I'm mentally stuck on this book, generally left with the impression that I viewed the practice palettes of a painting master. The strokes, or their equivalent, of this work, are fantastic - I challenge anyone to write something more beautiful, haunting and dripping with energy (despite being written about a singular event as it was witnessed by a single person) than the intro, the first forty pages, of Saturday. I had to set down the book; that first exposure to McEwan's writing style was more than a little breathtaking. It's a relatively brisk style of detail that, at least for the first forty pages, perfectly interweaves minutiae of surroundings with a characters reflection; you get a very authentic experience of what it is to see the world from the main character's, Henry Perowne's, perspective that is both lyrical but realistic; his mind wanders from the event at hand to his plans for the day to world events to remembrances past with the exact amount of ease. If McEwan's a genius, and at least to me he has some genius level skill in his hands, it's in what you might call clinical detail; he nails every sprawling inch, and God is in it.
But it's decidedly man that's in the narrative. I found this book to be a very frustrating read; on the one hand, I know it's great because individual sentences are intoxicating - the language and technical act of the novel's creation are amazing. On the other, though, I found myself hating some toss-off sentences, and after that beautiful opening sequence, found long stretches or scenes to be borderline idiotic, no matter how nice their florid touches. I was constantly battling the notion that there were parts of the novel that I was irritated either because one, I'm not in my forties, don't have children and therefore can't relate, or two, I'm just naturally inclined to disbelieve when I'm told works are great or well-written. But the more I think about it (and the more reviews I read that allude to this notion), I'm stuck with the feeling that parts of this tale are manipulative and contrived, derivative, heavy-handed and gratuitous. There are numerous reasons for this, and I fear this is going to come off sounding overly negative - I did enjoy the book. But it's a story against a brilliant background, a crafty juxtaposition of the everyday against the constant banter of post 9/11 terrorist world events swimming behind every scene. The background is brilliant, no doubt, and I think even the juxtaposition is well done with a nice rhythm in and out of the story v. the world events. I have to say that upon reflection, the story itself, though, looks like an ill-defined silhouette.
The first problem is that the narrative is sold as an average man going through his average day off; unfortunately, Mr. Average happens to be a neurosurgeon, which last time I checked is a profession that is so decidedly unaverage that it is used as a metaphor for things only a very small amount of people should be gifted enough to do, i.e., "it's not brain surgery." I completely understand why this profession was chosen for the main character - it's the cleanest example of someone whose collisions with the mental, spiritual and emotional worlds are all decidedly physical. He knows just what happens when you sever a nerve or infarct the wrong part of cingulate gyrus; his dedication to a realist vision of the world is not just personal but professional. So it was an apt choice, but unfortunately, it gave McEwan license to riddle the text with technical jargon that may have well just have screamed "look at me, I'm really researched." Technical jargon is not a turn-off for me instantly; Pynchon and Wallace throw in their share of miscellaneous rocket diagrams and math equations, too. But this application of it struck me an unnecessary and non-fluid. Part of the problem is that i already know what the effing motor cortex and frontal lobes and Huntington's chorea are and do to you - I'm nowhere near an expert in the area, and I felt like I was reading lay language run through an English-to-neurosurgeon's dictionary. His rendition of the neurosurgeon's thoughts about his own profession were, I felt, wildly off the mark, a transparent attempt at authenticating his main character. In short, I don't believe that neurosurgeons think in such overly simplistic and definitional terms of their own work, but I think authors that are trying to give the impression that they know what it's like to be a neurosurgeon do.
The second problem I had was something that I call "Ayn Randian tendencies." Ms. Rand, at least in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, her two most well known books and the ones that I have read, has entire characters that exist as sandwich board placards; they roam through scenes just to spout particular views and have very limited traits outside of their purpose to represent some idea. Which is fine, it's just an archetypal and metaphorical way of writing (people like Aesop and Jesus do this all the time), and I could criticize her for making puppets out of her characters and leaving them bloodless, but that's not the real point. The thing that makes an offense Randian is when a character steps on a pulpit and is given opportunity within the context of the story to vomit the author's philosophy, especially when one, this philosophy is already abundantly clear via the rest of the book (so it's a hammer across the forehead), and two, the character rambles for nearly a hundred pages (or, in Atlas Shrugged, even more). So it should be clear that I despise these kinds of passages because of their manipulation and overtness. McEwan doesn't go to Randian extremes, but there is a scene smack in the middle of the book where he and his daughter have an argument which is obviously thrown in to give the old v. young, hawk v. dove arguments for invading Iraq. It's a senseless and stilted scene, and goes on long and awkwardly, sticking out and killing some of the momentum of the book. There's another scene that does this but not through dialog - I found the scene with Henry visiting his senile mother to be a humdrum look at living with an aged parent as well as staring into the eyes of mortality and life's end morbidity. There was no grandiose speech, but the method and non-sequitur snippets were borderline emotionally cheap; if you've known someone to suffer through Alzheimer's or any form of dementia, then these scenes were the literary equivalent of sticking salt in a never to be closed. I think the entire scene was club-to-the-head morbid, better accomplished in the racquetball scene, and if I were to be really cynical about it, just plain nasty and emotionally manipulative.
The final, and third fault of the book was also the one that irked me the most: a forced, contrived plot (and a ridiculous scene within it). The central antagonist of Baxter was stupidly stereotypical, for one, and the mugging encounter and Baxter's disease, obvious enough to be diagnosable by a neurosurgeon (who, in case you don't know, would have no reason to encounter neurology, not neurosurgery, cases on a day to day basis), was far too convenient for me to stomach. This coincidence is the same kind of central plot-driving device that motors the movie Crash, and I found that one, too, equally manipulative and, for lack of a better term, implausible. Of course, this *could* happen, but when it happens as the central piece of the novel, it makes plain that the protagonist's profession and the antagonist disease are just puppets to the author's intent. This could have slid off just fine; a single encounter with the man would have been passable. SPOLIER: But since Baxter follows him home, and attacks his family in revenge for Henry's challenge to Baxter's street cred, the whole things becomes an overblown farce. And worse - Baxter holds Henry's wife at knifepoint and forces his daughter to strip and stand naked in front of him. I'm sorry, but this is painfully absurd - it may be because of the excerpt from Herzog that introduces the book, but all I could think while I read this scene was of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and the intense scene of exposure in that book. In other words, the scene stood out as an obvious attempt at making a shocking scene. Worse was that the fact that Daisy is naked is almost immediately dropped from the scene; it seems like an afterthought though it is obviously the oddest part of the encounter thus far. But the reason it is dropped is because Daisy is made *to read poetry* to Baxter. And Baxter *falls in love with it*, or something equivalent. McEwan tries to play this off as an effect of his Huntington's, but this does nothing to rescue the stupidity of the idea. But McEwan's trip through the depths of narrative highjacking are not done yet: to make a silly ending short, he and his son push Baxter down stairs, injuring Baxter's neck so that (yep you guessed it) the neurosurgeon has to operate on his attacker. Not to wreck the haughty tone of my review, but that is some stupid shit.
So, what I'm left with is a masterfully written and expertly detailed character study. To give credit, the opening of the book was outstanding, the squash scene (I find it very difficult to write sports action) very good, and Henry's relationship with his son, especially in attending his rehearsal, was downright beautiful. And, as stated, individual sentences throughout sang wonders. Unfortunately, the tumor of this book, its contrived narrative, was metastatic and forced beyond repair. I am forced to call this a very good but nowhere near great book.
No comments:
Post a Comment