Gessen dissin' "Saturday"

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

"[...] Four years and a series of catastrophic world events later, the
new production, Saturday, is here. It begins with its hero, the successful
neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, gazing through the window of his house at what
might well be another major calamity: A plane is flying over London, on
fire. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow also famously opens with a
burning projectile over London, and whether or not McEwan is alluding to
it, the comparison is instructive. Pynchon: "A screaming comes across the
sky." McEwan: "Above the usual deep and airy roar is a straining, choking,
banshee sound growing in volume-both a scream and a sustained shout, an
impure, dirty noise that suggests unsustainable mechanical effort," etc.,
etc. Pynchon's sentence contains no adjectives; McEwan's two clauses
contain ten. The desired effect is vividness, proximity; the result is the
opposite, with the adjectives muffling the screaming, so that it is no
longer screaming but only screaming-that-is-being-written-about. Few
contemporary writers are as fixated as McEwan on physical violence; yet no
one's prose is less violent than his. [...]."

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/11521/index.html


Heikki


P.S. R.I.P., great, unmuffled Saul Bellow.