During summer vacation from college, Paul is bored enough agree to his mother’s suggestion that he play tennis at the village club. He is paired with Susan MacLoed, unhappily married mother of two daughters who is breezily irreverent and entirely different from the tedious “Carolines” that Paul has met before. Their age difference (he’s nineteen, she’s forty-eight) is important, especially in their small English town in the 1960s, but, during that first summer and for a little while longer, their love supersedes considerations like societal expectations and familial obligations. Looking back, Paul struggles to tell this story, both to shape it in his own mind and to add it to the thousands of love stories that have been told before it, and he is hindered further by a struggling memory and the palpable pain its outlines bring to him. Only as we learn, piecemeal, how the story ends – and how Susan’s life unravels – we see why Paul and Susan’s romance is truly Paul’s only story. Julian Barnes is one of the few storytellers that can take a seemingly simple proposition like first love and bend it into an exploration of maturity, memory, and our endless searching for meaning in life.
November 27, 2019