Debating Ian McEwan's headgames. - By Geraldine Brooks and Erik Tarloff

Home

the book club

the book club: New books dissected over e-mail.

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Geraldine Brooks
to: Erik Tarloff

Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth: A Disappointed Fan

Posted Monday, March 18, 2002, at 8:24 PM ET

This week's reading.

Welcome to a new twist in an ongoing Slate experiment. For a few years now, we've been doing our book reviews as epistolary correspondences between two critics—usually big shots in whatever field the book is about. Now Slate is switching to a cast of 12 reviewers, chosen not for their expertise in any one area but because they're curious, sensible, and witty general readers whose criteria for evaluating a book are probably a lot like yours. Each week, you'll hear two of the folks below discussing a new book or group of books. The other Clubbers may interrupt them with comments and questions. And we hope you will, too, by submitting postings to "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum.

Participants include:

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author An American Story. Her next book, The End of Blackness, will be published in October 2003.

James Fallows, the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

Jodi Kantor, the New York editor of Slate.

Sarah Lyall, a correspondent in the London bureau of the New York Times.

Nell Minow, the editor of the Corporate Library, which covers corporate governance and performance, and writer of Movie Mom, reviews of films and videos.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.

Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Erik Tarloff, the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book. (Click here to buy Face-Time and here to buy The Man Who Wrote the Book.)

Ted Widmer, the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City and the co-author of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Marjorie Williams, the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Who are these people?

Buy the book.

Dear Erik,

Happily, we find ourselves substantially at odds on Atonement and, it seems, the entire McEwan oeuvre.

For unlike you, I am a fan: a longtime, slaveringly devoted fan. I read The Child in Time back in 1987 (thankfully before I had a child—for I do not think I could now bear to read that harrowing account of every parent's worst nightmare), immediately went in search of his earlier novel The Comfort of Strangers, and then waited for every subsequent book with mounting enthusiasm. I think McEwan is one of the four or five most consistently interesting, and occasionally dazzling, novelists currently writing. I'm not sure what you mean about his cleverness up until now achieving "rather small, almost trivial aesthetic effects," since what he has been about, in novels such as Child, Black Dogs, and Enduring Love, and even The Innocent has been nothing less than poking a relentless probe into the darkest corners of the human heart.

However, I think Atonement is a flabby novel. Unlike your good self, I feel no qualms in discussing the, to me, not very well-oiled plot, the fulcrum of which I could hear grinding and creaking from about Page 23 (enter Robbie: intelligent, kind, a working-class hero among the careless rich, i.e., the guy's got a bulls-eye painted on his forehead).

The first of the book's three parts unfolds, with the agonizing, fidget-in-your-seat pace of a Merchant-Ivory film, the story of a young girl with a fevered imagination who misinterprets some incidents in an adult sexual relationship and becomes so frenzied in her judgments of this misunderstood behavior that when a real sex crime (if I may say so, a credibility-straining one) takes place, she knowingly indicts the wrong man. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her act.

Here's the big flaw: The young girl, Briony, is supposed to be very bright. She is also supposed to be 13 years old. Yet all the behaviors and emotions McEwan ascribes to her—the frenzied writing of inane melodrama, the misconstruction of what she sees passing between her older sister and her friend, the betrayal of the letter—these are the acts and thoughts of a) an idiot; or b) a much, much younger child. Yes, yes, I know: This is pre-war England, not 21^st-century New York City, and childhood innocence lasted longer there and then than it does today. But to me, McEwan stumbles badly in his drawing of Briony's character and therefore pulls the first part of his book crashing messily around his head.

You admired the 37-page interregnum between Robbie's realization that he's sent the wrong letter and the revelation of the mistake's consequences; to you, "a virtuoso bit of literary architecture." To me, more like laying down a strip mall between a pair of Beaux Arts buildings; an irritating interruption—and a "look Mum, no hands" bit of showing off—that detracts from the slender pleasures of the plot.

I think there are way too many pages of carefully described French windows, rosewood music stands, and gilt mirrors (enuf floral wallpaper—eds.) before the novel suddenly, exhilaratingly soars in the final part of the three-part structure. You like McEwan's description of the warm stone, the crumbling stairs. Well, I'll see your McEwan stone and raise you an Ondaatje: "She smelled the stone, the cool moth scent of it." To me, McEwan's virtuosity has lain in his ability to imagine and describe horrible things, and it is when he takes us into the wartime hospital ward that, for me, the perfectly realized language and imagery arrive. "Using a pair of surgical tongs, she began carefully pulling away the sodden, congealed lengths of ribbon gauze from the cavity in the side of his face. When the last was out, the resemblance to the cut-away model they used in anatomy classes was only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen." If Paris is worth a mass, this is worth the slog through World of Interiors that McEwan earlier subjects us to. Death, says Billy Collins, is what gets poets up in the morning. Death, and the terrible, human preoccupation with it—imagining, avoiding, causing, grieving—this is McEwan's power alley. For me the sheer plod of the novel's first section is redeemed, in a Hopkins-like way, by the shine that McEwan obtains in the end.

Lest you think this is all the grouchy raving of a woman who has spent too long at bibulous literary festivals in two of the more interesting wine-producing regions of the Southern Hemisphere, I can only say that as a determined McEwan fan I bought and read the book when it was published in England last year. So my bile is not hangover-related.

All best,
Geraldine

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Geraldine Brooks
to: Erik Tarloff

Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth: A Disappointed Fan

Posted Monday, March 18, 2002, at 8:24 PM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Geraldine Brooks is author of Nine Parts of Desire and, most recently, Year of Wonders, a novel. Erik Tarloff is the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book and is a member of Slate's book-reviewing team.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

also in slate