Lessons

My harsh judgment on this Ian McEwan novel softened somewhat in the last 100 pages. In draft, my first sentence was: "This big fat novel is a big fat dud." Like other novels by this author it is a work of vanishingly small ambitions, despite its scope and length (150,000 words, I'd guess). This sentence refers to the main character of the book, a typical middling Englishman of McEwan's generation: "How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision." Novels, as Mario Vargas Llosa has written, should give the reader an intensified version of reality; it is barely worth the effort to read a book that simply reflects our day-to-day life.

Early on, the character's wife deserts him and becomes an acclaimed novelist, and it is those novels the reader wishes he were reading, not this one. Eventually, though, the poignancy and haze of melancholy lulled me into a kind of pleasant funk as I followed this unexceptional man into his twilight years, and for that McEwan deserves some praise.