I made it through another novel--a landmark event in the life of a mom continually chasing after a toddler, a mom who is already half asleep by the time her little one hits the sack at 8 pm...I'm reading maybe two novels a month, at best.
It certainly wasn't the worst novel I've ever read. But in terms of my desire to sink deeply into an interesting story, a story that would pull me completely out of the daily routine of diaper changes, baby books and toys, and constant instructions and corrections to a little boy who wants to get the most out of every single minute of every day, I was bitterly disappointed.
The novel was Saturday by Ian McEwan. An interesting premise: a talented neurosurgeon wakes up early one morning and sees a plane in flames shooting across the horizon, and has flashbacks to 9/11. It also happens to be the day of the largest worldwide anti-war rally in history; he starts ruminating about world events and the degree to which they penetrate all of our personal lives these days; then he goes back to bed and carries on with his rather ordinary, apolitical life, playing squash, visiting his mother in a care home, buying food for the evening meal which he will prepare, and so forth. Only, an unexpected confrontation with a hoodlum on the way to his squash game shakes up his quiet Saturday in various ways.
The entire novel takes place on one long, eventful day. McEwan has been called the "master of the defining moment": he often looks at ordinary (or at least, unexceptional) people whose lives are suddenly and irrevocably altered by one cataclysmic event. Only in this case, the neurosurgeon's life doesn't seem to have been altered at all. And the characters were so plastic and two-dimensional that I lost interest in the story about sixty pages into the novel.
Why did I need to know every detail about various surgical procedures the main character had performed in recent days? I admire greatly the precision and clarity of McEwan's descriptions, but he often crosses beyond the realm of precision into the realm of self-indulgence. Or perhaps he wanted to depict a pompous, self-indulgent protagonist. Well, he succeeded, and I only grew more and more tired of this novel as this self-indulgent protagonist made his way through more and more uninteresting adventures with his set of carefully circumscribed, conventional biases intact.
In other words, nothing happens in this novel. Nothing, that is, in the realm of shifting consciousnesses or clashing ideologies--which is at least 70 percent of the reason, I thought, to read any novel, any story. At one point McEwan implies that we are all living in a "community of anxiety," and that "when anything can happen, everything matters" (though it's the protagonist thinking these thoughts, not McEwan, it seems to reflect an overarching theme of the book)--I realize that I was supposed to feel a sense of growing anxiety as the novel progresses through several anxious moments in the neurosurgeon's day; but one is constantly reminded of how successful he is, as well as everyone in his family--there are, really, no cracks in their armor whatsoever; and I was just struck at how neatly McEwan wraps everything up in the end--in a way that is not entirely implausible, but that left me just wishing that I hadn't spent so much time with his uninteresting, unevolving characters.
I tried to read Atonement once but found it impossible to get past the first, oh, sixty pages or so (yes, 60 pages seems to be my limit for uninteresting story-telling). I will try again; but I begin to suspect that McEwan does not know how to get past his own sparkling verbiage to create living, breathing characters and a plot which has more than shock value. Which seems to be the problem with a lot of contemporary novelists. And now that I've used up most of my precious free moments at the end of this Sunday writing about McEwan, I'm going to steep myself in other reading material for the next thirty minutes or so, then call it a day.
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