I decided when I read the NYT review of Ian McEwan’s latest (and 18th) novel, What We Can Know, that I had to read the book.  (Click the screenshots to read the review if you have NYT access, or find the review archived here.)  I quote some of the encomiums from the review:

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.

McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.

. . . I’m hesitant to call “What We Can Know” a masterpiece. But at its best it’s gorgeous and awful, the way the lurid sunsets must have seemed after Krakatau, while also being funny and alive. It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.

I had to get it via interlibrary loan, and since it’s new it took some time. But I did get it, and read the 300-page book in a week. And yes, it’s excellent.

I’m a fan of McEwan, and especially like his novels Atonement (made into a terrific movie) and the Booker-winning Amsterdam. This one also does not disappoint. The NYT gives a plot summary, but I’ll just say that it’s a novel about a poem, and the action takes place over two years more than a century apart: 2014 and  2119. A well-known British poet named Francis laboriously pens a “corona” poem for his wife Vivien on her 53rd birthday. It would be hard to write a normal corona, much less one that, like this one, is said to be a masterpiece. Here’s what the form comprises according to Wikipedia:

A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close.

Imagine how hard that would be to write, as the first lines have to form a stand-alone sonnet, and rhyme properly, when put in sequence at the end! To see an example, go here, though the corona has only 12 rather than 14 included sonnets.  At any rate, Francis’s poem gets a national reputation although Francis won’t let it be reproduced or published; it is read aloud on Vivien’s birthday to a dozen guests and then given to her, handwritten on vellum. But only Vivien sees it in print.

Over a hundred years later, with the world devastated by nuclear exchanges, global warming, and skirmishes, a scholar named Thomas Metcalfe, specializing in poetry of the early 2000s, decides to track down the corona to see why it was so renowned despite being unpublished (a nostalgia for the past pervades the 22nd century). As he searches for the work, the story flips back and forth between the 21st and 22nd centuries, giving us two casts of characters, both of which engage in adultery and, in the earlier century, crime.  These intrigues determine the fate of the poem, but I won’t give away the ending. The novel starts a bit slowly, but builds momentum to a roller-coaster finish.  And yes, it’s the best novel of McEwan’s I’ve read since Atonement.

This one I recommend highly.  I keep hoping that McEwan, like Kazuo Ishiguro, will win a Nobel Prize, for he’s pretty close to that caliber. (I tend to lump the authors together for some reason.) But do read it if you like good fiction, and dystopian fiction even more. Two thumbs up!

By the way, it makes constant references to things going on in 2014: cellphones, social media, and people prominent today. I was surprised to find on p. 282 (near the end) a reference to Steve Pinker.  In the earlier century, the pompous poet Francis and his wife invite a couple over to dinner, and the man, named Chris, who is relatively uneducated, uses the word “hopefully” in a sentence, meaning “I hope”.  That was (and is to me) a faux pas, and Francis rebukes the speaker at the dinner table, saying that he doesn’t want to hear that word in his house again. (What a twit!)  But at a later dinner, Chris, rebuked again for the same word, takes Francis apart, showing how he used the word properly and, in addition, a bloke named Pinker said it was okay (I presume this is in Pinker’s book A Sense of Style).  Here’s the passage on p. 282. Chris is speaking and explaining how he discovered that it’s okay to say “hopefully”:

“I don’t know a thing. First time Francis jumped down my throat, I look on Harriet’s shelves. She poined me towards Burchfield’s Fowler and a bloke called Pinker. Seems like some ignorant snob years back picked on hopefully, and a mob of so-called educated speakers got intimidated and joined in and scared each other into never using the word and crapping on anyone who did. Pathetic!”

Below is the book with a link to the publisher. Read it. And, of course, my reviews hopefully will prompt readers to tender their own recommendations. If you have such a book, please name it and tell us why you liked it in the comments below.

UPDATE: The first reader’s comment below tells me what I didn’t know: that Amis himself died in May of this year. I had no idea. But of course it was esophageal cancer, a common result of excess drinking and smoking.

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Before I went on my Galápagos trip, a friend sent me this book, knowing of my love of Christopher Hitchens. It turned out to be an excellent read, and one that I want to recommend to readers.

Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site:

Although the book is called a “novel,” I doubt there’s much in it that’s fiction. Perhaps a name or two have been changed, but everything else rings true, and corresponds to what I know.

I’ve never read anything by Martin Amis before (now “Sir Martin,” he’s the son of the famous writer Kingsley Amis), but I do have an autographed novel of his given to me by another friend. It’s also well known that he was the best mate of Christopher Hitchens. They were born within a few months of each other in 1949, also my own birth year. Hitch, of course, died at the ungodly early age of 62; booze and smokes had taken their toll.

The book is about many things: the nature of prose and poetry, advice on how to write, a memoir (heavy on sex and girlfriends) and, above all, a recounting of the life and death of three of Amis’s literary friends: Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and, of course, Christopher Hitchens. It thus has an episodic structure: after you read a chapter on, say Phoebe Phelps (a pseudonym for one of Amis’s greatest loves, and a striking character), you immediately transition to a chapter on what words and phrases you shouldn’t use while writing, even as a layperson.  This structure is not jarring, for it’s a summing up of what Amis sees was important in his life (he avers that, given his age, this will likely be his last novel).

Above all, the book is about death, and the waning of literary power as one grows older. We see Larkin dying of throat cancer, his esophagus removed, Bellow slowly losing it in a battle with Alzheimer’s that he cannot win, and Hitchens, who also died of throat cancer after repeated bouts of radiation, chemotherapy, and proton therapy.  The dying/death scenarios are long, occupying multiple chapters, and are somewhat depressing, but that’s the theme of the book. (Well, the real theme is what writers can leave behind when they die.)

There’s a final chapter on the death of each of the three principals, called “The Poet” (Larkin), “The Novelist” (Saul Bellow) and “The Essayist” (Hitchens). Readers will be most interested in Hitch, whose medical travails are described in gruesome detail.  But you have to hand it to the man—he never kvetched or complained about dying, even though he knew (especially near the end) that he was on the way out.  Amis and six others kept watch for eight hours over Hitchens in the hospital as, comatose with pneumonia, his blood pressure dropped and then his heart stopped.

This is the most complete description of Hitchens’s death, and it also gives his two last whispered words, which you won’t find anywhere else. They were these: “Capitalism. . . . downfall.”

The sad atmosphere of the book is leavened by Amis’s conclusion (there are two postludes after it), which is that great writers are great because they are infused with the love of life—the ability to see in everyday things the wonder that most of us miss. That may sound trite, but Amis tells it with panache. Some final excerpts:

Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes”, “your first heart”, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent—don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.

He then goes on to show how Nabokov (another writer much discussed by Amis), Bellow, Larkin, and Hitchens saw the world like this because they were in love with life, which makes their deaths even sadder. One more excerpt:

Saul Bellow was a phenomenon of love; he loved the world in such a way that his readers reciprocated and loved him in return. The same goes for Philip Larkin, but more lopsidedly; the world loved him and he loved the world in his way (he certainly didn’t want to leave it), but so far as I can tell he didn’t love a single one of its inhabitants (except, conceivably, my wholly unfrightening mother: “without being in the least pretty” she was, he wrote in his last letter “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen”). Anyway, the love transaction has always operated, to various degrees, with each and every repeatedly published novelist and poet. With essayists, the love transaction was more or less unknown until Christopher Hitchens came along—until he came along, and then went away again.

This is literature’s dewy little secret. Its energy is the energy of love. All evocations of people, places, animals, objects, feelings, concepts, landscapes, seascapes, and cloudscapes: all such evocations are in spirit amorous and celebratory. Love gets put into the writing, and love gets taken out. . . .

Take that for what you will, as it may reflect Amis’s own amatory propensities.  There’s no doubt, though, that Hitch had a great gusto for life. But what’s certain is that writers, like painters, see the world in ways that we peons don’t, and so, when they’re apparently doing nothing—just thinking or observing—they’re actually doing the hard work that gets transformed into art.

Others, like the Guardian reviewer above, may not like the book, but it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, gets many stars on Amazon, and got starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Booklist.  So I’m not alone in recommending it.

By the way, Hitchens should have won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays, but he never did.

Here’s a picture of Amis and Hitch (note “Mr. Walker’s amber restorative” and the cigarettes) from a tepid review of the book in The Guardian.

UPDATE: I just found this review in the NYT, which is mixed but largely positive. A long excerpt:

Don’t be baffling, don’t be indigestible, he warns the young writer. Exercise moderation when writing about dreams, sex and religion. Be a good host to your readers.

It’s sound advice. Why doesn’t he take it?

“Inside Story” is rife with dreams, sex fantasies and maundering meditations on Jewishness, a longstanding obsession. The book feels built to baffle. It is an orgy of inconsistencies and inexplicable technical choices. Why are some characters referred to by their real names (Amis’s friends, for example) and others given pseudonyms (his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, is referred to by her middle name, Elena)? What is the logic behind the sudden shifts into the “loincloth” of the third person? Why does a writer who, on one page, excoriates Joseph Conrad for cliché, for the sin of “in the twinkling of an eye,” so blandly deploy “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” — and worse? What … is … the point … of the … insane … amount … of ellipses?

[The ellipses are explained by Amis as mimicking the pauses in most people’s conversations, and this book, if anything, is a conversation between Amis and the reader, beginning with an invitation to come inside, sit down, and have a drink. I quite like the conversational style. This is NOT your conventional novel!]

The review continues, and this part should make you want to read the book:

Most maddening of all, “Inside Story” also includes some of Amis’s best writing to date.

The sections on Bellow and Larkin, about whom he’s written exhaustively, are warm and familiar. There are scenes of the disorientation of their last days, of Bellow compulsively watching “Pirates of the Caribbean.” He’s a very brave boy, he’d say of Jack Sparrow, with genuine emotion.

It’s on Hitchens that Amis moves into a fresh register. A writer so praised for his style (but also derided for being all style), Amis accesses a depth of feeling and a plainness of language entirely new to his work. He marvels at his friend’s ability to face death with courage. He puzzles over what he still doesn’t understand — chiefly Hitchens’s support of the Iraq War, which he claims Hitchens deeply regretted.

In one scene, Amis assists Hitchens as he takes a swim. “Do you mind?” Hitchens asked, now ailing. Swimming alongside him, Amis was seized by the memory of helping his son learn to walk in proper shoes. “No,” he responded. “I love it.”

Nothing in Amis prepared me for such scenes, for their quiet, their simplicity. Martin Amis, like Phoebe Phelps, has retained the power to surprise. An unexpected boon of aging? He’ll never admit it. But we might say of him, as he says of Phoebe: “She’s like a character in a novel where you want to skip ahead and see how they turned out. Anyway. I can’t give up now.”