Heartbreaking tale of love, regret

How do you express a regret? Do you put your heart on your sleeve and confess it? Do you play lawyer and coolly assess it from a distance? Or do you try to bargain and rationalize, pointing to all the extenuating circumstances surrounding your mistake?

For Paul, the narrator of Julian Barnes’ heartbreaking 13th novel, “The Only Story,” the answer is “all of the above” and more: He writes as if in a hall of mirrors to make sense of his young, callow self. When he was 19 — five decades earlier — he fell for Susan, a 48-year-old woman in a loveless marriage. That in itself wasn’t the error, though the May-December romance did scandalize the suburban London tennis club where they met.

Regardless, their actions have consequences: The bulk of the novel turns on Susan’s rapid descent into alcoholism, and Paul’s inability to rescue her from it.

Barnes subtly but powerfully signals how badly Paul wants to absolve himself by having him tell “The Only Story” in a variety of moods and tenses. The novel opens in the first person, as if he were delivering a confession. But midway through it slips into the second person, as if to recruit the reader as an accomplice. And he addresses Susan’s final days in a somber and distant third person, as if this were all something that happened to somebody else.

What’s missing amid Paul’s hand-wringing is Susan’s own perspective: Why, exactly, did she leave her husband to live with an emotionally stunted teenager? The usual thrills of lust and freedom that are typical of such stories are absent; she was abused, but not without other options. Barnes suggests she was desperate enough to exploit Paul’s pliability, though not without a hint of warning.

In other words, they had something that is true of every love story: Paul and Susan were made for each other. She was emotionally scarred and desired an unwitting enabler; he had enough of a savior complex to contentedly take on the role. Their love is never in doubt. But neither is his sense of helplessness, and Paul flails throughout the novel to explain his actions (or inaction), sometimes desperately.

It’s a cliche to say that love is inexplicable, but the strength of “The Only Story” is Barnes’ willingness to explore the nature of that inexplicability, how it makes for honeymoons and tragedies alike.