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.