Anna Kaufman

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is one of those writers who, having been crowned an author of literature, thinks he can write any piece of cracked-out nonsense and know it will be treated as a serious work. Is he taking the piss? Who knows. What I do know is: this book is a joke. I've liked other works of McEwan's, although even my favorite, Sweet Tooth, contained elements that were highly problematic -- gotta love that nasty streak of British misogyny! But really he just writes hammy melodrama, often punctuated by a "twist," and dresses them up with pretentious prose. At his worst -- which this is -- he is absolutely the M. Night Shyamalan of authors.

McEwan's main conceit -- the narrating from the womb thing -- is pretty stupid, but not entirely unworkable. Here's the first paragraph to Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum:

I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime counts me into the world. I'm begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith's Best Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep -- as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didn't let that put him off.

Energy! Verve! Humor!

In contrast, here's the opening paragraph to Nutshell:

So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I'm in, what I'm in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I've no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I'm troubled. I'm hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I'm terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in.

Oh my god. Where's Laertes to put him out of his misery already?

There are only 197 pages of this solipsistic shit, but it feels like a thousand. I'll admit it: I knew I would loathe this book by the time I had finished the above paragraph, but I hate-read it all the way to the end. I wanted to be thorough and complete in my disdain. But I can save you the trouble. In a nutshell: what a piece of crap.