Next week, the veteran English novelist Julian Barnes will celebrate his 80th birthday, and he has chosen to mark the occasion in an unusual way: in the same week, he will publish his final book.
How do we know? Because, in the aptly titled Departures(s), he tells us. Although notionally a work of fiction, much of the book comes from the viewpoint of a man indistinguishable from its author: “This will be my last book,” he tells us, in the opening pages.
What this means is that Barnes – a prominent figure in the British literary landscape for more than four decades – will still be around, just not publishing new books.
This is relatively unusual. None of Barnes’s peers has followed this path. Writers build up a readership over their career, and readers look forward to the new book. For Barnes, the answer is simple: “You can always read the earlier ones,” he told Publishers’ Weekly in the US.
RM Block
Barnes does have some health issues, which he discusses in Departure(s), but he is not terminally ill. He could write more books if he chose. But he is getting older, and wants to avoid the fate of many writers, where “you keep going until the grim reaper cuts you down in your study”. Besides, he says, “Having my last book published in my lifetime is more fun. I’ll be able to read my literary obituaries”.
Barnes’s elective silence – a solution, on reflection, not unexpected for a writer where a steely control has always been a hallmark of his work – also solves the problem of unfinished posthumous work, where writers from Gabriel García Márquez to Roberto Bolaño have had their reputations unenhanced by their literary estates bagging up the scraps from the table.
But Barnes’s retirement highlights how rare it is for a writer to choose to fall silent. Of major literary figures, the only comparison is Philip Roth, who announced his retirement (“to tell you the truth, I’m done”) in 2012, two years after he published his final novel, Nemesis. At the time, Roth made little of the decision: “Enough is enough!” he said. “I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”
But it was only with the publication of Blake Bailey’s biography in 2021, three years after Roth’s death, that we found out the real reason. He simply couldn’t do it any more. As he got older, Roth, for whom writing a book had always been “a ghastly protracted slog”, found it impossible to summon the mental focus to produce work that matched up to his own standards. And so, after a series of minor works, he chose to stop, rather than continue to disappoint.
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We might wish for other writers to share Roth’s self-awareness. After all, few writers produce their best books late in their career. Kazuo Ishiguro observed that – with exceptions for unique talents such as Penelope Fitzgerald – “your best chance of producing a decent book comes somewhere between 30 and 45”. Would Graham Greene’s reputation have been damaged if he hadn’t published those late-career trifles, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or Monsignor Quixote?
The problem is that we expect each book by a writer to be a unique expression of their vision, but why should any writer have an endless supply? Early in his career, Salman Rushdie met the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “Are you serious about this writing business?” Vonnegut asked Rushdie. “Then you should know that the day is going to come when you won’t have a book to write, and you’re still going to have to write a book.”
Vonnegut was speaking from experience. He met Rushdie in 1981, with his great works of the 1950s and ’60s long behind him, leaving only the late, second-rate ramblers such as Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard and Hocus Pocus in the tank. Of these Vonnegut novels, Douglas Adams said, “I can’t understand how he gets the enthusiasm to get in front of the typewriter and actually write that stuff. It’s like going through the motions of his own stylistic tricks”.
Enthusiasm, as Adams puts it, may be the key here. To be at their best, a writer needs to feel that there’s something they must communicate. This was the reason Harper Lee gave for never writing a follow-up book after her debut To Kill a Mockingbird. “I have said what I have to say, and I will not say it again.” Easy for her, of course, with a perpetual bestseller on her hands and no need to make a living from publishing new books regularly. And she kept her word: the fiction Lee or her estate has published since then predates Mockingbird.
Then there are the writers who try to give up, and find that they can’t. Maeve Binchy announced her retirement in 2000, aged 60, partly for health reasons – travelling for book tours was hard on her arthritis – and partly from a fear that she might be losing relevance. “It’s hard to keep a finger on the pulse of the young today,” she said at the time.
But despite her insistence that “I’m not at all a Frank Sinatra person who can be lured back,” Binchy was lured back, through sheer reader demand. She published another five novels in her lifetime, and her final book, A Week in Winter, posthumously put to rest her fears that she was no longer relevant: it set a record for the most pre-orders for a book on Amazon’s site.
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Similarly kick-started by fears of mortality was Stephen King’s short-lived retirement, announced in 2002. King had been hit by a van and almost killed three years earlier, and this seemed to shake something in him. But there was more too: he feared the diminishing returns of a popular novelist, where “you get to the point where you get to the edges of the room, and you can go back and go where you’ve been, and basically recycle stuff”. His “nightmare”, he said, was to end up like once-popular master of the potboiler Harold Robbins, who was still turning them out before his death aged 81, despite falling sales (Robbins: “I’m just a guy trying to make a buck and stay alive”). But King unretired almost immediately afterwards, and has continued to publish a book a year on average, as he closes in on Robbins’s age.
But if fear of ceasing to be relevant, or diminishing returns, is sometimes a factor in a writer’s decision to drop the pen, it might also come from a fear of success. Or that is one way of interpreting the remarkable number of writers who have stopped publishing books after achieving great acclaim.
For example, of the last 12 winners of the Booker Prize for fiction, only two have published another novel since their win. (George Saunders’s new novel Vigil, later this month, will make it three.)
Of course that doesn’t mean the writers have fallen permanently silent, and there may be other reasons for the hiatus – publicity demands arising from the prize, the fact that literary novelists tend to be less prolific than genre writers – but it’s not impossible to think that winning the UK’s biggest fiction prize could put pressure on a novelist when starting their next book.
Or take the case of Robert McLiam Wilson, whose third novel Eureka Street in 1996 became an acclaimed bestseller, was adapted for TV and won Wilson a place on the Granta list of Best Young British Novelists in 2003. A follow-up, The Extremists, was whispered about, but 30 years on, Wilson has not published any more novels.
Wilson’s is not the only scalp claimed by the Granta list: this announcement of great promise has silenced writers including Adam Lively (son of Penelope Lively), who was in the 1993 list, Ben Rice (2003) and Susan Elderkin (2003).
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Perhaps the most famous example of a writer who publicly stopped is JD Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s origin story as a great refuser is simple: he loved to write, hated to publish. It is very hard to be a public figure – exposing your soul in fiction – and maintain the sort of privacy Salinger required. He deplored it so much that after a long story of his, Hapworth 16, 1924 appeared in the New Yorker in June 1965, he didn’t publish anything further for the remaining 45 years of his life – though he continued to write.
Whether Salinger’s silence will ever be broken is a moot point. Sixteen years after his death, and despite his family’s insistence in 2019 that “we’re going as fast as we freaking can” to get Salinger’s new writings ready for publication, nothing has appeared: not even a single short story. Of course, given the trend in Salinger’s writing even through the 1960s toward greater digression, length and demands on the indulgence of the reader – and with the absence of an external editorial hand – it’s possible that the work remains unpublished because it is unpublishable.
Still, sometimes a long writerly silence does come to an end. For a quarter of a century, Marilynne Robinson appeared to be a Harper Lee-style one-and-done writer, with her debut Housekeeping (1980) not followed up until Gilead (2004). Kathryn Stockett, 17 years after The Help, returns in May with The Calamity Club.
The record holder in this respect is Henry Roth, whose debut Call it Sleep (1934) was his only book until – 60 years later! – he made up for lost time with Mercy of a Rude Stream, a new four-volume sequence. And fans of George RR Martin may not have quite given up hope on seeing The Winds of Winter, the next part of his A Song of Fire and Ice sequence, 15 years after the last.
So, as these examples show, there is still time for Julian Barnes to go back on his declaration and publish another novel. And there may, after all, have been a hint of this in the last non-fiction book he published before Departure(s), less than a year ago. It was called Changing My Mind.
The quiet ones
- Robert McLiam Wilson – 30 years since Eureka Street
- Arthur Golden – 29 years since Memoirs of a Geisha
- Jamie O’Neill – 25 years since At Swim, Two Boys
- Alice Sebold – 19 years since The Almost Moon
- Zoë Heller – 18 years since The Believers
- Sarah Waters – 12 years since The Paying Guests
- Helen Fielding – 10 years since Bridget Jones’s Baby
