SOURCE: “Breaking the Frame, Again,” in Commonweal, Vol. 119, No. 9, May 8, 1992, pp. 22–4.

In the following review, Wheeler lauds Barnes's Talking It Over.

Julian Barnes is an extraordinary writer. In this novel [Talking It Over,] he takes an old love story, the triangle that leads from marriage to divorce and remarriage, and applies a skewed narrative geometry. He then leads a reader to illogical proofs and theorems. But paradox is nothing new to Julian Barnes's books—five novels in the last decade—or to his admirers. What he does with so apparently simple a story is all the more impressive when measured against the books which have brought him acclaim.

“Real questions were limited to those questions to which the people you asked already knew the answers … it was these questions, the ones that weren't real, to which you wanted to know the answers most pressingly.” So observes a character...