The Sense of an Ending

Taylor Swift released a new album last week. I still download all her new stuff, though I'm a bigger fan of the middling albums than I am of her newer albums. Anyway, the first line of her new song Anti Hero is: “I get older but just never wiser.”

That sums up Tony, our narrator. There's no character growth, just increasing unreliability. Veronica doesn't grow either, despite the passing of 40 years. She doesn't behave like a normal human woman would. Like, if you don't want to see this old flame, just delete his emails. Don't sit in silence being weird and inscrutable and then blame him for having no understanding of something that happened 40 years ago. I never got the sense that it was worth my time to care about what happened to any of these characters, and so I didn't.

Also it should not have taken me a whole week to read a novella.

Barnes can write beautifully, so that's why I've rated this as high as I have.

I understand why Veronica had to burn Adrian's diary, what with his affair with her mother.