BY: VIC MATUS Speaking of terminal outcomes, Micah Mattix reviews Julian Barnes’s supposedy final novel Departure(s). https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R1q7!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28a92840-c2b2-4d0f-87c6-9319467f9b7e_695x491.jpeg The title announces that this is another novel about death—in this case Barnes’s own. It opens with the author learning in 2020 that he has a rare form of blood cancer: myeloproliferative neoplasm. The cancer is untreatable but ‘manageable,’ meaning it cannot be killed but probably won’t kill him if he undergoes regular treatments. He will likely die of some ordinary cause, though he finds this slightly disappointing: ‘He would rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else’s.’ “It’s not every day that one gets diagnosed with an untreatable but manageable cancer, and another writer might have jumped at the chance to write a long ‘elegiac’ novel about death. Not Barnes, who recently turned 80. He chastises himself for using ‘moribund adjectives’ and announces early on his intention to keep things short. As writers ‘get older,’ he notes, ‘either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase. Verdi once observed that in old age he “learned how to write less music.” And no, I’m not comparing myself to Verdi.’ “Of course, Barnes is comparing himself to Verdi, and he’s not wrong. His unflamboyant prose is similar in some ways to Verdi’s compositions: The apparent simplicity disguises the artistry required to create a voice (or melody) so seemingly natural. It is this voice, a persona of Barnes, that usually drives his novels forward, not character or plot, and it does so effectively here.”