End-of-the-Week Jottings

Posted 16 November, 2007 in Jottings |

• A thoughtful piece by Daniel Green on the disparity between early Ian McEwan and recent Ian McEwan. Green prefers the stylized Gothicism of The Cement Garden and First Loves, Last Rites to the realism of Amsterdam, Atonement, or On Chesil Beach. I’m not sure whether this marks a conscious “selling out” on McEwan’s part, or is simply the mark of a writer’s maturation (in the sense of his developing style), but I’d have to agree with Green that there is something more arresting in the earlier works than in anything McEwan has published recently.
• Panic on the hazards of having one of your guilty pleasures picked for Oprah’s Book Club. As a bit of a book snob myself, I freely admit to retroactively disliking books that Oprah has chosen for her club: We Were the Mulvaneys, The Poisonwood Bible, Love in the Time of Cholera. Then she goes and chooses something like Light in August or Anna Karenina (which I’ve heard rumours she hadn’t read when she picked it for her club), and I find myself helplessly waving a white flag and muttering in a despairing voice: “You win, Oprah. You win.”
• The best explanation of the current Hollywood writers’ strike I’ve yet seen. (via Bookninja)
• Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, takes a surprisingly contrarian stand on the utility of collecting omnibuses (omnibi?) of “classic” comics: “The people creating those stories were just trying to sell that month’s issue and put food on the table. They had no idea there’d be book collections of this stuff decades later. It was designed to be read, enjoyed and thrown away, disposable entertainment.”
• As a writer, what writerly strengths do you see in others that you wish you possessed? (via Moonlight Ambulette)

2 comments to “End-of-the-Week Jottings”

Panic, November 16th, 2007 at 5:09 pm:

• I haven’t read the really early McEwan, but I wonder if Green suffers from the same thing I do: your first McEwan is the best McEwan. I read Atonement first, and nothing has come close since. Even Enduring Love, a favourite of many, didn’t move me like Atonement did. Every book of his I’ve read since, just hasn’t lived up to it. I certainly didn’t find much “warmth” in Atonement, though it is *very* accessible.
  Just musing…

  (Thanks for the linkage!)

Kerry, November 18th, 2007 at 4:18 pm:

• That might be true, what “Panic” says. I found “Saturday” absolutely stunning.

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