Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Just finished McEwan's latest. It's terrible. "A carefully crafted lesson plan," Walter Kirns calls it in the Sunday Book Review. I share the same judgment of the novel, but Kirns puts it more witheringly and wittily than I ever can. Here is a choice passage: What makes “Solar” such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges [of plotting] so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess. This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else. The tip-off is Beard, who’s endowed by his creator with precisely the vices — apathy, slothfulness, gluttony and hypocrisy — that afflict the society the book condemns, threatenin...

One day in the life of. It has been done before. Many times. Joyce. Woolf. Bellow. And more recently, three times in the same novel, The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Why did McEwan choose to follow the same scheme when he is on record for criticizing his earlier work as too schematic? When Henry Perowne--neurosurgeon, husband, son, father--returns at the end of the novel to the foot of the marital bed, the same place from which he began the novel and the day, the neatness can feel less classical than cliched.  Yes, the world has changed since 9/11 (or so Americans argue); the change demands a chronicler with a finger on its pulse. But why choose the lens of a day through which to focus one's vision of a changed world? Why make playing squash, visiting  a demented mother, and shopping for seafood bear the weight of the world?  I think McEwan does not so much want to add to this genre as to quarrel with his predecessors. In adopting a single limited point of view, instead of a stream...

identification / identification I think I will identify myself as a guest. An alien is so outlandish. I am your guest. In the house you describe as a beautiful book about damn ugly people, I live as Nick Guest. I ache for class and mourn for Robbie in Atonement . To Howard’s End I come as Leonard, pity’s guest. There are house rules for a vacation orgasm. The mind closes the doors softly like a good guest. My friend is buying his first house in New Hope. He has invited me to be his weekend guest. The good hosts in The Odyssey throw a great feast while stories are a grateful answer from the guest. Sometimes Jee is Odysseus, sometimes Penelope. Homer, if not a home, makes me a host and guest.

TNY Feb 9 & 16, 2009 from Claudia Roth Pierpont's article "Another Country" on James Baldwin: Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa--a part of the world he was not ready to confront--he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. * It is an incongruous image, the black American writer in Istanbul, but Baldwin returned to the city many time during the next ten years, making it a second or third not-quite-home. . . . Istanbul was unlike any place Baldwin had been before and, more to the point, unlike the places that had defined both the color of his skin and his sexuality as shameful problems. Whatever Turkey's history of prejudice, divisions there did not have an automatic black/white racial cast. . . . In fact, during his first days in the city, he was nearly giddy at the sight of men in the street openly holding hands...

This one has the feel of an archetype, with its attendant strengths and weaknesses for a novella. The domineering but insecure father. The loving but helpless mother. The capable oldest daughter who takes on the mothering when both parents die suddenly. The second-oldest son browbeaten by dad, lusting for the sister, masturbating constantly. The third child, another daughter, the studious and sensitive one. The youngest boy who likes dressing up as a girl, and holding hands with his male play-mate. The archetype gives the family drama a strong sense of inevitability but the predictability at the same time weakens the drama. Part 1 begins with its promised end, the father's death coinciding with Jack's first wet climax. It is a beautiful demonstration of how a son comes of age by killing (indirectly) his father, but, despite its sure narrative and precise language, or, perhaps, because of them, it does not escape the feel of being a demonstration. Part 2 is messier, within the p...

This is how I know I have read a masterpiece: I walked out of my apartment, and my neighborhood seemed far less real than the world of Robbie Turner, Cecilia Tallis and Brioni Tallis. I loved them, and feared for them more fiercely than I had for anyone real. The love and fear came from an imagination so thoroughly awakened that its previous life had the quality of a dream. I think Alan Hollinghurst is a greater prose stylist than McEwan. The Line of Beauty has passages of such lyrical, yes, beauty, exquisite passages that Atonement could not match. McEwan sometimes resorts to commonplaces. Sunlight is described as a "parallelogram," a "wedge," and then "geometry." But McEwan is not after beauty per se; his prose probes and delineates the subtle psychology of his characters. Many reviewers compare him rightly to Jane Austen for his strength in this regard, though McEwan is, I think, fundamentally non-ironic. Who said that there are only three literary mo...