Four book reviews

Ian McEwan's Atonement is one of the best-reviewed books in the last five years, but for as long as I've owned it, I've been dismissive, writing it off as a family melodrama set among English elites, somehow centering on the morality of a group of children putting on a play. Every time I picked it up, I read the first three pages, felt annoyed, and placed it back on the shelf.

It turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my lifetime, up there with American Pastoral, As I Lay Dying and All the King's Men in the way a character-driven story unfolds with a sort of crushing momentum. What at first appeared to be a story about class and family in rural England turns into a story about the paranoia, terror and prejudice of early adolescence. It is unsentimental and severe.

The first half of the book focuses on the events of a single day, climaxing in a brutal action that was unforeseeable in the book's first gentle pages. The second half moves the action seven or eight years later, to London during World War II, the characters now young adults, all of them scarred by the events that preceded them.

This is as perfect as any contemporary novel I've read. I'm being a little vague in my description because I don't want to spoil the experience. One of my complaints over the years is that not many contemporary writers understand how to set up a plot and finish a novel -- plenty of them assemble convincing characters and scenarios, but not many know how to wrap things up. Atonement does not suffer from this problem.

From the extraordinary to the horrible, McEwan's recent novel, Saturday, is a disaster in every way. The premise is promising enough: haunted by the imminent Iraq war, a London neurosurgeon goes about a typical Saturday in London when a violent altercation occurs after a traffic accident. Later that day, this incident is revisited when the surgeon's antagonist intrudes upon his home.

The book's theme seems to be that in the age of terrorism, the only way for people to persevere and maintain sanity is to think small -- focusing on basic things in their lives and not becoming oppressed by the existential dread of global events.

Again -- fine. But this book is horribly executed. Full of pedantic navel-gazing, centering on a family that is too perfect to be liked or credited. The husband is a neurosurgeon; the wife is a media lawyer; the 23-year-old daughter is a gifted poet with a book imminent; the son is a successful blues musician studying guitar under Jack Bruce from Cream. The children's skin is pure as cream. They love their parents. Everyone is articulate, loving, innocent and clean beyond belief. This family makes any episode of The Cosby Show look like the precursor to Natural Born Killers.

McEwan's political views -- while sincere -- are trite. The characters' "think small" credo comes about because the author is unable to think large about the issues he's trying to explores. A debate about the characters' views on the Iraq War is unconvincing in tone and in substance.

Saturday features a villain that is wholly unconvincing. The protagonist's powers of insight are so deep that he immediately recognizes that this person is suffering from Huntington's Disease. When he appears at the family's home late in the book, the events that follow lack basis in normal human behavior and storytelling instinct.

Lastly, there is an unconvincing "twist" that not even the writers on Boston Public would have tried.

I'm n0t quite sure how Ian McEwan managed to follow-up one of the best novels of my lifetime with a work that fails on every level, but he did. Saturday is the worst kind of failure -- a work that tries to think big and tackle grand themes, but descends into trite pomposity.

On Beauty, Zadie Smith's homage to Howard's End, also is a flawed work, albeit far more successful than Saturday. The good news first: She assembles a collection of likeable characters, most of whom are credible, and sets them loose in a fast-moving and readable story. At different points in this book, I loved or raged at almost everybody, and found her ability to track a dozen different characters and multiple storylines to be seamless.

The bad news: There is no big idea underlying this book, which concludes in a sort of vague mash. Her satire of academic life and politics is trite and not knowledgeable -- not even in the early '90s were campus leftists and conservatives spouting such simplistic ideas. Lastly, her depiction of black and mixed-race teenagers and young adults in Boston reads as a little condescending and unconfident, like she drank from the cup of I Am Charlotte Simmons before writing.

What to make of the following? Her most authentic and likeable character is a philandering, fiftysomething art history professor who spouts some of the most stereotypical liberal claptrap, while Smith -- the mixed-race, 30-year-old daughter of London natives -- does not convincingly convey the inner lives of mixed-race young people. Does this testify to her skills as a novelist? Do I know what I'm talking about? There might be something peculiarly British to her sensibilities that keeps her from convincingly portraying young Americans.

Still, I don't want to be hard on this book. It lacked the energy and joy of White Teeth, and it felt a little uncohesive. She raises a lot of questions about race, art, family, class and politics, but doesn't seem able to answer them. It's still a pleasure to read -- a kind of thoughtful, likeable escapism. If it was a little less than I hoped for, that's only because Zadie Smith at her best can acheive so much.

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the second book of his that I've read in the past two months. When I previously wrote about Kafka on the Shore, I struggled to decide how much of the book was artistic achievement, how much was sleight of hand, and whether I was giving Murakami the benefit of the doubt because I assumed he was commenting on Japanese culture with more specificity than I comprehend.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does nothing to resolve this confusion. A Murakami fan described this as the perfect book for someone with A.D.D. -- hopping between characters and storylines, containing multiple novels-within-a-novel. If nothing else, the book testifies to a modern Japan haunted by the atrocities it committed on mainland Asia during World War II. As with Kafka on the Shore, what it all adds up to -- and what Murakami is trying to say -- is anyone's guess.

Also like Kafka on the Shore, it reflects a preoccupation with a cat -- cats serving as the intermediary to some sort of malevolent interior world. It is also concerned with water, wells, islands, sex and dreams. If I were to guess at a thesis, Murakami is saying that Japan is so haunted by its legacy from World War II that it has turned into an antiseptic technocracy, the placid exterior of which conceals lifetimes of repression and dread.

Wind-Up Bird also confirmed a fear that I had when reading Kafka -- that like Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and many others, Murakami is a novelist who strikes you most deeply the first time you read him, with subsequent works less affecting. He's clearly got a lot to say, but his vision of the world and his storytelling techniques don't have the same magic on a repeat visit.