Sense of an ending
Many literary careers have been made, and doubtless more will be, by conveying the inwardness, awkwardness and social anxiety that constrict British mores like a very tightly wrapped cummerbund. This suffocating self-consciousness lies at the heart of British humor, whether in the farcical scramble of trying to keep up appearances or the risible but sincere terror of being mocked — which sniping English schoolboys still fear, even when they’re grown up, bald and 70. It takes a brave author to mine this dynamic for pathos instead of sniggers. Evelyn Waugh did it in “Brideshead Revisited,” as did Philip Larkin in “Jill.” (Think of the scholarship boy John Kemp, who “tingled and shuddered” with embarrassment when his posh Oxford roommate’s friend caught him looking at her with desire.) And Kazuo Ishiguro did it in “The Remains of the Day,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 1989. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, “The Sense of an Ending” — which has just won the 2011 Booker...