What I’m Reading: McEwan

Jun 252014
 

Read in January 2014

Solar, by Ian McEwan

Two stars

I like Ian McEwan’s writing, but I don’t care for anyone’s novels that are entirely satire, so I didn’t like his Booker Prize winner Amsterdam, and I really didn’t like Solar. In contrast, I loved both Atonement and Saturday, and I must confess that I wonder why a writer capable of turning out work like that would waste his time on a character like Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar. Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has been coasting for years, accepting every honorarium offered since his big win and keeping up with the latest in his field by reading Scientific American. He’s been married five times, which never kept him from sleeping with any woman who’d have him. (Apparently, he asks most he meets and an astonishing — and unbelievable — number accept.) Yet for all his sexual appetite, his first love is food, and over the course of this short novel he progresses from overweight to grossly obese and his food obsession leads in the end to several passages that turned my stomach. McEwan throws in a variety of plot machinations — a celebrity boondoggle trip to investigate global warming in the Arctic, a carefully contrived murder, and high-stakes intellectual theft — all of which added up for me to “Meh.” My suggestion for McEwan is to quit wasting his and his readers’ time on trivial pursuits like this and get back to the hard work and incomparable reward of Atonement and Saturday.

What I’m Reading: Walker

Jun 252014
 

Read in January 2014

Crime of Privilege, by Walter Walker

Two stars

I was jazzed when I saw that Walter Walker had a new book coming out after 20 years of silence. While I hadn’t loved all of his earlier novels, his first — A Dime To Dance By — made it onto my Top 10 mysteries list. The fact that Crime of Privilege takes place on Cape Cod, where I lived for a time in the late 1970s, only added to my interest. However, I did not love this novel. The main character, George Becket, is an assistant district attorney who has been rewarded with a job for failing to tell the whole truth about a sexual assault he witnessed in the Palm Beach mansion of a Massachusetts political dynasty while a college senior. Many years later, he goes rogue to investigate an unsolved murder that may be connected to the political family he has protected for so long. I found Becket unlikeable, which was my first problem with the novel. In addition, he wasn’t much of an investigator, running off to Hawaii and Costa Rica to track to witnesses to interview but not bothering to interview those still on the cape until their existence/location was pointed out by someone else. So while all the elements were there for a solid mystery — interesting crime, interesting characters, interesting difficulties — the weakness of the central character and his handling/bungling of the investigation undermined the story. But the capper for me was Walker’s decision to use two actual crimes connected to the Kennedy family — the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley for which Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was found guilty and the 1991 rape of a Palm Beach woman for which Kennedy cousin William Kennedy Smith was acquitted. At the end of the novel, very similar crimes remain unsolved and the story ends with a lot of yadda-yadda-yadda about the privileged corrupting the justice system and getting away with murder and much more. In reality, the privileged were charged with crimes, tried for those crimes, and subject to a jury’s verdict. That 180 degree switcheroo bugged me a lot.

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