JULIAN BARNES

"Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the hardest to pin down. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years.
But the unifying theme of Barnes's work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it's an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.
The one time I met Auberon Waugh, the founder of Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years' time. This would have been about 20 years ago. Waugh had recently set up his literary magazine as a sort of critical sea-wall, its task to hold back the tide of postmodernism, experimentalism, clever-clever obfuscation and general dicking around with form. Perhaps Waugh was just trying to wish Barnes into obscurity. He was best known at that point for Metroland, a debut that loitered in suburbia and didn't frighten the horses, followed by Flaubert's Parrot, which did."