Pynchon and McEwan, friends in the figures in the carpet?

[John Bailey]

I recently read a great review of McEwan's Solar which is,
unfortunately, nowhere on the web (the review, not Solar, which I
imagine isn't freely available yet either).

It broke down the author's recent output into two camps - the timeless
novels and the topical novels. For every On Chesil Beach, it noted,
there's a Saturday. He writes about Great Themes and then he writes
about Today, and Today is usually a pretty limping personal response
to some zeitgeisty concept floating around at the time. The writing
sometimes makes up for the lack of content (Atonement) and sometimes
it doesn't (finally, a review that finds Amsterdam as lame as I did).

Anyway, it felt a bit like Pynchon. One for you, one for me. Or,
perhaps, One for the You fans, one for the Me fans. They don't need to
be mutually exclusive.

Either way, I've been reading Solar and finding it hard to get into.
The prose is great and finely styled but I'm having problems giving a
rat's arse about the subject matter at all.

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
> << Reading some more Ian McEwan, cause I think he and P are some kind of friends. We remember when TRP signed that letter in defense of him re Atonement and his research for it.... >>
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> Yeah, and that must have been nice for McEwan. I remember around the same time, McEwan wrote one of those 'English authors eulogise American authors' pieces and ignored Pynchon.
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> I read some excerpts from 'Saturday', and strongly disliked them. At a time when so many hundreds of thousands of people in this country were protesting, marching on the streets, against the Iraq invasion, McEwan produced a book whose purpose - from what I could make out, not admittedly having read the whole thing - is to equivocate about it. Shameful, imho.
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> I also don't like the way he shoehorns his obvious interest in science into his books, which was one of the factors that made me dislike 'Enduring Love'. That book had a fantastic opening chapter, then got really boring.
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