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 Perowne’s cautiously supportive attitude towards the war in Iraq. I’ve become so accustomed to anti-war perorations from literary luminaries that I had no expectation that McEwan would offer anything different (I should have known better); the enormous uncertainty, the high stakes, the intolerable complacency of a pacifism that is content to leave Saddam in power, the difficulty of separating ends from means when responding to the call to arms made by leaders whose real motivations are surely mixed…I think McEwan did justice to the complexity of the judgments–the mental and moral balancing acts–called for by these circumstances. I thought the use of “Dover Beach” as a frame and model was brilliant: I can’t believe I didn’t recognize Perowne’s situation at the beginning as analogous to that of Arnold’s speaker until the poem appeared directly in the action. I’m curious about how or whether the initial encounter between Perowne and Baxter stands as its own analogue to the international situation: surely it does, and so Perowne’s feelings of responsibility for the violent consequences also have some application to the wider issues, including perhaps his stance towards the invasion of Iraq. Why is he a neurosurgeon? At what level is the fascinating issue of the relationship between physical and mental states raised by Perowne’s work on the brain also part of either the problem or the solution he posits for the world that lacks ‘certitude’ or ‘help from pain’? The turn from the window to the lover in “Dover Beach” has been criticized as an objectification of the companion, sought not as an individual but as solace, as a solution to the ignorant clash of armies. Has McEwan avoided that solipsistic impulse on the part of his protagonist? Does his family have the solidity Arnold’s love lacks? It is not credible in a simple realistic way that Baxter should be turned aside from violence by poetry, but how far is McEwan appealing to us to see some poetic essence (yearning, as Henry considers it?) as the saving grace in a world racked with ‘confused alarms of struggle and of flight’? The novel seems far too political to be satisfied with an aesthetic turn away from the clash itself. McEwan’s writing here seemed flawless to me, with all the richness of detail that made Atonement dazzling in its own way, but without the tendency I felt in that novel to abstraction or aesthetic self-indulgence: this book reads as if all of its details are necessary, and as if it is equally necessary that they be clear and concrete.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall
It’s odd and a bit disconcerting to see that a category of “9/11” fiction is emerging, but of course it is only right and natural, too, that this moment in our history should become part of our literature. The Writing on the Wall seemed to me a delicate, even elegant, engagement with the big issues of loss, survival, and recovery that broke over America that morning…delicate in the sense that the horror and pathos is understated, elegant in that these emotions are brought out through recurrent touches like the ‘Missing’ posters so poignantly itemized. As McEwan evokes so powerfully in Saturday as well as his essays written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most of us are bystanders at the crises of history, and yet even that witnessing creates change in our lives–perhaps most irrevocably, in our thinking about our lives. I think this sense of how we think differently is a big part of what Schwartz’s novel is about, as her characters (so distinct, so individual, with their own complex pasts) are shaken up by the visitation of terror on the once familiar streetscapes of their city. Is this really a novel “about” 9/11, in the way that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is? I’m not sure, though both novels are certainly about Renata’s favourite storyline, ‘Transformed Lives’. Twin sisters, twin towers: how far, thematically, are we supposed to pursue these parallel stories of ruin?
Swallow-Flights: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
First of all, The Year of Magical Thinking is a strange kind of book. It is intensely personal, and thus poignant and compelling in the intimacy of its revelations about Didion’s grief, but thus also the reading experience seemed to me oddly voyeuristic–which made me puzzle over why someone would want to publish such an account. I didn’t notice that this issue is ever explicitly addressed, though I suppose we can fill in some good guesses, such as the therapeutic effects of writing it all out, the opportunity to pay a kind of literary tribute to her husband, or just the idea that writing is, after all, what a writer does.
The book is full of mundane details, those that arise because of what Didion evocatively refers to as vortices, moments that propel her into chains of memories. The very ordinariness of life becomes extraordinary when you realize, as the events of this year bring Didion to realize, that all is subject to dramatic, irrevocable change without warning: you sit down to dinner, as she says, and life as you know it ends. In such reflections lie the book’s message for its readers, the ideas about the fragility of everything and everybody we take for granted. These ideas seem commonplace themselves, and yet through the very particularity and idiosyncracy of her account Didion gives them new urgency. “I didn’t appreciate it enough” is one of her refrains.
While there is something inevitably egotistic about supposing there’s an audience for such a personal account of a year in her life, writing of all kinds always has at least a shade of such arrogance. And as the many quotations and allusions woven into her text remind us, loss has often become literary. Didion never quotes “In Memoriam,” but many moments in this book reminded me of Tennyson’s image of his own verses as “short swallow-flights of song that dip / their wings in tears and skim away.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
I did not find this novel as engaging and exhilarating as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close–not as a whole, anyway, though it was impossible to resist the Ukrainian translator’s brilliantly comic and touching narrative. I think it would help me to read some commentaries by other reviewers about the fable-like story that accompanies the fictionalized Jonathan’s quest: I became impatient with its elaborate artifice and tired of trying to grasp what it was saying about the history of Jewish communities. I did discern (I think!) that it offers a kind of allegorical account of the way a community builds meaning around tradition, myth, and relationships; and I felt that perhaps the element of disbelief it evokes in readers (or in this reader, anyway) was related to the inability of the inhabitants of the fabulous village to understand the direction of their own history and, ultimately, the fate that awaits them. Here it seemed interestingly linked to other Holocaust stories (such as Night) that similarly rely on dramatic irony to generate tension and mourning in their readers: we know, or imagine, only too well what lies in the characters’ futures. Here as in his second novel, Foer seems preoccupied with the proximity of love to grief and suffering. If there’s a redemptive message in either book, I’d say it is that the pain becomes worthwhile (if you can say that) because it is a measure of love. Suffering seems in both books to be what makes love most tangible: if this perspective is essentially a tragic one, I suppose that is the consequence of setting these books around human catastrophes.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, which seemed as generous and humane as I expected from its reviews, and from the comments of other readers I had talked to about it. On the other hand, though I have heard the term ‘Dickensian’ applied to it–perhaps because of its length, and the diversity and eccentricity of its cast of characters–White Teeth struck me as more worthy of the ‘loose baggy monster’ epithet than such genuine Dickensian candidates as Bleak House or Little Dorrit. Where was the unifying pattern, whether of plot, imagery, or idea? Compare the climactic (?) shooting incident near the end of White Teeth with Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, for example. While the former was high in drama and yet somehow comic, and while it brought elements of the story around to a kind of neat circularity, the latter (despite being entirely outrageous in realist terms, despite Dickens’s famous defense of it) is much more richly emblematic of the social and moral crises of its novel. Though I would not have expected to say quite this about Dickens, his is by far the more compelling moment aesthetically as well as intellectually.
Novel Readings 