A novelist falters in nonfiction

The perfect epigraph for "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" would be the haunting Latin refrain which concludes each stanza of a poem by the 15th century Scottish writer William Dunbar: "Timor Mortis conturbat me." ("The fear of death distresses me.") It is certainly the leitmotif that runs through this odd book -- part family memoir, part meditation on death and dying -- by British novelist Julian Barnes. If he were not such a dedicated Francophile -- to the point of literary tunnel vision -- he might have chosen it. But as it is, most of the literary references which pepper the pages of this book come from French writers -- and largely from those of the 19th century.

French might be said to be in Barnes' blood: his father was a teacher of the language. His good English education has ensured that Shakespeare will crop up, but it is more likely that English writers who are themselves Francophiles (like W. Somerset Maugham) will bat for England on Barnes' literary team. For the most part, as he looks for answers to the nature of death and fear of his own mortality, it is Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Emile Zola and -- most often of all -- a much less well-known French writer, Jules Renard. Clearly French literature is important to Barnes, and anyone who has read his novel "Flaubert's Parrot" knows that his passion enabled him to produce a marvelously vibrant tale that breathed life into a long-dead master. But as he bounces from one anecdote to another about these writers' lives -- or deaths -- the book at hand seems not only disorganized but also claustrophobic. Sometimes biculturalism makes you simply long for multiculturalism.

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Familial chill

Barnes is a masterly novelist, at his best able to summon up characters of all ages and types. But here he emerges as a chilly and tentative character, emotionally challenged and technically hobbled. Judging by his portraits of his parents and of his older brother, coldness and remoteness seem to be familial traits. His only sibling, a totally rationalist philosophy professor, appears frequently as a weird kind of counterpoint to the author: a contrast only in being even chillier and more remote, more certain in his beliefs (atheist to Julian's agnostic), more emotionally constipated. This is obviously intended to make Barnes seem warmer, but it fails to do so: rather it highlights the qualities they share, albeit to different degrees of intensity, at least as viewed by this brother.