Fiction

First published last winter in Second Spring Journal, Debra’s article, “A Christian looks at the fiction of Ian McEwan”, is now available online at CatholicExchange.

Here’s how the article begins:

Two things need to be gotten out of the way before anyone attempts to address the fiction of English novelist Ian McEwan in a disapproving vein: First, he is one of the most acclaimed writers of our time; Second, unless your name happens to be, oh, John Updike, it is almost certain that McEwan is a better writer than you are.

In other words, one had best proceed with some humility, and I do. Rightly regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language—McEwan’s prose is as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, or a time bomb―his Booker Prize win in 1998, though for one of his fluffier little books, Amsterdam, was nonetheless not entirely misplaced. Sentence for sentence, it simply doesn’t get much better.

For the rest of the article, click here.

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Debra’s essay, “A Christian Looks at the Fiction of Ian McEwan” has been published in issue 10: “The Spirit of the University”, of Second Spring Journal. Back issues and subscriptions to this fine journal, edited by Stratford and Leonie Caldecott, can be ordered here.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the opening section:

Two things need  to be gotten out of the way before anyone attempts to address the fiction of English novelist Ian McEwan in a disapproving vein: First, he is one of the most acclaimed writers of our time; Second, unless your name happens to be, oh, John Updike, it is almost certain that McEwan is a better writer than you are.

In other words, one had best proceed with some humility, and I do. Rightly regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language—McEwan’s prose is as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, or a time bomb―his Booker Prize win in 1998, though for one of his fluffier little books, Amsterdam, was nonetheless not entirely misplaced. Sentence for sentence, it simply doesn’t get much better….

But great episodes do not a great novel make, and after reading, with a writer’s appreciation, six of his eight novels, I confess myself disappointed with the collected works of Ian McEwan. More, mine is that greatest of all disappointments in artistic terms, the disappointment of unfulfilled (great) expectations. This guy is so good, so fine a wordsmith―at crafting a sentence, a paragraph, a scene―that one ought to feel confident that he will be reckoned among the few authors of our time who will outlast our time.

And yet, set side-by-side with the Greats of previous eras, McEwan, in my view, comes up perpexingly short. In place of a fully-realized narrative structure complete with foundation, floor, supporting walls, and a roof, fretted with golden fire, what we get in his books are brilliantly executed but strangely strung-together episodes, many of which end up having nothing to do with anything else in the novel; or which one feels should have led to a wholly different novel. That brilliant pre-migraine scene in Atonement, for instance, serves no purpose in the rest of the story. In fact, neither does Emily Tallis, the migraine-sufferer herself. Instead, Emily drops off the page as the book goes on to tell the story of Emily’s daughter, Briony, a teenager (and budding writer) whose immature misreading of a romantic incident ruins the lives of two people close to her. It was as if the author got a terrific idea for a passage about an approaching migraine, and having no place else to put it at the moment, stuck it in the middle of the manuscript that happened to be on his desktop ….

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The Guardian has published an insightful article by Zadie Smith on the art of “failing” to write great novels, and what it takes to write “truthful” fiction. One of the things I like about the piece is that it underscores the (for me, long-wished-for) death of “Theory”–particularly the peculiar lit crit theory that there is no such thing as Authors, only Text. Even the venerable T.S.Eliot, such a favorite of many a conservative Christian writer, contributed to this notion for reasons, as Smith points out, had as much to do with a desire to maintain his own privacy as it did to ensure the purity of literary art. Smith may be a “hip” young writer (the author of White Teeth), but she shows some wisdom beyond her years in pointing out what nonsense it is to think one can entirely separate a novel (or poem) from the personality and, yes, even character of the one who wrote it. Neither does she make the mistake, so common in recent decades among hip young writers, of ignoring the value, even existence of the Western Canon. Here’s a particularly neat little quote on cliches as a form of authorial laziness:

With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones – for example, in each of my novels somebody “rummages in their purse” for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate “purse” from its old, persistent friend “rummage”. To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence – a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which “inauthentic” is truly the correct term.

read the entire article here.

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