Two McEwan articles

I just want to point to a couple of articles about Ian McEwan and his new book, Saturday. James Wood, the most insightful literary critic of our generation, has written a long assessment of Saturday and McEwan's body of work in the New Republic. Some choice samples:

Saturday is set on a single day, both with great naturalness and with the self-consciousness that always attends such literary endeavors. (It is written, for instance, in the present tense, a tense that mimics real-time continuity but in fact always draws attention to the stop-time of writing itself.) Like Atonement, also a fictional argument about fiction, Saturday alludes to other novels and writers. It has a long epigraph from Herzog, and is palpably indebted to Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. It closes with a whisper of allusion to Joyce's story "The Dead." Its denouement turns on a reading of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." Less obviously, McEwan has, I think, read Cosmopolis, DeLillo's novel set on a single day, and he has learned from DeLillo's errors.

McEwan's protagonist, like DeLillo's, spends several hours driving through a big city, and has a similar fondness for what Bellow once called "modern speculation." But Henry Perowne has nothing in common with DeLillo's pomo techno-analyst. His thoughtfulness is thoughtful rather than theoretical. McEwan writes far better prose than DeLillo's smeary stylish ecstasies. His severely planed and rich sentences are supple, disciplined, natural--a rigorous dovetailing. There are moments of quietly satirical wit: "Once a week, usually on a Sunday evening, they [Henry and Rosalind] line up their personal organisers side by side, like little mating creatures, so that their appointments can be transferred into each other's diary along an infrared beam." But the prose is also capable of aeration, and London is caught in precise sensuous detail. Above all, the novel manages to inhabit the mind of a not immediately fascinating man--"a droning, pedestrian diagnostician," he thinks of himself, and also something of a philistine--and move easily from that mind to general reflection and back, without ever losing narrative pressure.

Elsewhere, Laura Miller interviews McEwan in Salon. He talks about his feelings about literature and commercial success, and how he came to write the novel the way he did. An interesting insight into one of the best writers of fiction in the world.