Review Consensus: Not quite a consensus, but the majority are impressed
From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age
"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist
"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times
"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman
"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People
"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon
"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator
"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald
"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph
"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph
"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.
McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.
As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)
On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.
Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.
After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).
There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.
Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel
On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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Links: On Chesil Beach:
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
John Updike has died this week.....
John Updike: The sultan of suburbia
By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.
By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
David |Mitchell ~ His next novel....
Quite a few people at the Book club have asked me if I knew what David Mitchell was writing currently............
I picked this up from Wiki..........
Mitchell's next book, currently known as "NAGASAKI" [3], will be an historical novel about Dejima, the man-made island in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour that was built to house Dutch traders in the 17th century. Having just finished five months of research in the Netherlands, Mitchell says that the biggest challenge will be what to omit from this complex story. "For over two centuries", he said, "the Dutch were the only white people allowed to see inside Japan". No one was allowed on or off the island except for tradesmen, translators and prostitutes. "Except", he said, "every four years when the head of the trading post made the trek to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay his respects to the Shogun." Mitchell plans to contrast Shogunate Japan with the Napoleonic era in Europe, he said. Of particular interest is the fact that while the Netherlands ceased to exist for a while after Napoleon annexed it, the Dutch flag still flew in Dejima.
[edit] Novels
Ghostwritten, 1999
number9dream, 2001
Cloud Atlas, 2004
Black Swan Green, 2006
Untitled De-jima Novel, 2009
[edit] Further reading
Mitchell, D. (2003). "January Man", Best of Young British Novelists 2003, Granta. Retrieved on 24 September 2007.
Linklater, A. (2007-09-22). "The author who was forced to learn wordplay", Life & Style, The Guardian. Retrieved on 23 September 2007.
[edit] References
^ Bold Type: Essay by David Mitchell
^ David Mitchell - The TIME 100 - TIME
^ http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20070624a1.html
I picked this up from Wiki..........
Mitchell's next book, currently known as "NAGASAKI" [3], will be an historical novel about Dejima, the man-made island in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour that was built to house Dutch traders in the 17th century. Having just finished five months of research in the Netherlands, Mitchell says that the biggest challenge will be what to omit from this complex story. "For over two centuries", he said, "the Dutch were the only white people allowed to see inside Japan". No one was allowed on or off the island except for tradesmen, translators and prostitutes. "Except", he said, "every four years when the head of the trading post made the trek to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay his respects to the Shogun." Mitchell plans to contrast Shogunate Japan with the Napoleonic era in Europe, he said. Of particular interest is the fact that while the Netherlands ceased to exist for a while after Napoleon annexed it, the Dutch flag still flew in Dejima.
[edit] Novels
Ghostwritten, 1999
number9dream, 2001
Cloud Atlas, 2004
Black Swan Green, 2006
Untitled De-jima Novel, 2009
[edit] Further reading
Mitchell, D. (2003). "January Man", Best of Young British Novelists 2003, Granta. Retrieved on 24 September 2007.
Linklater, A. (2007-09-22). "The author who was forced to learn wordplay", Life & Style, The Guardian. Retrieved on 23 September 2007.
[edit] References
^ Bold Type: Essay by David Mitchell
^ David Mitchell - The TIME 100 - TIME
^ http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20070624a1.html
Message from Pat.......
There is a slight change in the order of books for reading because of people being away when their book was going to be discussed.
So now we shall be discussing:
On Chesil Beech by Ian McEwan at our 20th February meeting.........
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson at the 20th March meeting............
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Alborn will be discussed on the 17th April ...........
Mutant Messages Down Under by Marlo Morgan to be discussed on 15th May.
Best wishes, Pat
So now we shall be discussing:
On Chesil Beech by Ian McEwan at our 20th February meeting.........
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson at the 20th March meeting............
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Alborn will be discussed on the 17th April ...........
Mutant Messages Down Under by Marlo Morgan to be discussed on 15th May.
Best wishes, Pat
Friday, January 16, 2009
Some critical Reviews of "On Chesil Beach"....
A Talented Wordcrafter Describes an Improbable Honeymoon, July 6, 2007
By
Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book. If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it. The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate. Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do. Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part. Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
What might have been, July 4, 2007
By
Ann Nigel James (Menemsha, Martha's Vineyard, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As an Ian McEwan virgin, I was eagerly anticipating my tryst with this book--but it turned out to be as disappointing and unsatisfying as Edward's and Florence's wedding night (well, maybe not quite). McEwan does not merely ignore, but actually reverses, the wise "show, don't tell" advice about fiction writing. In his expository chapters about Edward's and Florence's backgrounds and courtship, he doesn't let us see much of them interacting and conversing with each other and their families; instead of fleshing them out in these sections, he gives us their inner thoughts, a panoply of geographical place names that won't mean much to readers outside the U.K. and a list of gourmet vegetables that Edward tastes for the first time at his future in-laws' dinner table: courgettes, aubergines and mangetouts. Conversely, in the play-by-play account of the wedding-night bedroom activities, McEwan "shows" each frame of the encounter with exhaustive, sometimes clinical detail. In this area, less is often more, and although it requires greater effort to write about physical intimacy with subtlety and allusion, it can still evoke the same intense reaction in the reader--without getting the sheets so messy. Do we really need words like "perineum" and the focus on the lone pubic hair that has escaped from Florence's knickers? Since I've already given away my copy of "On Chesil Beach," I can't use exact quotes here, but suffice it to say that the description of Edward's sticky, gummy ejaculate adhering to Florence's knees and chin is over the top--almost as if the author is trying to turn off the reader as well as Florence. The story could have ended effectively and poignantly after the couple's hopeless, near-tragic postcoital verbal battle on the beach, perhaps with a few closing thoughts from the author on the sadness and might-have-been-ness of it all. But instead, there is an anticlimactic final chapter consisting of what sound like afterthoughts, hurriedly recounting Edward's meanderings over the next 40 years. Somewhat mystifyingly, McEwan does not mention Florence's personal life after the traumatic wedding night, although he has paid equal attention to both characters until this last chapter. He does, however, offer an oblique but important clue. In a recent review of "On Chesil Beach," Christopher Hitchens concludes dismissively--and erroneously--that "Florence, a classically trained violinist, devotes the remainder of her life to a rather spinsterish role in a string quartet." Not at all. In an admiring newspaper review of a triumphant performance by that string quartet at Wigmore Hall in Oxford, the fictional reviewer singles out the exceptional playing of the first violinist, who is Florence. "She is obviously in love," writes this critic (to the best of my recollection), "not only with the music and with Mozart, but with life itself." Surely McEwan is implying that Florence, unlike Edward, has ultimately found fulfillment and happiness.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Could something please happen..., July 27, 2007
By
J. Mills "adventure seeker" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) Although I felt that this book was well-written, my attention span was challenged. The book was long on detail and short on action. Simply, it was antclimactic...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Not My Cuppa, July 13, 2007
By
David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) The author is dead on in his description of sexual frustration, I'll hand him that. One does indeed feel as though one knew these people, because what he is describing in the end is the fear of sexual contact. These days such experiences are rare, because by the time they are married, most people have been around the block. But fifty years ago in the world McEwan describes, sex came for the first time on honeymoon night. If the couple can be described as naive, it is only in this one area; otherwise they are sophisticated, if not jaded. The bride is having a hard time accepting French kissing, and fears she may vomit if he probes too deeply. He is afraid he may experience ecstasy before she's ready. This is described in excruciating detail. In fact, the details pile up until one is taking the bride's side: This sex business is an ordeal. The couple is a nervous wreck. The reader finds oneself wondering how the modern age ever was born with this sort of Victorian repression pressing so heavily. This all sounds very 19th century but the author is right to locate this so very late in the 20th century. We may never be free of it. These deeply disturbed individuals need help - not just sexual counseling but probing psychoanalysis and possibly shock treatment. In this sense the book is a revelation - what in God's name was done to these decent people in their childhood to make them so sick? We believe them to be permanently scarred. McEwan no doubt accomplishes what he set out to achieve, but I wonder if it was worth the trouble.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Love means never having to say..., August 9, 2007
By
JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I'm sorry, but what else can you say about a 22-year-old wife who ran away? And who took almost 200 pages to do so, leaving her drooling groom and an untold number of readers on a beach filled with literary quicksand, struggling to find a likeable character or a redeeming bit of plot? As I finished this book, I found myself humming "Where do I begin?" (the theme song from the movie version of Love Story). The similarities between that book and Chesil include length (both books barely squeak past 200 pages) and an ill-fated romance marked by different socioeconomic backgrounds and music. But Edward and Florence are no Oliver and Jenny, and anyone who sheds tears at the end of Chesil is probably mourning the loss of $22 (even the $13.20 amazon price seems steep.) I admire spare, chiseled prose, but McEwan's stiff, unyielding dialog feels wooden rather than trenchant. The book reads like a period piece, a stylized sitting room drama from the turn of the last century. Was Florence molested by her repulsive father? Possibly. But McEwan does his best to depict Edward as a pretty unappetizing boyfriend/husband. Was Edward's inability to sense his bride's emotional state a result of his growing up with a brain-damaged mother in a pigsty of a house? Does it matter? (I have to admit that the description of the mess was probably my favorite part of this otherwise unappealing book.) Though the story describes their courtship, the relationship has so little sizzle that it's hard to understand how the two of them managed to work up the energy to go through with a wedding. After dragging us through the beach spat (their first and only fight? and even that lacked spirit), McEwan decides to take the easy way out. So much for enduring love. While I can accept the premise for most of the book--the stilted, boring couple, the unpleasant parents, the wedding night jitters--a lifelong estrangement defies all experience and common sense. My impression was that McEwan was as tired of these colorless whiners as I was. Finally, the big question: how did this book ever get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course. If anyone else had written this book and managed to get it into the hands of a publisher, he would have been told "nice treatment--shows a lot of promise--bring it back when you're finished." But when you're Ian "Booker Prize" McEwan, editors may be a little too kind. As Ian himself might say, the result can be downright nauseous.
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'
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
The ickiness of intimacy, July 27, 2007
By
Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As the novella (miniscule font in a small dimensioned book) begins, Florence and Edward are "young [22 years old], educated, and both virgins," newlyweds on their wedding night contemplating the evening's objective: consummation. But considering his prenuptial preparation and nature--prone to making spontaneous relationship decisions in the throes of passion, hers--uptight in the ways of intimacy, what transpires is no surprise. The couple's progress is interrupted at opportune moments for flashbacks into their pasts: a bit on their upbringings, family members, meeting, and courtship. Alternate chapters cover the wedding night. Its final dozen pages fast-forward four decades beyond the honeymoon. On the night in question, she naively suffers from a failure to understand; he just plain misunderstands. Readers, sexually squeamish or not, may also suffer when reading the minutiae of their intimacy, which is, at times, just plain too much information. Better: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
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'
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Clearly in the minority, June 18, 2007
By
Alexander G. Hoffman (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I fully realize that as I am writing this, I am outnumbered 18-1 in the reviews of this book. Frankly, I absolutly loathed it. Florence and Edward don't, for a second, feel like actual human beings. I never saw any indication of why these two were "in love" or why they would ever have gotten to the point of being married. Edward is married to a woman who pretty much recoils at intimacy and who has made it clear she doesn't want his tongue in her mouth and yet while kissing her, seems to believe she is going to...well...take him in her mouth? Florence suggests, on her wedding night, that she and Edward would be fine as long as he goes out and makes love to other women? Any of this is realistic? The ending just caps it off. It sounds like a guy with a failed life, "talking an ex pretty" believing that it would have worked only "if". I never got the characters, never cared about them, certainly didn't see any reason they were together and just didn't enjoy it.
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Not to be compared to Atonement, March 31, 2008
By
anonymous "mrw" (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) This is a very short, very pointless novella in my opinion. It is in no way comparable to Atonement. The prose is in McEwan's usual excellent style, but I was left with the feeling, "Is that all?"
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Bittersweet tale, ultimately trite, December 18, 2008
By
Cecil Bothwell "Author of Pure Bunkum" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) Ian McEwan set himself the writerly task of composing a novel whose entire action takes place in just a few hours and succeeded. However, along the way he failed to help the reader much care about the young couple whose lives turn on a dime on their honeymoon night. The characters are so two-dimensional that their cataclysm fails the believability test. No one THAT much in love could behave THAT stupidly. McEwan is handy with a phrase, however vacuous the result. If you are fond of TV drama, this may just be your ticket, but life is short and there are more good books to read than you will ever have time to open.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Not as good as his previous works, July 14, 2008
By
Barbara Johnson "Avid Reader" (Baker City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) I have enjoyed this author for years, but Chesil Beach didn't live up to his previous works.
By
Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book. If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it. The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate. Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do. Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part. Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
What might have been, July 4, 2007
By
Ann Nigel James (Menemsha, Martha's Vineyard, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As an Ian McEwan virgin, I was eagerly anticipating my tryst with this book--but it turned out to be as disappointing and unsatisfying as Edward's and Florence's wedding night (well, maybe not quite). McEwan does not merely ignore, but actually reverses, the wise "show, don't tell" advice about fiction writing. In his expository chapters about Edward's and Florence's backgrounds and courtship, he doesn't let us see much of them interacting and conversing with each other and their families; instead of fleshing them out in these sections, he gives us their inner thoughts, a panoply of geographical place names that won't mean much to readers outside the U.K. and a list of gourmet vegetables that Edward tastes for the first time at his future in-laws' dinner table: courgettes, aubergines and mangetouts. Conversely, in the play-by-play account of the wedding-night bedroom activities, McEwan "shows" each frame of the encounter with exhaustive, sometimes clinical detail. In this area, less is often more, and although it requires greater effort to write about physical intimacy with subtlety and allusion, it can still evoke the same intense reaction in the reader--without getting the sheets so messy. Do we really need words like "perineum" and the focus on the lone pubic hair that has escaped from Florence's knickers? Since I've already given away my copy of "On Chesil Beach," I can't use exact quotes here, but suffice it to say that the description of Edward's sticky, gummy ejaculate adhering to Florence's knees and chin is over the top--almost as if the author is trying to turn off the reader as well as Florence. The story could have ended effectively and poignantly after the couple's hopeless, near-tragic postcoital verbal battle on the beach, perhaps with a few closing thoughts from the author on the sadness and might-have-been-ness of it all. But instead, there is an anticlimactic final chapter consisting of what sound like afterthoughts, hurriedly recounting Edward's meanderings over the next 40 years. Somewhat mystifyingly, McEwan does not mention Florence's personal life after the traumatic wedding night, although he has paid equal attention to both characters until this last chapter. He does, however, offer an oblique but important clue. In a recent review of "On Chesil Beach," Christopher Hitchens concludes dismissively--and erroneously--that "Florence, a classically trained violinist, devotes the remainder of her life to a rather spinsterish role in a string quartet." Not at all. In an admiring newspaper review of a triumphant performance by that string quartet at Wigmore Hall in Oxford, the fictional reviewer singles out the exceptional playing of the first violinist, who is Florence. "She is obviously in love," writes this critic (to the best of my recollection), "not only with the music and with Mozart, but with life itself." Surely McEwan is implying that Florence, unlike Edward, has ultimately found fulfillment and happiness.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Could something please happen..., July 27, 2007
By
J. Mills "adventure seeker" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) Although I felt that this book was well-written, my attention span was challenged. The book was long on detail and short on action. Simply, it was antclimactic...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Not My Cuppa, July 13, 2007
By
David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) The author is dead on in his description of sexual frustration, I'll hand him that. One does indeed feel as though one knew these people, because what he is describing in the end is the fear of sexual contact. These days such experiences are rare, because by the time they are married, most people have been around the block. But fifty years ago in the world McEwan describes, sex came for the first time on honeymoon night. If the couple can be described as naive, it is only in this one area; otherwise they are sophisticated, if not jaded. The bride is having a hard time accepting French kissing, and fears she may vomit if he probes too deeply. He is afraid he may experience ecstasy before she's ready. This is described in excruciating detail. In fact, the details pile up until one is taking the bride's side: This sex business is an ordeal. The couple is a nervous wreck. The reader finds oneself wondering how the modern age ever was born with this sort of Victorian repression pressing so heavily. This all sounds very 19th century but the author is right to locate this so very late in the 20th century. We may never be free of it. These deeply disturbed individuals need help - not just sexual counseling but probing psychoanalysis and possibly shock treatment. In this sense the book is a revelation - what in God's name was done to these decent people in their childhood to make them so sick? We believe them to be permanently scarred. McEwan no doubt accomplishes what he set out to achieve, but I wonder if it was worth the trouble.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Love means never having to say..., August 9, 2007
By
JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I'm sorry, but what else can you say about a 22-year-old wife who ran away? And who took almost 200 pages to do so, leaving her drooling groom and an untold number of readers on a beach filled with literary quicksand, struggling to find a likeable character or a redeeming bit of plot? As I finished this book, I found myself humming "Where do I begin?" (the theme song from the movie version of Love Story). The similarities between that book and Chesil include length (both books barely squeak past 200 pages) and an ill-fated romance marked by different socioeconomic backgrounds and music. But Edward and Florence are no Oliver and Jenny, and anyone who sheds tears at the end of Chesil is probably mourning the loss of $22 (even the $13.20 amazon price seems steep.) I admire spare, chiseled prose, but McEwan's stiff, unyielding dialog feels wooden rather than trenchant. The book reads like a period piece, a stylized sitting room drama from the turn of the last century. Was Florence molested by her repulsive father? Possibly. But McEwan does his best to depict Edward as a pretty unappetizing boyfriend/husband. Was Edward's inability to sense his bride's emotional state a result of his growing up with a brain-damaged mother in a pigsty of a house? Does it matter? (I have to admit that the description of the mess was probably my favorite part of this otherwise unappealing book.) Though the story describes their courtship, the relationship has so little sizzle that it's hard to understand how the two of them managed to work up the energy to go through with a wedding. After dragging us through the beach spat (their first and only fight? and even that lacked spirit), McEwan decides to take the easy way out. So much for enduring love. While I can accept the premise for most of the book--the stilted, boring couple, the unpleasant parents, the wedding night jitters--a lifelong estrangement defies all experience and common sense. My impression was that McEwan was as tired of these colorless whiners as I was. Finally, the big question: how did this book ever get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course. If anyone else had written this book and managed to get it into the hands of a publisher, he would have been told "nice treatment--shows a lot of promise--bring it back when you're finished." But when you're Ian "Booker Prize" McEwan, editors may be a little too kind. As Ian himself might say, the result can be downright nauseous.
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'
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
The ickiness of intimacy, July 27, 2007
By
Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As the novella (miniscule font in a small dimensioned book) begins, Florence and Edward are "young [22 years old], educated, and both virgins," newlyweds on their wedding night contemplating the evening's objective: consummation. But considering his prenuptial preparation and nature--prone to making spontaneous relationship decisions in the throes of passion, hers--uptight in the ways of intimacy, what transpires is no surprise. The couple's progress is interrupted at opportune moments for flashbacks into their pasts: a bit on their upbringings, family members, meeting, and courtship. Alternate chapters cover the wedding night. Its final dozen pages fast-forward four decades beyond the honeymoon. On the night in question, she naively suffers from a failure to understand; he just plain misunderstands. Readers, sexually squeamish or not, may also suffer when reading the minutiae of their intimacy, which is, at times, just plain too much information. Better: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
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'
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Clearly in the minority, June 18, 2007
By
Alexander G. Hoffman (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I fully realize that as I am writing this, I am outnumbered 18-1 in the reviews of this book. Frankly, I absolutly loathed it. Florence and Edward don't, for a second, feel like actual human beings. I never saw any indication of why these two were "in love" or why they would ever have gotten to the point of being married. Edward is married to a woman who pretty much recoils at intimacy and who has made it clear she doesn't want his tongue in her mouth and yet while kissing her, seems to believe she is going to...well...take him in her mouth? Florence suggests, on her wedding night, that she and Edward would be fine as long as he goes out and makes love to other women? Any of this is realistic? The ending just caps it off. It sounds like a guy with a failed life, "talking an ex pretty" believing that it would have worked only "if". I never got the characters, never cared about them, certainly didn't see any reason they were together and just didn't enjoy it.
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Not to be compared to Atonement, March 31, 2008
By
anonymous "mrw" (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) This is a very short, very pointless novella in my opinion. It is in no way comparable to Atonement. The prose is in McEwan's usual excellent style, but I was left with the feeling, "Is that all?"
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Bittersweet tale, ultimately trite, December 18, 2008
By
Cecil Bothwell "Author of Pure Bunkum" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) Ian McEwan set himself the writerly task of composing a novel whose entire action takes place in just a few hours and succeeded. However, along the way he failed to help the reader much care about the young couple whose lives turn on a dime on their honeymoon night. The characters are so two-dimensional that their cataclysm fails the believability test. No one THAT much in love could behave THAT stupidly. McEwan is handy with a phrase, however vacuous the result. If you are fond of TV drama, this may just be your ticket, but life is short and there are more good books to read than you will ever have time to open.
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Not as good as his previous works, July 14, 2008
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Barbara Johnson "Avid Reader" (Baker City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) I have enjoyed this author for years, but Chesil Beach didn't live up to his previous works.
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