Word: mcewan
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...McEwan's unerring prose and godly powers of awareness have made him one of the best of Britain's youngish novelists, a distinguished group that includes Martin Amis, A.N. Wilson and Julian Barnes. But the 39-year-old author of In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden and First Love, Last Rites offers something extra, what might be called the McEwan effect. It is the giddy sense that given sufficient time and megabytes, an experience could be parsed into an infinite number of verbal and emotional moments...
...McEwan bridges the chasm between private anguish and public policy with a death-defying story, inventive, eventful and affirmative without being sentimental. Entwined with the Lewises' tragedy is the tale of Stephen's friend Charles Darke, a former editor and, as a junior minister, author of a hard-nosed government manual, The Authorized Child-Care Handbook ("Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with"). His sad fate is that his political ambitions conflict with a longing to chuck it all and live in rural, childlike innocence. Longing wins, and Darke moves to a Suffolk woods where...
...seem improbable and even fanciful, but the feelings expressed by the characters and their sense of time (running up, running down and running out) are, without exception, genuine. There is nothing titillating or vulgar about the PM's confession of missing Charles Darke because of loving him. And McEwan's humor is never simply topical. "I can't go anywhere alone," says the government leader of the impossible romance. "Bodyguards apart, I have to take the nuclear hotline, and that means at least three engineers. And an extra driver. And someone from Joint Staff." "Disarm," Stephen urges, "for the sake...
...fairly rare literary species: a writer of social comedies. He is also prolific-Wise Virgin, his first book to be published in this country, is his sixth novel-and very good. Not for him the extravagant mythmaking of his contemporary Salman Rushdie or the chilly experiments of Ian McEwan. Stylistically, Wilson is headed straight into the past, when a novelist told a suspenseful story and commanded his characters' souls. He can be flippant and overly mordant, but his lively wit and fine sense of morals and manners mark him, at 33, as a formidable novelist already...
Stephanie A. McEwan Orange, Calif...