SOURCE: “Invasions of Privacy,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 45, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 331–38.

In the following excerpt, Flower praises Barnes's Talking It Over, stating, “Few novels seem as authentic and lifelike as this one.”

Fiction, especially modern fiction, licenses a certain amount of prurience. It invites us into the mind of a character or a narrator, and lets us indulge ourselves there rather freely. We are pleasantly exempt from the risks of any real intimacy. Readers are supposed to be eavesdroppers and spies, of a certain kind at least. Filmgoers have to confront their own voyeurism at some point, morally, but readers of Lambert Strether or Lily Briscoe or Quentin Compson are not likely to have that problem. Just looking, thanks. In the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom watches Gertie MacDowell on the beach while we hear by means of internal monologue the cliché-ridden contents of her soul...