SOURCE: A review of Cross Channel, in Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1996, p. 2.

In the following review, Eder lauds the stories in Barnes's Cross Channel.

In the 1860s, a bourgeois family takes a Sunday excursion out of Rouen to gawk at an encampment of British laborers engaged in building the railroad line from Paris. The red-faced giants are reported to shovel 20 tons of earth apiece each day and to devour 12 pounds of beef.

A bluff Englishman of the John Bull variety falls into conversation at a Paris bar in the 1920s. Soon he finds himself a guest at a Surrealist seminar on sex, being grilled with mock pedantry about his favorite positions and whether he has ever lusted after a nun or a rabbit—and not quite answering. “Almost like betraying your country, talking smut to a group of foreigners,” he explains to his nephew years later. “Unpatriotic, don't...