On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s latest novel, received mostly favorable reviews after its release in Britain earlier this year, but today Michiko Kakutani lays out a nasty opener in the NY Times Review:
“After two big, ambitious novels — “Atonement” and “Saturday” — Ian McEwan has inexplicably produced a small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail.
Although “On Chesil Beach” grapples with some of Mr. McEwan’s perennial themes — the hazards of innocence, the sudden mutation of the ordinary into the awful, the inexorable grip of time past over time present — it does so in a mechanical and highly arbitrary fashion. It also focuses closely on one couple’s romantic and sexual relationship without opening a window, as his earlier novels have done, onto larger social and moral issues, and without giving the reader any genuine psychological insights into its two main characters.”
