brain tumor, Barnes got through the horror by spending what time he could at his desk. “Terror and anguish were kept away by writing about terror and anguish,” he writes in “Departure(s).” Writing about his own illness brings similar solace.
“Departure(s)” is billed as a novel, and indeed it contains a metafictional love story about two friends Barnes met while at Oxford in the 1960s, and how he helped them reconnect late in life, when they fell in love. These characters interrogate the author. One of them says, wonderfully, “Oh, stop saying wise things that aren’t true.”
“Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift,” Barnes once said. “Art is not a brassiere.” Barnes, a lifelong melancholy baby, has rarely been a dispenser, in his work, of happy endings. The woman, Jean, says to him, in a line Barnes might also have uttered: “Happiness doesn’t make me happy.”
The medical portion of “Departure(s)” begins when Barnes comes down with a violent skin condition at the start of Covid. It turns out to myeloproliferative neoplasm, a cancer that originates in the bone marrow.
It’s not necessarily a death sentence. He still must floss, as a doctor told Michael Kinsley when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. But he feels tipped from his orbit. With both Covid and cancer stalking him, he shivers like a cabinet of crystal while tanks are rolling past.
He’s gone for his medical appointment after packing a briefcase for himself, with “chocolate, an apple, the morning’s Guardian for the crossword, a notebook and my iPhone.” He doesn’t like to watch what goes on in examining rooms:
I avoid the needle going into the vein, the scalpel descending towards the eyelid, the catheter being inserted (and extracted), stitches put in here and there, a big toenail being lifted from its moorings, and now the laid-out juicy product which lives inside my bones and is suddenly misbehaving.
Worse, after a certain age, “most of your orifices will, one by one, have been medically invaded: ears, nose, throat, eyes (with lasers), bum, cock, vagina.” It’s the bum invasions, he writes, that somehow keep coming around.
He marvels at England’s tax-funded National Health System: “It all seems to me astonishingly efficient, and, indeed, a marvel, one of the few things we can really be proud of, and I loathe Johnson, Gove, Cummings and their alt-right U.S. backers for wanting to tear it down.”
Now just another geezer being pushed down a hospital hallway, he wonders, touchingly, if he deserves a lapel badge that reads: “BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE.” We all like a pat of butter next to our names.
Peel the dust jacket off “Departure(s)” and what’s left is a slim, black volume, like a hymnal. Where there was fire, there are now mostly ashes.
Every book is, in its way, about memory, but Barnes makes a special effort to interrogate this place where “degradation and embellishment overlap.” There is a good deal about Barnes’s touchstone writer, Proust, and the repercussions of his madeleine.
Barnes is losing his sense of smell, but he wonders “what sudden olfactory key” might open his memories “like a Japanese flower in water.” He suspects it might be “the smell of glue and varnish I used when constructing model aircraft, or the aroma of frying bacon, or that of a damp golden retriever.”
As a culture, we’ve grown cynical at the notion that we are witnessing the “last” of anything — the last tour, the last film and the last episode so rarely are. Still, here’s hoping that Barnes is not yet finished writing. I’d like to meet him, again, at whatever lemon table is available.
It was Ali Smith, in her novel “Summer,” who said it: “Whatever age you are, you still die young.”
DEPARTURE(S) | By Julian Barnes | Knopf | 160 pp. | $27
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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