Pulse  by Julian Barnes  240PP, JONaTHaN CaPE, ?16.99 T?14.99 (PLUS ?1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 ****  In an interview a few years back, Julian Barnes described talking to a cross-Channel reader about the popularity of his books in France. Over there he is the only foreigner to have scooped the M?dicis and the Femina, two of the top literary prizes: and presumably, speculated Barnes, this interest had something to do with the French strand in his books.  Besides the obvious contenders, such as Flaubert's Parrot and Cross Channel, several of his other works also draw inspiration from French literature and society. Certainly in England he's well known, sometimes to the point of suspicion, as a "European" writer. But not a bit of it, said his interlocutor: here in France we like your stuff because it's so English.  Behind the jolly story of vive la diff?rence lies a serious point. Of course, when it comes to France, Barnes knows his stuff to a slightly intimidating degree. ("Spare us your Froggy wisdom for one night," implores one dinner party guest in Pulse, his latest collection of stories.) Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), his cross between a family memoir and a tactical literary strike on his fear of death, draws heavily on the work of the novelist and diarist Jules Renard, while a few years before that Barnes also translated a littleknown work by the 19th-century writer alphonse Daudet. and there he was in the LRB not a month ago, delivering an essay on Flaubert in translation.  But the inspiration that Barnes takes from his most conspicuous influences, Flaubert and his prot?g? Maupassant, is also crucial to what makes him so good on the English. along with that other great Europhile writer VS Pritchett, he realised early on that the best tricks of the French proto-modernists - half-buried irony, tactical selfeffacement, a sharp ear for coded language and a penchant for intricately prosaic detail - were also those that lent themselves best to describing British social life.  Barnes's precise, acerbic novels and stories are a million miles from the state-of-the-nation stuff that tends to dominate modern writing about "Britishness": but in the fictional works about the psychology of these isles, they're very near the top.  Pulse is Barnes's 17th book, and as a collection of stories it lacks some of the structural tightness that made earlier volumes, in particular the excellent Cross Channel, so impressive. But many of these pieces are still masterclasses in the form, full of the sidelong wit and intelligence that make the writer one of our most consistently deft short-form stylists.  The collection splits into two parts. The first is composed of stories with a contemporary setting, yoked by a quartet of pieces under the title "at Phil and Joanna's", which describe a sequence of dinner parties attended by several married couples in their fifties and sixties. The setting is contemporary; the tone, as so often in Barnes's work, an elusive mixture of lampoon and sincerity.  Topics under discussion at this middle-class version of the Symposium include "whether the Labour Party was any longer distinguishable from the Conservatives, the suitability of London's streets for bendy buses, the likelihood of an al-Qaeda attack on the 2012 Olympics and the effect of global warming on English viticulture", as well as social truth and falsehood, the fear of approaching death, and, in true Platonic style, "what we don't talk about... Love".  Brief introductions and excipients apart, each of these Phil and Joanna stories is composed entirely of dialogue. Drama is a form Barnes has always resisted, shrewdly observing that "the history of the theatre is littered with novelistic failures": but these excellently turned conversations, dense with non sequiturs, interruptions and concealed humour, give a glimpse of the playwright he might have been.  Interleaved with the prose playlets are denser pieces, most with a distinctly autumnal feel. The opening piece, "East Wind", takes place on one of those bleak East anglian shinglescapes in November, as Vernon, an estate agent, shuffles his way into an affair with a waitress in a seaside caf?.  What begins as a post-divorce fling soon edges into a relationship of power and control, as Vernon, obsessed with the details of his lover's previous life, makes his way towards a horrid revelation.  In "Gardener's World", a childless couple's divisions and rapprochements are figured in their patch of kitchen garden. and in the devastating "Marriage Lines", a grieving husband looks for comfort on the tiny Hebridean island where he and his late wife used to go on holiday, but only finds that "he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him."  Several of these stories will have been written after the death of Barnes's wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, in 2008. But setting aside "Marriage Lines" and certain passages of the Phil and Joanna stories, there's not much here for biography-prospectors or griefvultures.  Certainly the tone of this collection is darker than much of Barnes's other work, but then Nothing to be Frightened Of was hardly free of shadows either: still, many of these stories might have been written by a different author from the Barnes who wrote the glorious, tripping satire England, England.  Consider the endings, some of which are delivered in a downbeat tone that borders on the vicious. "He thought about this for a while, and chose direct debit." "Jane sighed, reached for the remote and change