Lewis was always more of an idea man than a character-man.
—Julian Barnes on C. S. Lewis (1977)
In America these days, the most-travelled route to literary success passes through the creative-writing programs, where would-be novelists read Ann Beattie and learn how to turn their middle-class suburban childhoods into earnest, inert, and carefully crafted fictions. The corresponding route in Britain traverses a strikingly different territory: from Oxford and Cambridge, it leads directly to literary London, where aspiring novelists apply their public-school cockiness and liberal educations to irreverent, arrogantly slapdash pieces for publications like The Literary Review and The London Review of Books, thereby preparing themselves for the production of smart, vibrant, often untidy fictions which may be inspired by anyone from Laurence Sterne to Evelyn Waugh.
Among the English novelists who have trod this well-worn path to glory is the Leicester-born, Oxford-educated, forty-three-year-old Julian Barnes. His literary journalism of the late Seventies proved Barnes to be more than adequately keen, versatile, and impudent for the job: he reviewed everyone from Heinrich Boll to Richard Price, and wrote with equal insouciance about censorship, comic books, the royal family, and television (for many years, indeed, he served as a regular television critic for The New Statesman and the London Observer). Barnes’s first two novels, while displaying the requisite Oxbridgean cheekiness, were more or less conventional in form and subject: Metroland (1980) was a public-school Bildungsroman which reminded reviewers of his fellow Oxonian Martin Amis; Before She Met
