Reception
On Metacritic, the book received an 80 out of 100 based on twenty-three critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [7] The Daily Telegraph reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Love It", "Pretty Good", "Ok", and "Rubbish": Guardian , Sunday Telegraph , Observer , Spectator , and Literary Review reviews under "Love It" and Daily Telegraph and New Statesman reviews under "Pretty Good" and Sunday Times and TLS reviews under "Ok". [8] Globally, Complete Review saying on the consensus "Generally impressed by aspects, and some by the whole collection, but no real consensus, even on the individual stories". [9]
Many reviews were positive :
- Thomas Mallon of The New York Times is full of praise:
- "The Lemon Table has plenty of sharp, even cruel, comic pleasures"
- "Barnes is a top-flight precisionist, often sectioning stories with space breaks and numerical divisions that give them a surprising amplitude"
- "Stylistically, Barnes doesn't go in for bravura set pieces so much as the steady, pleasing wit of English comic realism, in which sheer intelligence and acute observation carry the whole production, line after line and page after page. The author's figurative language is consistently satisfying" [10]
- Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle writes "Everywhere he ventures, Barnes is sure-footed: each word, each tone, each nuance of phrase is just right. Every word is the proverbial mot juste. Barnes is always adept at avoiding cliche. If some of the situations in the stories veer too close to that fatal shoal, he is sure to put in some unexpected touches"... "It is inevitable that not every tale in this collection is a masterpiece. Even those, however, that do not rise to this level are very well done" [11]
- Frank Kermode writing in The Guardian praises the collection, "The Lemon Table leaves one in no doubt as to Barnes's virtuosity." [12]
But there was some criticism :
- Carolyn See in The Washington Post wrote "These particular stories suffer from an overwhelming disadvantage (and I don't care if Julian Barnes is a very skillful writer and gets published in the New Yorker all the time). You can't condescend to your characters, scorn them even, and expect to leave the reader with much more than a bad taste. A little hauteur goes a very long way" [13]
- Ruth Franklin, of The New Republic : "the proximity to gravitas serves only to pinpoint Barnes's inadequacies as a fiction writer. He dreams up some nicely unconventional figures and puts them in provocative scenarios, but he fails to discover any emotion richer than a condescending pathos." [14]
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