Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, reads more like Rebecca Goldstein's latest, than Ian McEwan's. McEwan typically probes human psychology. The strength of his writing on a sentence by sentence basis allows us to get into the head of his characters, most of whom do gruesome things. In The Cement Garden, one of his earlier novels, three children pack their mother's body in cement, and keep the block of cement in their basement. This lurid concept is made palatable as we come to understand the children's decisions. At the moment of their mother's death, they don't want to be removed to foster care, and happen to have a bag of cement handy, so --why not? McEwan's short 2007 novel, On Chesil Beach, explores the lead up to a virgin couple's wedding night, its ultimate letdown, and the aftermath of the couple's life. One can hardly imagine any other novelist describe at length the couple's humiliation. But McEwan does a thorough job, first showing the husband's embarrassed outraged, followed by the wife's quiet, but unapologetic attempts to soothe him. She proposes a compromise, which he is too proud to accept, cleaving their married lives the moment it starts. McEwan spends the second half of the novel explaining what the next forty years entails for each of them. While he summarizes their lives in a short amount of space, he has so successfully up their lives with his in-depth examination of their wedding night that readers completely understand the motivations behind each of the characters' actions.Solar, in contrast, lacks the psychological depth of McEwan's previous works. Nearly a week after reading it, I'm still struggling to pinpoint McEwan's main point. On the surface, it seems to comment on some of society's current obsessions: global warming, the petty politics of science funding, organizations like the Aspen Institute, and philandering husbands. The academic satiric is akin to the recent 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Like Goldstein's novel, McEwan's focuses on a scientist whose main successes in life seem to have been achieved by accident. Michael Beard is a Nobel winning physicist whose main ideas happened to occur at the right time to be recognized. But in contrast to Goldstein's Cass Seltzer, Beard is an ornery, almost detestable man who thinks he is better than everyone else. The novel's opener sums up Beard's self-love: "He belonged to that class of men -- vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so."
The novel opens in 2000. For the next nine years, Beard participates in exactly the type of behavior that you'd expect someone who fit the above description to practice. He cheats on his long-term girlfriends; he steals an idea from a student and markets it as his own. One farcical event even involves Beard covering up an accidental crime. Throughout, he takes no responsibility for anything that happens. As a result, throughout, it seems like McEwan is getting at the idea that we live in such a ridiculous world where the selfish get everything. Throughout, Beard also gets fatter, as if McEwan is providing us with a literal manifestation of Beard's greed. But just when we think Beard cannot be redeemed, he is faced with an actually stumbling block. Except this happens at the very end of the novel, with no clear resolution. The reader is left wondering if Beard will take the opportunity to redeem himself or continuehis old ways.
Unfortunately, all this plot seems to have left McEwan very little room to do what he does best: dwelling on very specific, small actions to reveal profound psychological truths about his characters. Instead, McEwan spends much time describing the absurdity of certain farcical set pieces. In one instance, Beard incompetently outfits himself for a snowmobile trip and gets his penis frozen to a tree when he urinates. Funny, yes, but also better done by a number of other British writers (Barnes, Amis even).What I want to know is why Beard is so shallow.
What makes Solar ultimately disappointing is that by avoiding much psychological probing, the novel is also bereft of McEwan's lyrical writing. Instead, it's sentence of plot after sentence of plot. Beautifully written free-indirect style thoughts are rare. Perhaps Solar was an experiment, and all writers are entitled to that. I just hope McEwan goes back to his forte in his next endeavor.