Julian Barnes's novel reminded me of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Both are about young affairs that sour and a man who settles into a humdrum life. Barnes falls into the trap that just about every novelist falls into -- including especially English ones like McEwan and Graham Greene -- in treating love as a noun, a freestanding wondrous entity that someone "falls into"; instead, it should be seen as a verb, something that is done, worked at, the art of placing another person above oneself. If a novelist could read Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving and base characters on its truths, that might be a great book.
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