Volume 46, Number 1 · January 14, 1999
Wages of Sin
By Gabriele Annan
Amsterdam
by Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 193 pp., $21.00
Ian McEwan is a prize winner. His novels and stories have won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Whitbread Prize, and have been shortlisted for Britain's most hyped trophy, the Booker Prize. This year he won it with Amsterdam. When the award was made in October, there were murmurs that it must have been an act of reparation by this year's Booker judges for their predecessors' mistake: the 1997 prize should have gone to McEwan for Enduring Love, which was thought to be a much meatier, longer, and more profound novel. Amsterdam is an intricate satirical jeu d'esprit and topical to the point of Tom Wolfeishness. It is also funnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal.
Review, 1742 words
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