The novel shows how Roland has been damaged, but it also persuasively suggests the damage may be more ambiguous, less decisive, than the traumas visited on earlier McEwan protagonists. Though the Cornell affair is recognizably a trademark McEwan turning point, it plays out over hundreds of pages rather than in a single bravura sequence. At the same time, that precision can sometimes come to feel airless and oppressive. He works his effects-of suspense, disquiet, or out-and-out horror-with a precision few contemporary novelists can hope to emulate. Formal control has been McEwan’s greatest strength as a writer as well as his greatest weakness. Lessons is a litany of suffering and grievance that secretly doubles as an ode to life. Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time. Without downplaying the nightmare that is our current political situation, McEwan exposes this attitude as a form of historical narcissism. Provide something lacking in most rapid-response novels: a sense of perspective. It is also the story of the postwar world as seen through the eyes of one of its citizens. Lessons is more than a running commentary on our inflamed present. Here is a narrative that moves with such patient dedication into the circuitous details of an ordinary man’s experience that by the end I knew Roland better than I know most of my actual friends. There’s something close to divine in this process of creating the entire span of a person’s life embroidered with threads trailing off in every direction. Some readers may feel Lessons is too stingy with drama, particularly given the book’s length, but I think it demonstrates the peculiar power of the novel form. Roland may be imaginary, but he’s thickly woven into the social and political developments that shaped all our lives. Indeed, even more than McEwan’s previous novels, Lessons is a story that so fully embraces its historical context that it calls into question the synthetic timelessness of much contemporary fiction. progresses in time the way a rising tide takes the beach: a cycle of forward surges and seeping retreats, giving us a clearer and fuller sense of Roland’s life.

an extraordinarily deft portrayal of the way a too-early sexual experience permanently stains Roland’s romantic expectations.

Here, finally, McEwan luxuriates in all the space he needs to record the mysterious interplay of will and chance, time and memory. While the story shares a few tantalizing similarities with the author’s life, it’s no roman à clef. a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill.

Review lessons ian mcewan