 Amsterdam (1998)
Reading the work of a great writer is like rocking in a baby carriage – you're in good hands, satisfied with the ride and sorry when it has to end. Reading a not-so-great writer is like wearing a crappy diaper all morning, mushy and crusty and oozing out the sides, your coworkers giving you strange looks, and no change of clothes because you really bought into what are now obviously overstated claims of absorbency. And really, what logic had you brought to bear when "holding it" for days prior to your little experiment? Did you really think a single diaper could hold that much excrement?
Trust me when I tell you, from nauseating personal experience, that—despite everyone's secret desire to shit their pants—the baby carriage is way better.
Ian McEwan is the kind parent you never had, gently rocking you in a sweet baby carriage of well-picked words. And Amsterdam is yet another in a series of self-assured, letter-perfect rides. It was a great first meal after an unexpected fiction fast.
Amsterdam follows two old friends who make a pact, following the undignified death of their mutual former lover, that if one ever gets too sick or crazy to take care of himself, the other will enact a merciful death in the city of clear-eyed European common sense, thanks to liberal Dutch euthanasia laws.
The book is short and fast-paced, easily consumed in a few eager sittings. Like all of McEwan's work, it's so well-written as to be awe-inspiring. The quality of the writing never intrudes on the story, but you're always aware that the author is so fucking good at what he does that you'll rarely read a better string of words and sentences and paragraphs and pages.
And he's concise—an economical wordsmith who, as far as I can tell, never makes a poor, weak, misguided, or lazy choice. Yet he's not weighty or "writerly" at all—his work is simply effortless to read.
I love that, the sense that the author is way smarter than myself—not just technically smarter, like the Tom Clancys of the world, but emotionally and structurally smarter.
There's twists and turns galore, rich character detail, and exceptional descriptions of the main character's livelihoods—music composition and newspaper editing, respectively. As someone who knows nothing about the creation of classical music, I felt I was there, inside Clive's mind as he constructed the epic piece that ultimately proves his downfall. Similarly with Vernon's work as an editor, played as more of a political game than a series of red lines and grammar trees.
Amsterdam is surprisingly more harsh and satirical than previous McEwan books, and has none of the offhand moments of magic I've come to expect from him. Yeah, it's probably no crueler than an early short story of his in which a man literally folds his nagging wife out of existence, but because Amsterdam exists so solidly in the real world, it somehow seems colder.
It reads, in fact, more like a Martin Amis novel than your typical McEwan, with characters whose minor ego-trips blossom into full-blown moral catastrophes, though not everyone who deserves an unpleasant end gets one.
Speaking of unpleasant ends, I swear it took hours to wash the feces off myself that time I wore the diaper to work. Lesson learned.
Likewise, the biting, clever conclusion is distinct from his sweeter, more emotionally satisfying work, such as The Daydreamer or The Child in Time.
As a result, though an excellent, brilliant novel, and leagues ahead of 99% of all other novels and novelists, Amsterdam is microscopically lesser than McEwan's other writings, if only because it didn't make me feel as good.
But that's just splitting hairs, like telling your pastor that the Book of 2 Samuel is lesser than Ezra … God's in both equally, even if you prefer the struggles of Zerubbabel to Ishbosheth.
Review by Crimedog |