288
PEARL
K.
BELL
What does Julian Barnes want his readers to make of this irre–
deemably thin story? It's hard to say, since the book consists entirely of
talk, talk, talk. But after a while we do begin to sense, beneath his char–
acters' chatter, the presence of the novelist, his very cool dispassion and
detachment from the persons and sorrows he has set in motion. And this
detachment, in turn, reduces the entire novel to a game whose supposed
truth and consequences it is impossible to care about one way or an–
other. Even the title is - perhaps deliberately - misleading: The three
parts of the love triangle don't "talk it over," they don't share feelings
or thoughts; they talk
at
an invisible listener - presumably the reader–
who never answers back. They are locked in the impenetrable isolation
of their monologues. Even Oliver's brilliant and quicksilver wit soon be–
gins to pall, as all the disembodied voices are shorn of whatever living
reality they seemed at first to possess. Since Barnes makes little effort in
Talking It Over
to engage our emotions in the fate of his characters, to
make what happens to them matter to us, this novel in the end seems an
exasperating waste ofBarnes' restless intelligence, that subtly mischievous,
languid amorality that he has put to much richer use in his previous
novels.
Darryl Pinckney is the most astute and independent-minded critic of
black literature in America today. In trenchant essays about such revered
figures as Alice Walker and Countee Cullen, he has raised hackles by re–
fusing to be intimidated by orthodox pieties about race and gender.
Pinckney has now published his first novel,
High Cotton,
which reads less
like imaginative fiction than a thinly disguised autobiography of an ex–
ceptionally precocious and high-spirited young man, born in 1953 into a
black family in Indianapolis. More
Bildung
than
roman,
the book takes its
title from the folk saying "If you're chopping in high cotton, you've got
it easier." In other words, the higher the social class, the better the life:
High Cotton
portrays a world very different from the more familiar ac–
counts, fictional or otherwise, about the black experience in America.
Pinckney comes from what W. E. B. DuBois called "the talented
tenth" - the educated and socially mobile segment of black society. His
world is not the Spike Lee inner-city ghetto of poverty and despair, but
an eminently respectable upper-middle-class black family in which four
generations have earned college degrees. As the narrator tells us at the
start, "No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was
something I figured out on the sly." But as he learns soon enough, being
part of "the talented. tenth" does not absolve him from wrestling with
the problems of blackness, even if he cannot share the older generations'
anxious vigilance about the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry.
