What I’m Reading

Ian McEwan profile in the New Yorker

The January 23rd issue of the New Yorker has a thoughtful profile of Ian McEwan by Daniel Zalewski (“The Background Hum -Ian McEwan’s art of unease.”)

I was particularly amused by this:

Greg, McEwan’s younger son, entered the sitting room in a bright-blue bathrobe. He had spiky black hair and his father’s slitted eyes. McEwan chatted briefly with him about Argentina—in two days, Greg was beginning a semester abroad. Now twenty-two and a graduate student in international relations at the University of London, Greg was a source for Theo, Perowne’s guitarist son in “Saturday.” Greg later told me that he had a persistent virus that kept him at home, “under observation,” when his father was writing the novel. Though he had Theo’s loping grace, he noted a key divergence: “I definitely don’t wear tight black jeans!” He recalled, “I used to play the guitar a lot, and I think he foresaw me going into music. I used to really like the blues.” His father, he noted, plays the flute and is also a blues fan. “He gave me loads of instruction. He taught me my first chords. He’d play Oasis with me.” Some reviewers found the father-son relationship in “Saturday” dubiously chummy, but not Greg. “I’m not sure if we’ve ever argued,” he said. “He walked us to school and picked us up, yeah. He’d drive us to my friends’, and watch out for us when we went to skate parks.” His father didn’t “close himself off with the work,” he said. “I could walk into his study at any time of the day.”

The portrayal of familial contentment in “Saturday” was meant as a provocation. “No one ever says, except in conversation, that they’re actually enjoying their children, that they might be a source of interest and pleasure,” McEwan said. “I thought there was some bad faith in omitting that as a possibility.” The book is equally rosy about marriage; Perowne has sex with his wife twice in one day. John Banville, in The New York Review of Books, seized upon that detail, writing, “Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan’s fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex.” McEwan says, “The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife’s teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book.”

Speaking of his son, Greg – farther along in the piece there’s a brief aside about Greg having to write an essay about one of his father’s books. The teacher gave him a D because she “didn’t care what I [Ian McEwan] thought” after Greg had consulted his father before writing the essay. I know making fun of Lit Profs is like shooting fish in a barrel, but really, this is why. Of course, the Elder McEwan might very well be failing to mention that the essay was poorly written.