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

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from: Erik Tarloff
to: Geraldine Brooks

More Matter, Less Art

Posted Tuesday, March 19, 2002, at 3:32 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 Geraldine,

I don't want us to get waylaid by disputes about novels not under discussion, but since you invoke The Child in Time—and cite it as a model of what a good Ian McEwan novel can be—let me explain briefly why I didn't much like it. This might shed some indirect light on our present disagreement.

The Child in Time takes as its premise perhaps the most horrific event a parent can imagine, the abduction of a small child. An idea like that is a guarantor of emotional power; no special skill is required to make the situation resonate for the reader. I don't mean to say it's necessarily a cheap idea—McEwan is never cheap—but still, it does at the very least buy its dramatic potential at an awfully good price. What follows, though, struck me as more the working-out of a literary conceit than an honest exploration of emotional consequences. Now, I read the book 15 years ago, so my memory may not be completely reliable, but as I recall, the novel's turning point consists of the extraction of a lorry driver from his crushed vehicle after a motorway accident. The description of this process, jaws of life and all, is executed in such a way as to resemble the forceps delivery of a baby. You know, a symbol of a new life starting and so on. To be honest, despite its cleverness (or rather, because of its cleverness), I was offended by the scene, and by its place in the author's dramatic schema. It seemed unworthy of the novel's potential; it seemed to bespeak the wrong sort of ambition. A little less art—or at least less self-conscious, less arty art—might have better served McEwan's artistic aims.

Whereas Atonement, for all its … you call it "showing off," and I won't cavil at that. But for all its virtuosity, and its manifest reveling in its own virtuosity, Atonement strikes me as a more emotionally honest book, truer to its premise, less wedded to literary effect.

I'm surprised you found the opening section dull. The pace is unquestionably slow, but then, the same may be said of Mahler's great adagio movements. The pace must be slow precisely because so much is happening, a great deal of it below the surface, and because every scene is informed by a multiplicity of tensions maintained in perfect equipoise. The magic of that 37-page interruption you scorn is that it isn't simply an interruption; it brims over with its own vivid dramas, with the poignancy (and understandable horribleness) of the Quincey children, with the lies at the heart of the Tallis marriage, with Cecilia's uncomprehending erotic anxiety, with the arrival of her beloved bland older brother and his bland but somehow still creepy chum, with Briony's narcissism and confusion and pre-adolescent hysteria. And, of course, with our knowledge that Robbie's obscene love letter is going to be delivered and read at any moment, a novelistic analogue to Chekhov's loaded gun, waiting to be fired. All of it held in exquisite, elegant balance.

I'm also surprised that you don't even mention the novel's second part, taking place in 1940, in which the wounded Robbie and two fellow tommies exhaustedly trek through the French countryside toward what seems like the desperate fantasy of evacuation at Dunkirk. If death, as you say, is McEwan's power alley, then it's hard to believe this densely rendered slog against death somehow failed to grip you. The surface is rich with incident and vivifying detail, and the subtext, with its class tensions and the ever-present (although superficially absent) weight of the main plot as it presses down on the beleaguered Robbie, is full of the subtle contrapuntal drama of which McEwan now seems a complete master.

But let me end this posting with a leap ahead to a section of the book about which you and I may actually agree. For all my enthusiasm, I do think the epilogue is a bit of a miscalculation, a piece of cleverness that's too clever by half, reminiscent of precisely those qualities I've resisted in earlier McEwan novels. Again, I don't want to give too much away, so I'll restrict myself to saying this: The epilogue implicitly suggests that everything preceding it is itself an element in the story it purports to tell, as well as a grand gesture providing the book its title. I found this sort of circular structure distancing, alienating, a device calling far too much attention to itself. It breaches the fourth wall without adequate justification and without sufficient payoff.

The damage done is relatively slight, though. Even if it keeps Atonement from absolute perfection, the novel still represents, to me, Ian McEwan's arrival as one of the major writers of our time. I'll happily settle for that.

Fondly,
Erik

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Erik Tarloff
to: Geraldine Brooks

More Matter, Less Art

Posted Tuesday, March 19, 2002, at 3:32 PM ET

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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.

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