Barnes's fiction has been acclaimed by readers as different as Carlos Fuentes and Philip Larkin; reviewers and interviewers sum him up with praise such as Mark Lawson's claim that he "writes like the teacher of your dreams: jokey, metaphorical across both popular and unpopular culture, epigrammatic." On the other hand, he has been subjected to a persistent argument that the books he calls novels are really collections of short stories or essays or some other nonfiction genre and are only "marketed" as novels. Although he is regularly called "erudite" and "philosophical," he is also witty and humane; as David Coward explains in the Times Literary Supplement (5 October 1984), "The modern British novel finds it easy to be clever and comic. Barnes also manages that much harder thing: he succeeds in communicating genuine emotion without affectation or embarrassment." Barnes's work has stimulated considerable critical discussion over its allegedly postmodern traits, including questions about whether it is dangerously relativistic or nihilistic. That his novels have never won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious award for British fiction--although Flaubert's Parrot was one of the six finalists for the prize in 1984--has baffled some observers.
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