The Elegant Variation: LRB ON SOLAR

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March 23, 2010

LRB ON SOLAR

The London Review of Books weighs in with its appraisal of Ian McEwan's new novel Solar.

The elements of farce in Solar have the unintended side-effect of pointing up how farcical many of the events in McEwan’s previous, more serious novels are: the lengths the children go to in The Cement Garden to try to conceal their mother’s corpse, inexpertly disposed of in the cellar; the drunk ex-husband in The Innocent falling asleep in his ex-wife’s wardrobe while waiting for her to come home with her new fiancé; the nervous young man, also in The Innocent, struggling round Berlin failing to get rid of a pair of suitcases stuffed with body parts; the young man in Atonement sending the drastically wrong draft of a letter to the young woman he’s just realised he’s in love with. In The Cement Garden or The Innocent, the incongruous elements of farce make the stories darker. But McEwan hasn’t been interested in that kind of darkness for some time, and in his more recent novels, such as Saturday or even the intermittently dazzling Atonement, the farcical elements are merely incongruous. At least Solar is meant to be funny.

Posted at 08:15 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

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Comic literature is baaaaack!

Posted by: Niall | March 23, 2010 at 08:50 AM

Thanks for posting that segment from The London Review of Books. I read the review of Solar and found its dissection of Ian McEwan's most recent work sharper and deeper than anything I've read in the NYTimes Book Review. Another reason your blog has become as addictive as coffee.

Posted by: Ward Jones | March 23, 2010 at 02:40 PM

So good to have access to the London Review for this. Thank you thank you! Such a fascinating review.

Posted by: Ana | March 23, 2010 at 06:41 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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*Now in Paperback*

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 23, 2010

LRB ON SOLAR

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 23, 2010

LRB ON SOLAR

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism