Talking It Over
Praise for
Julian Barnes’s
Talking It Over
“The funniest, cleverest book I’ve read in years …
Talking It Over
isn’t just … a boffo modern novel of manners. Barnes got me seriously involved with his comic characters. I’ll remember them with great affection.”
—Edward Hower,
Chicago Tribune
“Barnes has created vivid, idiosyncratic voices.… The book is beautifully constructed, with the narrators’ memories overlapping just so, telling stories that sometimes differ widely and sometimes oh-so-subtly.… Barnes writes like a dream.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Talking It Over
is rich and fully realized.… Mr. Barnes spins a story of intrigue and dazzlement.”
—Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine
“What is impossible to suggest … is Barnes’s almost magical skill in making his three-part counterpoint work so well.… Each character alters as it revolves and alters back, sometimes with hilarious sharpness.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“I was drawn irresistibly into the story.… Barnes brings to bear all the powers of a scrupulous intelligence. He pushes reason all the way past its breaking point, the point where it gives way not just to unreason but to pathos.”
—Stephen Goodwin,
USA Today
“Barnes proves himself once again to be a master of wit and playful technique.”
—
Vogue
“… packed full of funny and incongruous observations on contemporary life.”
—
Vancouver Sun
Julian Barnes
Talking It Over
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His five previous novels—
Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun
, and
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
—have brought him international acclaim. His newest novel,
The Porcupine
, has just been published.
ALSO BY
Julian Barnes
Metroland
Before She Met Me
Flaubert’s Parrot
Staring at the Sun
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
The Porcupine
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1995
Copyright © 1991 by Julian Barnes All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited, London, in 1991. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “Three Cigarettes in an Ash Tray” by Eddie Miller and W.S. Stevenson, copyright © 1982 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., and excerpts from “Walkin’ After Midnight” by Alan Block and Don Hecht, copyright © 1956, copyright renewed 1984 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
eISBN: 978-0-30779788-9
v3.1
to Pat
He lies like an eye-witness
.
RUSSIAN SAYING
Contents
1: His, His or Her, Their
2: Lend Us a Quid
3: That Summer I Was Brilliant
4: Now
5: Everything Starts Here
6: Stave Off Alzheimer’s
7: Now Here’s a Funny Thing
8: OK, Boulogne It Is
9: I Don’t Love You
10: I’m Not Sure I Can Believe This
11: Love, & c.
12: Spare Me Val. Spare Yourselves Val.
13: What I Think
14: Now There’s One Cigarette in the Ashtray
15: Tidying Up
16: De Consolatione Pecuniae
17: Sont fous, les Anglais
1: His, His or Her, Their
Stuart
My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.
Stuart’s my Christian name. My full name is Stuart Hughes. My
full
name: that’s all there is to it. No middle name. Hughes was the name of my parents, who were married for twenty-five years. They called me Stuart. I didn’t particularly like the name at first – I got called things like Stew and Stew-Pot at school – but I’ve got used to it. I can handle it. I can handle my handle.
Sorry, I’m not very good at jokes. People have told me that before. Anyway, Stuart Hughes – I think that’ll do for me. I don’t want to be called St John St John de Vere Knatchbull. My parents were called Hughes. They died, and now I’ve got their name. And when I die, I’ll still be called Stuart Hughes. There aren’t too many certainties in this great big world of ours, but that’s one of them.
Do you see the point I’m making? Sorry, absolutely no reason why you should. I’ve only just started. You scarcely know me. Let’s start again. Hullo, I’m Stuart Hughes, nice to meet you. Shall we shake hands? Right, good. No, the point I’m trying to make is this:
everyone else around here has changed their name
. That’s quite a thought. It’s even a bit creepy.
Now, did you notice how I said
everyone
followed by
their?
‘Everyone has changed their name.’ I did it deliberately, probably just to annoy Oliver. We had this tremendous row with Oliver. Well, an argument, anyway. Or at least a disagreement. He’s a great pedant, Oliver. He’s my oldest friend, so I’m allowed to call him a great pedant. Soon after Gill met him – that’s my wife, Gillian – she said to me, ‘You know, your friend talks like a dictionary.’
We were on a beach just up from Frinton at the time, and when Oliver heard Gill’s remark he went into one of his spiels. He calls them riffs, but that’s not my sort of word. I can’t reproduce the way he talks – you’ll have to listen to him for yourself – but he just sort of zooms off. That’s what he did then. ‘What kind of dictionary am I? Do I have a thumb index? Am I bilingual?’ And so on. He went on like this for a while, and ended up asking who was going to buy him. ‘What if nobody wants me? Disregarded. Dust on my top fore-edge. Oh no, I’m going to be remaindered, I can see it, I’m going to be remaindered.’ And he started thumping the sand and wailing at the seagulls – real Play for Today stuff – and an elderly couple who were listening to a radio behind a wind-break looked quite alarmed. Gillian just laughed.
Anyway, Oliver’s a pedant. I don’t know what you think
about
everyone
followed by
their
. Probably not very much, no reason why you should. And I can’t remember how it first came up, but we had this argument. Oliver and Gillian and me. We each had a different opinion. Let me try and set down the opposing points of view. Perhaps I’ll do the minutes of the meeting, like at the bank.
OLIVER said that words like
everyone
and
someone
and
no-one
are singular pronouns and must therefore be followed by the singular possessive pronoun, namely
his
.
GILLIAN said you couldn’t make a general remark and then exclude half the human race, because fifty per cent of the time that
someone
will turn out to be female. So for reasons of logic and fairness you ought to say
his or her
.
OLIVER said we were discussing grammar not sexual politics.
GILLIAN said how could we separate the two, because where did grammar come from if not from grammarians, and almost all grammarians – probably every single one of them for all she knew – were men, so what did we expect; but mainly she was talking common sense.
OLIVER rolled his eyes back, lit a cigarette and said that the very phrase
common sense
was a contradiction in terms, and if Man – at which point he pretended to be extremely embarrassed and correct himself to Man-or-Woman – if if Man-or-Woman had relied upon common sense over the previous millennia we’d all still be living in mud huts and eating frightful food and listening to Del Shannon records.
STUART then came up with a solution.
His
being either inaccurate or insulting or quite possibly both, and
his or her
being diplomatic but awfully cumbersome, the obvious answer
was to say
their
. Stuart put forward this compromise suggestion with full confidence, and was surprised by its rejection by the rest of the quorum.
OLIVER said that, for instance, the phrase
someone put their head round the door
sounded as if there were two bodies and one head, like in some frightful Russian scientific experiment. He referred to the displays of freaks which used to take place at funfairs, mentioning bearded ladies, deformed sheep’s foetuses and many similar items until called to order by the Chair (= me).
GILLIAN said that in her opinion
their
was just as cumbersome and just as obviously diplomatic as
his or her
, but why was the meeting being so squeamish about making a point anyway? Since women had for centuries been instructed to use the masculine possessive pronoun when referring to the whole human race, why shouldn’t there be some belated corrective action, even if it did stick in a few (masculine) throats?
STUART continued to maintain that
their
was best, being representative of the middle course.
The MEETING adjourned
sine die
.
I thought about this conversation for quite a while afterwards. Here we were, three reasonably intelligent people discussing the merits of
his
and
his or her
and
their
. Tiny little words, yet we couldn’t agree.
And
we were friends. Yet we couldn’t agree. Something about this worried me.
How did I get on to that? Oh yes, everyone else around here has changed their name. It’s true, and it’s quite a thought, isn’t it? Gillian, for example, she changed her name when she married me. Her maiden name was Wyatt, but now she’s called Hughes. I don’t flatter myself that she was eager to take my
name. I think it was more that she wanted to get rid of Wyatt. Because you see that was her father’s name, and she didn’t get on with her father. He walked out on her mother, who was stuck for years afterwards with the name of someone who’d left her. Not very nice for Mrs Wyatt, or Mme Wyatt as some people call her because she was French originally. I suspected that Gillian was getting rid of Wyatt as a way of breaking with her father (who didn’t even come to the wedding, incidentally) and pointing out to her Mum what
she
ought to have done years before. Not that Mme Wyatt took the hint, if the hint was there.