"McEwan’s new novel, Solar, unlike any of his previous work, is avowedly comic. And much of it is extremely funny, most of the time on purpose, as it plots its antihero’s cynical and self-serving efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with matter’ – is by now fairly old hat. Beard lives off his reputation, with a series of honorary professorships, seats on royal commissions, radio appearances, lecture tours and so on."
I admire McEwan's work, but the criticisms here strike me as valid, except I think the reviewer misreads Saturday. I also found myself murmuring in partial assent with the short story remark. I haven't read the profile referred to, but I did read a short story by McEwan in The New Yorker not long ago--"The Uses of Poetry," I believe--and I couldn't help but feel he benefited enormously from the form, a form, oddly enough, the English really have no tradition for. I do think McEwan is a great novelist and Atonement, to me, is a wonder. I'll definitely check this out, then.
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