SOURCE: Gitzen, Julian. “How to Be Postmodern: The Fiction of Julian Barnes and Alain de Botton.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 30 (October 2001): 45-61.

In the following essay, Gitzen compares the works of de Botton, particularly How Proust Can Change Your Life, with the fiction of Julian Barnes.

One of the most inventive English novelists to have emerged in the past decade is Alain de Botton. His stylistic originality is all the more striking in view of his youth (b. 1969). His background and his work notably resemble those of Julian Barnes, who is twenty-three years his senior. In addition to fiction, both writers have produced journalism and criticism. Coincidentally, both have served as television critics or reviewers for the New Statesman. The two men share Francophile tendencies, as reflected in the fact that Barnes's best known work is a fictional biography of Flaubert, while de Botton has recently produced...