Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
The Dangers of Innocence
By John Lanchester
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 351 pp., $26.00
Now, at a time when the British novel is an all-singing, all-dancing thing—as likely to be written in Glaswegian as in Standard English, to take place in Zanzibar as in Hampstead, to be set during the first Afghan war as during the last general election—it is hard to remember just how boring British fiction used to seem. When I was growing up (I'm thirty-nine) it was axiomatic in Britain that interesting novels came from somewhere else—usually America. British fiction was domestic realism, often about adultery; as for the prose, the rule was that you could have any color you wanted, so long as it was gray. American English had a relationship with the vernacular, a strength and flexibility and vividness, which British English, in its literary form, simply could not match, and made no attempt to match. A sentence by Bellow or Roth or Updike—any sentence—had a range and ambition and sheer aliveness that made sentences by their British contemporaries look dead.
Review, 3505 words
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