Ian McEwan, Saturday
I approached Saturday with caution because of its rave reviews, but I found this novel entirely engrossing, genuinely interesting, original, and moving. Part of the surprise it held for me was Henry...
View ArticleA Reader’s Responsibilities
Ian McEwan’s recent letter in The Guardian points to an aspect of criticism that is perhaps underestimated by those advocating a turn away from academic approaches towards more ‘aesthetic’ or...
View ArticleRereading Atonement
In my latest post about This Week in My Classes, I spent so much time on Gwendolen and Daniel Deronda that I never got around to Briony and Atonement. I mentioned there, though, that I was struck by at...
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Ian McEwan, Solar
Solar is everything I expected of a new novel by Ian McEwan, who may be the smartest contemporary writer I read: clever, timely, acerbic, well-written, intensely readable. The problem is that those...
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Monday Miscellany: Friday Night Lights, South Riding, Ian McEwan, & a Musical...
We’re finishing out a four-day weekend here based on a holiday we don’t even celebrate in its hopelessly commercial secular form–Maddie is the only one of us who’d really appreciate Easter Bunny stuff...
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“The bare outline of a useful story”: Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
If Sweet Tooth were not by Ian McEwan (author, as is stressed on the cover of my edition, of Atonement — one of my very favorite recent [that is, post-2000] novels) would I have been disappointed in...
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“Meaning”: Ian McEwan, The Children Act
She thought her responsibilities ended at the courtroom walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could...
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