Elizabeth's review
Black Dogs: A Novel
by Ian McEwan
haven't read "black dogs" but it's true that mcewan is thin on character development at his worst (i.e. "amsterdam." but i love the way he can stretch moments and make them so climactic, as in many points in "atonement" and the beginning of "enduring love." while i find his politics pretty annoying at times (especially what i feel is a lot of embedded homophobia in "forbidden love"), i do admire his sense of pace quite a bit.
Elizabeth's review
Black Dogs: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Elizabeth's review
rating:
I want to love Ian McEwan based on Zadie Smith’s (hilarious) interview with him in the Believer book of Writers on Writing. Maybe Black Dogs wasn’t the place to start. It was interesting to see his life work paralleled against Roth’s in the New York Review of Books (Al Alvarez, July 19 2007), suggesting that McEwan, like Roth, came of age as a writer at a moment when sexuality had to be busted out and that he, like Roth, was in the vanguard of this. I was expecting something more original in his style (like Roth’s), but came away with an impression of someone who got embraced by the lit establishment at a particular moment in time because of the above and also because his understated simple prose fit in with the aesthetics of the Ford-Carver-Tobias Wolfe school (of which I am a fan). Black Dogs felt flat and carpentered to me, though. I was also drawn to it because of it treats mystical material (the black dogs as a sort-of-literal metaphor for evil), and because the book expli...more
haven't read "black dogs" but it's true that mcewan is thin on character development at his worst (i.e. "amsterdam." but i love the way he can stretch moments and make them so climactic, as in many points in "atonement" and the beginning of "enduring love." while i find his politics pretty annoying at times (especially what i feel is a lot of embedded homophobia in "forbidden love"), i do admire his sense of pace quite a bit.