Volume 45, Number 6 · April 9, 1998
So Alert with Love
By Rosemary Dinnage
Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 262 pp., $23.95
After six previous novels and two books of short stories, Ian McEwan's reputation as a writer of small, impeccably written fictions is secure. His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too: among the critical praise that festoons his book jackets, the word 'macabre' crops up more than once. But his books are more than tales of suspense and shock; they raise issues of guilt and love and fear, essentially of what happens when the civilized and ordered splinters against chaos. There can be something of Greek myth in his narratives—man casually overthrown by the indifferent Fates. At the same time he is the quietest and most lucid of stylists, with never a word wasted or fumbled. It is a pity his surname is resistant to adjective (as in 'Kafkan'): it would have a quite recognizable meaning by now.
Review, 1801 words
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