Short Stories: The eponymous Lemon Table appears as a prop in the tellingly named 'The Silence', the last story in this collection, the cranky monologue of an ageing composer, writes Mary Morrissy.
It's the table at a restaurant where, the narrator tells us, his friends gather and where it is obligatory for the diners to talk about death. And, indeed, true to the contrivance, most of these stories boast an elder lemon or, if not, a mid-year's meditation on mortality.
In 'A Short History of Hairdressing', we get three snapshots of Gregory Cartwright's life as seen through the prism of coiffure. The barber's shop as a boy, the hairdresser's as a young man, the girlie salon as a middle-aged man:
The salon had the mixed-ward atmosphere of a jolly out-patients' department where no one had anything serious. Still, he could handle it; social apprehensions were now long gone. The small triumphs of maturity.
Barnes catalogues minutely all the theatrical rituals of the trade, including that final flourish - the mirror offered to the customer with a rear view of the handiwork. After years of meek assent, Gregory firmly says no. It is the only rebellion in a life thoroughly hemmed in by a timid conformity, and yet every salon-phobic will cheer for this small act of defiance.
Similarly, we salute the two campus widows of 'The Things We Know', one English, one American, who maintain an uneasy friendship despite the fact that both of them have knowledge about the other's spouse that could destroy their cosy post-mortem reminiscences. What makes it so affecting is the rather banal malevolence Barnes suggests beneath the surface. Equally, the vindictive outbursts of an Alzheimer's patient in 'Appetite' and the mysterious inner life of elderly parents in 'The Fruit Cage'.
Barnes is a witty, urbane writer and though he covers much ground here - 18th-century Sweden, an encounter between Turgenev and Tolstoy - his discursive talent feels hobbled by the form. An anthology so firmly anchored to theme means that some of these stories - 'Vigilance', for example, about a 60-year-old gay concert-goer who wages a vendetta against coughers - seem idea-driven rather than character-led, and end up tonally inhabiting grumpy-old-man territory.
Not so 'Knowing French', in which an endearingly batty 84-year-old nursing home resident, worthy of Alan Bennett, strikes up a correspondence with an author - a certain Dr Barnes - whose work she has discovered in the local library. In this way, Barnes playfully inserts a version of himself into the narrative - though we never get to see his replies. But the voice of Sylvia Winstanley, eccentric and incisive by turns, leaps from the page.
It is four years since Barnes's last novel, Love Etc, and since then he has concentrated on essay-writing and translating Alphonse Daudet's classic In the Land of Pain. The Lemon Table marks a welcome return to fiction, even if there is the sneaking feeling that they are really 11 stories in search of a novelist.
Barnes has always played fast and loose with the novel form, but in these stories - a view through the small end of the telescope, if you will - his normally rangy, intellectual scope seems a little cooped-up. Like Flaubert's parrot caged.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic
The Lemon Table. By Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, 213pp. £16.99
Julian Barnes will read with Neil Jordan at Cúirt in Galway on April 24th at 4 p.m. in the Town Hall Theatre