NONFICTION

So what's on the mind of novelist Julian Barnes these days? Death. In fact, he has been worrying about it on a daily basis most of his life "without acquiring any mellowness or philosophy," he writes in his new memoir of melancholia. Hence the irony of its title: "Nothing to Be Frightened Of." As he observes, the phrase takes on a darker meaning when the word "nothing" is emphasized.

Barnes writes that he became aware of his mortality at the age of 13 or 14. The experience, he writes beautifully, was "like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant's setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world."

A wake-up call, indeed. And the alarm keeps going off, night after night.

"Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting 'Oh no Oh No OH NO' in an endless wail, the horror of the moment -- the minutes -- overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist self-pity," Barnes writes.

Religion has offered Barnes no solace. His parents were nonbelievers, and they steadfastly avoided exposing their children to Christianity.

"I was never baptised, never sent to Sunday school," Barnes writes. "I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was."

Even so, Barnes' stance on religion has softened over the years. An atheist at 20, he writes that he began calling himself an agnostic at 50. (He is now 62.) At this rate, Barnes will be a bishop before he's 300.

"Nothing to Be Frightened Of" isn't a conventional memoir, and it certainly isn't an autobiography, the preternaturally private Barnes reassures us. Yes, he mulls over his childhood and his parents' deaths for details relevant to the topics at hand (death, religion and the fear of nothingness), but Barnes meanders equally long among writers whom he particularly admires.

Chief among them is Jules Renard ("[O]ne of my dead, French, nonblood relatives," Barnes tells us), who once wrote, "I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."

Barnes also turns to his brother Jonathan for clarification about childhood memories (although they rarely agree on the details or the value of memories in general), as well as for critiques of his "amateur, do-it-yourself" theories.

Jonathan, a professional philosopher, is often unimpressed. In response to his brother's statement, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," he offers a single word: "Soppy." Later, Barnes notes that his brother enjoys wearing an outfit styled to mirror 17th-century garb, complete with brocade waistcoat, knee breeches, stockings and buckle shoes. Touché!

Barnes is a virtuosic prose stylist with a dry wit, and the urge to applaud his agility arises often. Here, for example, he describes a priest he met while teaching at a Catholic school in France: "Among their number was a certain Père Hubert de Go?sbriand, a dim if good-hearted fellow who might have acquired his grand, aristocratic Breton name in a raffle, so little did it fit him."

Even Barnes' tossed-off imagery amuses. His family's first television set "was the size of a dwarf's armoire, and guzzled furniture polish," he writes; later, mulling his life-after-death options, he writes that cryonics "is a sad old man sitting by a leaky fridge hoping that a tragedy can have a happy ending."

While he's on the subject of secular resurrection, Barnes asks this favor of his readers: "Visit me and scrape the lichen from my name with the key of your rental car; then propose me for secular resurrection from a chunk of my DNA, though not -- I hope you don't mind my insisting on this point -- before the technical process really has been perfected."

If it weren't for the pesky subject of death, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" would be an unalloyed joy, a frolic of no consequence. But I suppose that's how Barnes feels about life in general.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.