Essay: "Ian McEwan"

I had high expectations when I read Atonement a couple of years ago.  The movie was receiving rave reviews and the novel had been shortlisted for the Booker and was being named to various "Best Novels in the History of the Universe" lists by prominent magazines.  McEwan had already won a Booker and I felt a kind of confident anticipation when I started to read it.  I felt that not only would I enjoy Atonement, but that I would probably tear through the rest of McEwan's books as well.  I felt as if I was in for a treat.

My main feeling upon finishing the book was bafflement; I didn't get it.  Not the way I didn't get Gravity's Rainbow; I understood what the book was about all, right.  And its not like I didn't get it the way I didn't get Naked Lunch; I understood why people thought it was a good book.  It was well-written and intelligent and moving and reading it didn't fill me with an urgent need to tell people who'd enjoyed it how wrong they were.  I just didn't understand why anyone would get excited about it.  It was a good book; there you go.

But people kept talking about how great Ian McEwan was and since I couldn't remember anything that was really wrong with Atonement I figured I must have missed something good about it and so I picked up another one of his books (Black Dogs).  But my initial impression was confirmed.  While I certainly think that Ian McEwan is not a bad writer, I have a trouble saying that I really like his writing, or, in fact, that I feel anything about it at all.

What causes this feeling?  I can't precisely say, beyond that I feel that I understand his books completely.  Atonement and Black Dogs both seem to me to be uncomplicated books, with relatively straightforward plots and themes.  They are both well-written, in a "Strunk and White" kind of way.  Both contain brilliant turns of phrase, imagery, symbols, moments, although nothing precisely over my head.  I don't mean to say that McEwan's books are not great because they are too simple, either in terms of how they are written or their plots and themes.  Some of my favorite books (including The Old Man and the Sea and The Little Prince) are among the simplest books ever written.  I'd certainly read another book by Ian McEwan without complaint, but I don't feel that he's a great writer.  That eventually begs the question - just what is greatness?

I suppose the first thing we have to acknowledge is that there's more, much more, to being a great writer than just avoiding mistakes and blunders.  Some of the people who are universally acknowledged to be the greatest artists in the world make what seem to me to be very basic mistakes.  It is much easier for me to criticize some of my favorite writers than it is McEwan.  Take Hemingway, for example, with his macho attitude and his See-Dick-Run writing.  Or Charles Dickens, with his enormous sentences and sentimental plots, a writer of whom George Orwell wrote: "[n]o grown-up person can read ... without feeling his limitations."  Or even Cormac McCarthy, perhaps my favorite living writer, who once, describing the weather, wrote: "The snow did not stop falling nor did it cease to fall."  It is difficult to imagine McEwan writing something as superficially appalling as that.

It makes me wonder whether in fact great writers are not great in spite of their flaws, but, in some strange way, because of them.  The most popular singers of the past century often had some twang, some imperfection, in their voice, that made them unmistakeable.  Does greatness imply some measure of individuality?  Of distinctiveness?

Is the problem that McEwan does everything very well without leaving a crack for the light to get in?

I've only read two of his books, but McEwan strikes me as a writer who follows the rules, both of style and substances.  The rules are there for a reason, and if you break them, you will look stupid, nine times out of ten.  But maybe there's only so far the rules can take you.  Sooner or later you just have to see what's outside of them - after all, the rules are only, to paraphrase William Blake, the outward circumference of what is known.  It's impossible to tell a writer like McEwan what he needs to do in order to take it to the next level because by definition, anything different than what he's doing would be the wrong thing to do.  And yet, he needs to do something.

Perfection could fairly be defined as the absence of imperfections.  But once you remove all the imperfections you have something that looks like everything else, bland and forgettable.  Greatness cannot be defined in terms of the absence of any thing but must be the presence of some thing, whatever that thing is.  In writing, in singing, even in physical beauty.  I'm not saying you should throw your copy of The Elements of Style out the window; I'm just saying you shouldn't marry it.  Samuel Johnson said of Laurence Sterne that "nothing odd lasts long", but it's not his novels that have swum down the gutter of Time along with the Legation of Moses and the Tale of a Tub.