Reviewing the Review

Interesting juxtaposition here. Sam Tanenhaus was recently raving about about Jonathan Lethem's "superb essay" review of the new Ian McEwan.

Levi on LitKicks thinks otherwise.

Jonathan Lethem has his pretentious dial cranked up to eleven with this overbaked exercise in profundity.  Here's how it starts:

The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle -- the pebbles, that is -- that forms its 18 miles; the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and features, so that the beach forms a spacial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole.

Ugh.

Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil beach, of a given stone.

Somehow, I doubt that local fishermen do any such thing.

I'm betting that the local fishermen of Chesil Beach are busy fishing, and I'm also betting Lethem has never been anywhere near Chesil Beach and that he cribbed that factoid straight from Wikipedia, which says:

Fishermen familiar with the beach claim to be able to tell their location from pebble size alone.

Nice research there, Jonathan.

So, who's right here? Judge for yourself.

Personally, I think I'm with Levi. For instance, this is a lot of words to essentially say "McEwan's novel is plotty, but also beautiful and dense":

Our appetite for Ian McEwan’s form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan’s books have the air of thrillers even when, as in “On Chesil Beach,” he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes — death and its attendant horrors — with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret.

I don't understand why Lethem sounds like an overeager college student in this review, but I do admit that this is pretty interesting:

In the painstaking and microscopic one-night structure of “On Chesil Beach,” McEwan advances his exploration of slowness in fiction (early evidenced in “Black Dogs” and “Amsterdam,” and exemplified in the 24-hour time scheme of “Saturday”). This suggests modernist experiment — not only James and Woolf, but even, in its combination with McEwan’s legendarily “forensic” vocabulary (here we’re greeted by the most instrumental pubic hair in the history of fiction), the chilly Alain Robbe-Grillet. But McEwan’s tone is more normative than that of his forebears, and it may be worth asking: Why doesn’t he feel like a “late” modernist? And what does he feel like instead?

The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel’s authority, psychoanalysis and cinema — one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who comes along later, shrugs at such absolutist contests, and has for that matter already engulfed (most brilliantly in “Enduring Love”) the latest challenger to the novel’s throne: neurology. In fact, McEwan may in retrospect be seen as the quintessential example of the recent integration of scientific interest into fiction, precisely because in McEwan (as opposed to, say, Richard Powers) such matters cease to be in any way remarkable.

Nonetheless, though, I disagree that McEwan's banalizing of science makes him a better example of inserting science into fiction than Powers. As I remember, critics found the intrusion of science into Saturday--regardless of its banality--pretty ridiculous.

Comments

[Mark]

Levi maybe should have read the McEwan book before slashing away at Lethem. The stuff about the rocks is in the book. So no research needed. I agree that the Lethem intro is clunky and sophomoric ("Okay class, remember to introduce your thesis with a concrete image"), but he does effectively pinpoint McEwan's strengths as a writer.