The entire midsection of the book is taken up by an essay that Neil has written about Julian the Apostate, monotheism, and the early Christian church. However, Elizabeth Finch is a bit of a slog for such a short novel. I wish the novel had mined this vein a little more acutely. In that way, the novel is about the platonic love between members of the opposite sex and I suppose there’s a good moral here for readers. This is a bit unusual, perhaps, as Neil never had sex with her. Finch, to the point of wanting to write a biography of her life. Neil is essentially a man who is obsessed with Ms. Neil is willed all her writings upon her death and comes to know her brother, Christopher. One of her students, a twice-divorced former television actor named Neil, is so smitten by her that he goes out with her on luncheon dates throughout the rest of her life to discuss intellectual matters. (The book doesn’t make it quite clear as to the date of its setting.)Įlizabeth Finch is about the titular character, an older woman who lectures a group of students in what is presumably a graduate-level course in European literature (though the novel doesn’t come out and explicitly state this, either). This is a tale for intellectuals and academics, since, after all, this is a novel that is partially set on a university campus somewhere in England, probably during the ’80s as I would imagine.
Part of the reason is that - even though a lot of people consider me to be really smart for someone who only has an undergraduate degree - the content and point of this novel largely sailed right over my head and down the river into the vast ocean. It is a novel with some pedigree - after all, its author has won the Man Booker Prize in the United Kingdom, and book awards don’t get too much bigger than that! However, I must remark with sadness that I was disappointed and underwhelmed with Elizabeth Finch. I read it in two sittings and the whole thing is less than 200 pages. Well, Julian Barnes’ new book Elizabeth Finch falls into the latter category.
Such books tend to make for pleasing reviews, at least as far as I’m concerned, since I like being able to file my words quickly and self-publish them in this forum.
However, sometimes I like short books, too - titles you can easily digest in a sitting or so. I usually like long books - books that you can spend all day under the covers with and be enraptured by.
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