Krissa's review of Saturday
Saturday by Ian McEwan
After all the sci-fi and complex epic novels I've been reading lately, reading Atonement over Christmas was a breath of fresh, deceptively simple air. So I immediately put out library requests for Saturday and Amsterdam and devoured them both.
Saturday, had it been written by a lesser writer, would have that distinctly Writing Workshop air about it. Setting the action over the arc of a single day where so many themes come full circle as they do in Henry Perowne's Saturday could be seen as a pretty typical Writing Prompt nightmare, oozing with cheese, corners tucked in too neatly. Not to mention the fact that this "ordinary" Saturday gets quite "extraordinary" in the events of the evening, in a way that rarely happens as concretely in real life.
What salvages it from Workshop Hell is really McEwan's strengths, which is his ability to create the sorts of characters that are so believably minutely dissecting their own days and constantly evaluating their own psyc...more
Saturday, had it been written by a lesser writer, would have that distinctly Writing Workshop air about it. Setting the action over the arc of a single day where so many themes come full circle as they do in Henry Perowne's Saturday could be seen as a pretty typical Writing Prompt nightmare, oozing with cheese, corners tucked in too neatly. Not to mention the fact that this "ordinary" Saturday gets quite "extraordinary" in the events of the evening, in a way that rarely happens as concretely in real life.
What salvages it from Workshop Hell is really McEwan's strengths, which is his ability to create the sorts of characters that are so believably minutely dissecting their own days and constantly evaluating their own psyc...more
comments
No comments have been added yet.
