Ian McEwan
represents all the good things I love about literary fiction. Precise and effective prose, interesting
characters, plots that will not let go, and a wonderful resource for building a
vocabulary. His latest novel, Nutshell, has an even more unusual
character/narrator than I have come to expect.
At first, I believed this was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The characters, Trudy and Claude, plot the murder of John, Claude’s
brother and Trudy’s husband. But McEwan
has led us down that path with a sudden 180 degree twist.
The narrator is the
fetus of Trudy and John. Now, this is
not unique. Lawrence Sterne in his 18th
century novel, Tristram Shandy, relates
the life of the title character from the womb.
Take that idea and mix in an articulate narrator, and McEwan has given
us a thoroughly modern twist on Sterne.
 |
| Yulia Tymoshenko |
Trudy is at dinner
with Claude, and she refuses a third glass of wine. McEwan writes, “But, no, she restrains
herself for love of me. And I love her –
how could I not? The mother I have yet
to meet, whom I know only from the inside.
Not enough! I long for her
external self. Surfaces are
everything. I know her hair is ‘straw
fair,’ that it tumbles in ‘coins of wild curls’ to her ‘shoulders the white of
apple flesh,’ because my father has read aloud to her his poem about it in my
presence. Claude too has referred to her
hair, in less inventive terms. When she’s
in the mood, she’ll make tight braids to wind around her head, in the style, my
father says of Yulia Tymoshenko. I also
know that my mother’s eyes are green, that her nose is a ‘pearly button,’ that
she wishes she had more of one, that separately both men adore it as it is and
have tried to reassure her. She’s been
told many times that she’s beautiful, but she remains skeptical, which confers
on her an innocent power over men, so my father told her one afternoon in the
library. She replied that if this were
true, it was a power she’d never looked for and didn’t want. This was an unusual conversation for them,
and I listened intently” (7-8). Curiously
enough, I found myself listening intently to the conversations between John and
Trudy and Claude and Trudy, as if I were an eavesdropping intruder, to piece
together how the novel might turn out.
Trudy listens to pod
casts to pass the time, and in one passage – too long for a complete sample –
the lecturer discusses the state of the world – “in existential crises” – “new
forms of brilliant weaponry” – “global corporations to dodge taxes” – ‘China,
too big to need friends or counsel” – “Muslim-majority countries plagued by
religious puritanism” – “The Middle East, fast breeder for a possible world
war” (24-25). And lastly, “the United
States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its
sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as
unchallengeable as the Koran. Its
nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by an inarticulate anger,
contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun” (25).
This is the power of
fiction. Holding up the reader to his or
her country for debate – hopefully before it is too late. The
Nutshell by Ian McEwan shows us one of those writers I voraciously pursue to
get every drop of the message, every turn of phrase, and every new word. 5 stars
--Jim, 1/16/17
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