Ian McEwan’s "Lessons" on How to Make It in Literature as a Rich White Guy

History first turned against Ian McEwan in retaliation for his 2008 indictment of “medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others.” Defending his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis against charges of bigotry, McEwan complained, “As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist.” Islamism, McEwan insisted, is easily separable from Islam, and just as easily separable from the skin-color of its most populous adherents. We can, in other words, criticize one without disparaging the other, and violent extremism—Muslim or Christian or any other variety—must be condemned. His reward for coming to his friend’s defense was, predictably, to be accused of racism himself. But he would not be deterred from speaking out.

            When McEwan ran up against modern sensibilities yet again, he was still in poor standing with many in the literary community for his earlier infractions. So imagine the furor when in 2016 he was reported to have said in a speech before the Royal Institution,

The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number. For example, some men in full possession of a penis are now identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms.

He only made matters worse when he began his response to a request for clarification during the ensuing Q&A by saying, “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.” He did go on to commiserate with the harrowing plight of transwomen, but the damage had been done. He came to discover he had run afoul of yet another vision of the world where only the faithful are redeemed and all others are damned.

            Six years later, a fictionalized version of this scandal appeared in the pages of McEwan’s novel Lessons, which includes alternative versions of several other events from the author’s life as well. Indeed, McEwan appears to have set out writing the story with a simple inversion: what if someone else in his life had become the successful novelist while he had instead eked out a mediocre existence as a disappointed but mostly contented man of his time? So, in the rearranged world of Lessons, it is the protagonist Roland Baines’s ex-wife, the celebrated novelist Alissa Eberhart, who falls from grace after offhand quips about transgenderism. McEwan writes,

She had made unnecessary enemies in the trans debate when she said on an American TV chat show that a surgeon might sculpt a “kind of man” out of a woman but there was never enough good stuff to carve a woman out of a man. It was said provocatively in the Dorothy Parker mode and got a quick bark of laughter from the studio audience. But these were not Parker’s times. “Kind of man” brought the usual trouble. An Ivy League university withdrew Alissa’s honorary degree and a few others cancelled her lecture engagements. More institutions followed and her speaking tour collapsed. Stonewall, also under new management, said she had encouraged violence against trans people. On the internet her remarks pursued her. A younger generation knew her to be on the wrong side of history. Rüdiger had told Roland that her American and UK sales had suffered. (411)

Rüdiger, Alissa’s German editor who goes on to become the CEO of a publishing house, is the one who relays the story to Roland because by this point in the novel the couple has been estranged for decades. When Roland is finally reunited with Alissa, she expresses her frustration with the new generation of critics. “Life is messy,” she says, “everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid and I’ve made lots of enemies among these young Puritans for saying so. They’re as stupid as we were” (414).

            After reading passages like these, you might expect the novel would be bitterly denounced by nonfictional critics and contemptuously dismissed by real-life readers, perhaps with an eyeroll and an exasperated “Okay Boomer.” But so far Lessons is doing well both critically and commercially, coming in at number six on review aggregator Bookmark’s list of best-reviewed fiction of 2022, while garnering an average Amazon rating—based on over 3,500 reviews—of 4.3 stars. That’s not to say McEwan and his latest offering lack their share of detractors. “It’s a reminiscence,” writes Daniel Soar for the London Review of Books, “sometimes fond, sometimes self-flagellating—and, for large stretches, it’s properly, Englishly, boring.” But the most galling thing about McEwan for Soar and the other naysayers just may be that he has not only earned a substantial measure of wealth from writing fiction, but from writing literary fiction no less. What makes this doubly impressive—or infuriating, depending on your allegiances—is that the “young Puritans” Alissa refers to in the passage above are thought to make up a disproportionate share of the readership for any literary work coming off the printers over the last several years.

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For anyone viewing his career through the lens of the currently ascendant “intersectional” ideology, McEwan’s ongoing success must stand as an annoying provocation—but it is McEwan himself who poses the real problem. Intersectionalism enjoins its followers to situate authors along the intersecting continua of their racial, gender, and sexual identities to determine their relative standing as either oppressor or oppressed: whites oppress blacks, men oppress women, cis people oppress transgenders, hetero people oppress gays. Late in Lessons, Rüdiger explains to Roland why promoting Alissa’s work has gotten dicey in the current climate. “She’s our greatest novelist,” he says. “Teenage school kids are made to read her. But she’s white, hetero, old and she’s said things that alienate younger readers” (407).

McEwan, being male, has one more strike against him than his protagonist’s ex-wife. Yet it is often difficult to disentangle criticisms focused on McEwan’s identity from those directed at his literary aesthetic. As Adam Begley, a longtime and mostly sympathetic interviewer, lays out in the Atlantic,

About literature, McEwan is always ready to talk. “Novels at their best name the world,” he tells me, not for the first time. His stubborn devotion to realism is at once a strength and a weakness; it risks making him seem old-fashioned and conventional, too tidy, too slick. He names the world, but of course can’t apprehend it with unimpeachable objectivity, his worldview distorted by the usual suspects: race, gender, sexual preference, socioeconomic status. A militantly empirical, science-minded secular humanist, he’s happy to declare that materialism is “the most freeing of worldviews” and unafraid to bash religiosity: “The word spiritual,” he told me nearly 20 years ago, “I just don’t understand what people mean. I hear that word and I reach for my gun.” His realism rests on certainty tempered by an acute awareness of contingency—and by empathy, a novelist’s indispensable attribute. But can empathy wholly compensate for an ingrained point of view, a nexus of obdurate personal bias and cherished belief? Even assuming that the world he wants to name is one we all recognize, how can he be confident that language carries meaning without spillage or slippage? Readers on the lookout for confirmation of radical, existential doubt and fans of the avant-garde thrilled by the instability of language should pluck books from a different shelf.

As bewildering as this assessment must be to the uninitiated (spillage or slippage?), it highlights the challenges McEwan is forced to overcome whenever he sits down to put pen to paper.

Begley’s characterization of McEwan’s work likely makes little sense to readers unfamiliar with what those in graduate literature courses call “critical theory” (of which intersectionalism is a subcategory). Frankly, the standard litany of charges leveled against McEwan hint at underlying premises so bizarre they ought to raise questions even in the minds of the students and academics who are most well-versed in this type of scholarship. To wit, why should the impeachability of McEwan’s objectivity count against him when no writer—no human—can claim perfectly unvarnished clarity into any topic? Doesn’t the ability to share insight into the experiences of each character matter more than the perspective of the author, especially if that author brings profound empathy to bear? Anyway, who but a masochist would want confirmation for “existential doubt”? For that matter, how are atheism and a thorough discounting of spirituality supposed to sooth such doubts? And what does it matter that language, however strenuously precise, can never fully capture the multitude of meanings the people, objects, and actions it describes are drowning in? Sure, readers often have wildly varying interpretations of the same text, but if a work of fiction contains ambiguities stark enough to make the story incomprehensible or incoherent, how likely is that work to win favor with readers—unless they happen to be among those fans of the avant-garde Begley warns off from McEwan’s work?

Begley’s anosognosia regarding the alien nature of his own “ingrained point of view” is not at all exceptional among professional literary scholars. Though, as with the case of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, McEwan’s continuing success signals a disconnect between critics and the publishing industry on the one hand and the reading public on the other. According to conservative writer and political commentator Douglas Murray, such divergent responses arise because “Publishing is Now a Left-Wing Bubble.” Murray arrived at this conclusion after reading an anonymous 2021 letter in the trade magazine The Bookseller which histrionically decries the allegedly cozy relationship between publishing companies and bigoted authors. It contains lines like, “We need to step away from the paradigm that all opinions are equally valid” to underscore the need for action, because apparently “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry.”

Murray surmises the unnamed signatories were reacting to the company Hachette’s decision to publish The Ickabog, a children’s book by Rowling—even though the story has nothing to do with gender. Again, the main trouble with The Ickabog is its author. Rowling has publicly rejected trans activists’ claim that no meaningful difference exists between transwomen and women born as females, further arguing that those who ignore the distinction are putting biological females at risk. The triviality of this offense, along with the ongoing debate about whether it constitutes an offense at all, offers Murray a hint about who was behind the missive.  

One suspects that the authors of the letter are the sort of liberal arts graduates who dominate the publishing world, and who bring with them the intellectual clutter of their education and their class, indicated by such jargon as “paradigms”. These are not social milieus where any sort of dissenting opinion is encouraged or tolerated, let alone the sort of hardened illiberal prejudice that they imagine—or pretend to imagine—is rife.

As further evidence of the viewpoint homogeneity in publishing, Murray points to survey data available on a website that tracks political affiliation by occupation. The site reports that book publishing stands as the sole industry exclusively employing people on the left, making it, in Murray’s words, “the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy.”

            That an outspoken conservative like Murray would voice such an opinion is no surprise. But his assessment has been echoed by a few prominent figures on the left. In an op-ed titled “There’s More than One Way to Ban a Book,” New York Times opinion columnist and former editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul suggests that while operatives on the right continue their attempts to officially ban books they deem morally and socially corrosive, activists on the left have likewise worked to “cancel” books through social media campaigns and organized protests among publishing industry workers. Paul writes,

In the face of those pressures, publishers have adopted a defensive crouch, taking pre-emptive measures to avoid controversy and criticism. Now, many books the left might object to never make it to bookshelves because a softer form of banishment happens earlier in the publishing process: scuttling a project for ideological reasons before a deal is signed, or defusing or eliminating “sensitive” material in the course of editing.

Paul’s apostacy in acknowledging these checks to free expression provoked a backlash among the faithful in the literary community. Her move to the Times opinion section, with its “expected results,” even earned her a spot on Literary Hub’s list of biggest stories of 2022. (And Paul would go on to create further controversy with a defense of J.K. Rowling.)

Paul was inspired—or provoked—to write her column on book banning by Gayle Feldman’s Publishers Weekly report on the state of free expression in the publishing world. Feldman began her investigation by soliciting the opinions of six industry leaders. Only one of these executives was willing to discuss the topic, and only on condition of anonymity. So, Feldman went on to seek input from former executives and others involved in book publishing. The report states that while campaigns by the right are wreaking plenty of havoc,

many longtime book people have said what makes the present unprecedented is a new impetus to censor—and self-censor—coming from the left. The desire to heal historical wounds and promote social justice is conflicting with the right to speak and write freely. Call it political correctness, cancel culture, wokeness—and the fear of challenging it—this is the censorship that, as the phrase goes, dare not speak its name.

Underlying these censorship campaigns, which the campaigners routinely complain do not warrant the label of censorship, is the ideological tenet that the wrong kind of writing or speech represents a grave threat to people who are already disadvantaged and oppressed. Such unintended impacts are what Begley is referring to when he writes about linguistic “spillage or slippage.” A cis male novelist, for instance, in his zeal for naming the world, might label a biological male a man, causing untold harm to the trans community—at least according to trans activists. The most reliable way to avoid these potential harms, believers argue, is to ensure that as often as possible it’s the downtrodden themselves who get to dictate the discourse. This precept comes with a troubling corollary.

While solid data on the criteria driving publishing decisions is next to impossible to come by, some prominent voices are suggesting it is not just the handling of taboo topics like race and gender that gets books nixed. Tweeting in response to Paul’s piece, none other than literary giant Joyce Carol Oates wrote,

a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own “privilege.”

If taken at face value, this observation means a book may be deemed problematic for its content, but it can also be torpedoed owing to the race and gender—the “positionality”—of the author. This policy follows logically from the premises of intersectionalism. If you’re a white cis hetero man, you occupy the apex of oppressordom. That means, at least within the framework of this ideology, that if you are speaking or writing, your words can only be operating to perpetuate the status quo that affords you this power—unless, as Oates suggests, you happen to be critical of your own privilege. But even if you are “self-flagellating” in this way, as Soar accuses McEwan of being, you can still be dismissed as boring, i.e., not as interesting as other writers with more impressive claims to victimhood. 

            Many in the industry claim this policy of exclusion is an open secret. The Cuban American writer Alex Perez, who graduated from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, created yet another controversy in 2022 with comments made in an interview for Hobart Magazine. He argued,

My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals. This is a mindset that views “whiteness” and America as inherently problematic, if not evil, and this sensibility animates every decision made by publishers/editors/agents. White people bad. Brown people good. America bad. Men bad. White women, I think, bad…unless they don a pussy hat. 

Perez also claims that “80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility; these woke ladies run the industry.” And this homogeneity has a particular effect on the types of books that get published and promoted. Perez argues,

Every white girl from some liberal arts school wants the same kind of books … I’m interested in BIPOC voices and marginalized communities and white men are evil and all brown people are lovely and beautiful and America is awful and I voted for Hillary and shoved my head into a tote bag and cried cried cried when she lost…”

A handful of Hobart’s editors resigned in protest after reading the interview, and the magazine was widely criticized for publishing it. But Sharmaine Lovegrove, founder of the Hachette imprint Dialogue Books, had just a year earlier made a similar point, saying in an interview, “I think what happened was that a particular type of person, a particular type of white, middle-class woman came through publishing and sort of had enough of the old boys’ club.” Lovegrove went on to say, “It’s really disappointing to see these stats of men not coming through, not just as novelists, but through the editorial process as well.”

Whether worries of this supposed “woke” takeover of literature are overblown—or whether you happen to be among those clamoring for it to continue—white male authors are undeniably facing unprecedented headwinds. So how has Ian McEwan managed to keep publishing and selling his books? Or, as Soar phrases the question in a London Review podcast episode,

Why do we give him quite so much attention? And some of it’s a little bit embarrassing. You know these 13 pieces that have been published in the LRB. And unfortunately, I think we can accept, he’s just inescapable, and once a figure like this is discussed, you’ve either got to ignore it in order to make space for other people—and that’s probably a better way to behave—or you’ve got to kind of think about how we’ve got to this point. What goes on to get this person on the radio every morning soon after his novel comes out?

Listening to Soar’s self-negating mea culpa, you may think McEwan was guilty of some atrocity. Though Soar provides precious few details about what he dislikes in Lessons, he seems unaccountably assured that McEwan’s mediocrity is beyond dispute—his commercial success notwithstanding. Soar, an Oxford man (though not at all like Gatsby), is so unselfconscious in his elitism that he never pauses to consider readers may pick up a book for some other reason than that people like him are discussing it. But what might that reason be?

            Soar isn’t alone in proclaiming McEwan’s writing tedious, but there is a peculiar tendency among those unimpressed with his prose to mischaracterize major aspects of the stories they’re criticizing. In a notorious hatchet job for the New York Review of Books, for instance, novelist John Banville argues that McEwan’s novel Saturday is little more than an overdressed fairy tale. In keeping with this thesis, Banville complains about having to slog through a lengthy description of the protagonist’s preordained victory in a heated squash match with a work colleague. “Having thrashed his squash opponent,” Banville writes, “Perowne returns to the arts of peace.” The only problem for Banville is that McEwan in fact has his main character losing the game. After the players argue over a let, Perowne is forced to concede. “And so they played the let,” McEwan writes, “and Perowne serves the point again, and as he suspected might happen, he loses it, then he loses the next three points and before he knows it, it’s all over, he’s lost” (118). Later, when his wife asks him over the phone why he’s out of sorts, he decides against telling her about a drubbing he took during a road rage incident earlier in the day because it might worry her. Instead, he answers, “I lost at squash,” adding “I’m getting too old for this game” (151)—some fairy tale hero he is.

What must be borne in mind is that critics’ complaints often reveal far more about their own preoccupations than they do about the books under review. Soar for instance claims later in the London Review podcast episode that among the many explorations of historical events in Lessons,

an odd missing part is 9/11, which is sort of mentioned and you kind of know it’s happened, but unlike everything else, probably in the sort of present imagination (sic), it doesn’t loom quite as large. It’s sort of passed over.

Soar then suggests the elision was deliberate, as McEwan wanted to avoid reminding readers of his earlier position on the Iraq war. But here’s how 9/11 is “sort of mentioned” in Lessons, as McEwan describes how Roland

did not trust the Tube. Only a miniscule faction, credulous and cruel, believed that the New York hijackers reclined in paradise and should be followed. But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some. Chosen from among the bearers of “Rushdie Must Die” placards or the burners of his novel, or from among the younger brothers, sons and daughters. That was chapter one, thirteen years ago. Chapter two, the Twin Towers. The next chapter was likely to be a story of punitive revenge, of military invasion, not of Saudi Arabia where the hijackers came from, but its murderous neighbor to the north. Two-thirds of the American public were persuaded that Saddam was responsible for the New York slaughter. The prime minister was inflamed by traditional loyalty to the US and successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. The country was preparing for war. (307)

Roland next recalls London being shut down for rehearsals of an emergency response to a terrorist bomb. “He thought about it often, too often.” His response was to “Never take the Underground again,” and he was sure “The buses too could not be trusted.” That’s why in this scene he is traveling on foot. While Soar is right that the passage takes up little space in the book, he might have noticed that Roland’s destination lends some added significance to the topic of his ruminations.

One of two major incidents that set the plot of Lessons into motion in its earliest chapters is fourteen-year-old Roland’s becoming enmeshed in a sexually abusive relationship with his piano teacher. The passage about 9/11 comes when a fifty-something-year-old Roland is going to confront that teacher for the first time in nearly forty years—not exactly where an author would tuck a topic he was embarrassed to broach. Later, as Roland walks away from the encounter, he picks up the thread again. Contemplating his former involvement with politics and why New Labor has fallen out of fashion, he thinks, “Iraq, the deaths, careless American decisions, sectarian slaughter had caused some of the best local people to return their party cards” (324).

What we have then is not an evasion on McEwan’s part so much as prejudice and suspiciously poor recall on Soar’s. Had he not decided to dislike McEwan’s work because he disagrees with his politics, Soar might have realized the simpler explanation for the brevity is that McEwan already wrote about 9/11 at length in his novel Saturday. Likewise, though Soar devotes most of his print review of Lessons to the question of why McEwan incorporates violent encounters, dramatic accidents, and other lurid events into his stories, he is so consumed with contempt for both the author and his readers that he never bothers to consider the obvious answer. Violence is compelling. Intrigue is engaging. Suspense propels us onward to the next page. An eventful plot makes reading more pleasurable.

            In keeping with H.L. Mencken’s definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” critics like Banville and Soar cannot abide protagonists taking pleasure in their life circumstances, failing to be brought to their knees by the tragic state of the world, or behaving in any way heroic. And they cannot abide books that bring enjoyment to readers. “Page-turning excitement has long been a suspect virtue in a literary novel,” writes Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker, “and some critics have disparaged McEwan as a hack with elegant prose.” For today’s critical theorists, stories are supposed to serve as tools for galvanizing collective efforts at political reform, and no one will be motivated to overturn the status quo by characters given to singing its praises or luxuriating in its blessings. The prescribed conversion is meant to begin in penance: privileged readers must be made to feel guilty so they will be more apt to divest themselves of their privilege for the sake of equity. As Perez suggests in his Hobart interview, the ideal stories for these critics feature hyperarticulate victims completely at the mercy of the societal forces that define them. Traditional plots, contented characters, anything redolent of gratitude or celebration on the part of the allegedly privileged—not only do these sins bring the taint of kitsch, but they also subvert the cause.

McEwan’s conception of what a story is and what a story does is different: less propagandistic, more aesthetic, more capacious, more human—and far more likely to conduce to true transformation, beginning as it does with transcendence. McEwan has written of “fiction’s generous knack of annotating the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness, the small print of subjectivity.” Recounting how a couple of choice sentences from the greats once restored his “faith” in the literary endeavor, he explains, “Appreciating the lines, you are not only at one with the writer, but with everyone who likes them too. In the act of recognition, the tight boundaries of selfhood give way a little.” He could be paraphrasing Tolstoy’s famous line about how “A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” It’s through this communion and renewal that most of us experience the exquisite pleasure of reading literature.

No clear line separates commercial from literary fiction, but one way to think of the distinction is that the commercial variety features extraordinary characters and events—dragons, wizards, epic battles—rendered in ordinary prose, while literary fiction features ordinary characters and events rendered in extraordinary prose. McEwan offers us something of a hybrid, in that his novels are eventful and brimming with suspense, even as they weave into their plots meditations on life’s finer mysteries, all the while observing the minutia of daily life with deadly poetic precision.

McEwan may have been grandfathered into the publishing world; his breakout works hit the shelves in the decades before smart phones and social media allowed radical postmodern progressivism to spread from humanities departments into the wider public consciousness. But there must still be plenty of readers who find value in his works, or they wouldn’t continue to be published to the fanfare Banville and Soar find so embarrassing. Publishers wouldn’t bother if the books didn’t sell. As novelist Charles Finch writes of McEwan in his 2014 review of The Children Act for The Chicago Tribune,

The first thing to do about Ian McEwan is stipulate his mastery. Anything we want a novelist to do, he can do, has done. His books are fantastically pleasurable. Their plots click forward, the characters lifted into real being by his gliding, edgeless, observant, devastating prose—his faultless prose. (That’s not a random word of praise. It doesn’t contain faults.) Every novelistic mode is at his command, from the dark fabulism of “The Child in Time” to the vibrant sweep of “Atonement” to the modest but beautiful realism of his more recent work, “On Chesil Beach,” “Saturday,” “Solar.”

Finch represents another common variety of McEwan criticism, one that treats political concerns as merely one dimension among many, leaving room for an appreciation of the author’s uncommon gifts. These critics, as ambivalent as they are—or pretend to be—are the ones who put Lessons on the list of best-reviewed books of 2022.

Since he begins his review insisting on “The first thing to do,” however, we know Finch believes something more must be done. “So then,” he writes, “The next, more rarefied level: To what end is he employing these perfections? What does he care about? What is he trying to tell us about ourselves?” Finch too, despite his willingness to acknowledge McEwan’s virtuosity, fails to realize his own ideological approach to reading may not be widely shared. Maybe McEwan is not trying to tell us anything. Maybe he is just trying to create great works of literature, shared aesthetic experiences that transform our consciousness by letting elements of others’ consciousness seep in through the magic of language—to no end other than the sharing and the self-transcendence.

While Finch’s review reveals he is also steeped in critical theory, his preferred subcategory is Marxist, not intersectional. Once again, though, the main criticism leveled against McEwan’s work focuses on McEwan himself rather than on any element that may be called aesthetic or literary. In this case it’s his wealth that must be gestured toward as a problem, not his whiteness or his sexuality. Here is how Finch takes on the question that stymies Soar about why McEwan’s novels include so many scenes of menace:

I think the essence of McEwan’s work lies in this anxiety. He takes a certain class of people—his people, for though every life is blemished by private sorrow, he must know how blessed he seems from the outside, a rich, brilliant, successful Londoner—and puts them at tension with their own tranquil lives. Often he has done that by examining stark moments of trauma or error, like the false charge of rape in “Atonement” or the balloon accident in “Enduring Love.”

Or maybe McEwan writes about “his people” simply because they are the ones he knows best. They may also be the ones he thinks he has the best chance of connecting to with his writing, liberal types with sufficient education to know they have it good and conscientious enough to be uncomfortable about it. And maybe the trauma and error come in simply because something has to happen in a story for it to be a story.

Finch ends his review by granting McEwan the status of genius, but “Does this dissolve the criticism most frequently leveled at McEwan in recent years,” Finch asks rhetorically, “that his novels treat the problems of a caste without many problems?” Here we come to the problem Finch struggles to reconcile with his appreciation of the book’s literary quality. Suggesting that McEwan condescends to his less well-to-do characters—by making them too intelligent—Finch explains,

It’s the kind of thing that bothers people, because in a way, every novel is already an act of class warfare in the wrong direction. It’s the art of the bourgeois order. What’s fascinating about McEwan is how he at once extends that conventionality and atones for it.

This is cleverly phrased cant. McEwan does in fact frequently explore the theme of an accidental fate that situates some in society’s more comfortable echelons while leaving others much worse off—an insight he should be credited for all the more considering he was not born to money. But when critics say things like “every novel is already an act of class warfare in the wrong direction” (Dickens, Steinbeck, Morrison?), all they’re really telling us is that they are not as interested in discussing literature as they are in proselytizing on behalf of their favored political ideology.

            So even the critics willing to grant that McEwan’s success may have something to do with his ability to write good novels have a hard time not turning the focus onto McEwan himself. This brings us back to the question of how he manages to keep selling novels and winning critical accolades—though from markedly conflicted reviewers—when his identity has nothing to recommend it. How has his writing career survived his multiple blasphemies against the prevailing academic creed? So far, we have identified two important factors. First, his renown had already begun to grow before the current checks on free expression were established. Second, he happens to write excellent novels, stories people want to read despite the denunciations of papery and patronizing scholars. But there’s something else he does to evade the censors, something ingenious.

            The scene in Lessons about Alissa’s troubles with the “new Puritans” wasn’t the first time McEwan commented on academic anti-liberalism and leftist identitarianism in his work. In his 2016 novel Nutshell, he writes that

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in a new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender… (144).

At first, the unnamed protagonist’s feelings about this “mood” are hard to discern. He even seems excited by the prospect of broadened horizons. But later in the scene, it becomes clear he’s having some fun at the expense of those “almost-educated young.”

I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing in my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs. (145)

This sendup heightens the mystery of how McEwan’s career has withstood the inevitable backlash. But it also provides a clue to his strategy.

            If the dominant ideology declares the identity of the speaker supersedes the substance of what is spoken, we must ask who it is making these problematic statements in McEwan’s stories. It so happens that Nutshell is a retelling of Hamlet, and the narrator occupies the role of the eponymous lead character. The brilliantly peculiar twist is that he narrates the entire story while still inside his murderous mother’s womb (casting still more doubt on the acuity of those critics who complain of McEwan’s bland conventionality). What accounts for the satirical lines about coddled college students in this bizarre context? The narrator continues,

I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. (146)

Readers can sympathize with the narrator’s real grievance and may even grasp the underlying absurdity of taking desires and feelings for facts. “Lies will be her truth,” the narrator laments. Such a point is much easier to take from a babe in the womb than from a bespectacled rich white dude.   

            What McEwan understands is that fiction is the only realm where we enjoy the freedom to exchange our real identities for any of our choosing. A man may write from the perspective of a woman, as McEwan did in Atonement and The Children Act. An adult can write from the perspective of a child, as he also did in the first part of Atonement. He even took on the identity of a fetus in Nutshell. (Though, interestingly, he has yet to attempt taking the perspective of a racial minority.) At the point in Lessons when Alissa’s editor is telling Roland about her run-ins with social justice activists, readers have recently learned about the amputation of her foot. When she tells Roland in person about her frustrations with the “young Puritans,” she does it from a wheelchair, and later in the scene she reveals she’s been diagnosed with lung cancer, the result of her lifetime of smoking. Harsh truths are easier to take from moribund, wheelchair-bound old feminists than from comfortable old white men married to reason and realism.

            One of McEwan’s motives when he sat down to write Lessons was to pay homage to Nabokov, as the perverse relationship between piano teacher and pupil attests, along with references to Alissa’s Nabokovian prose in fictional reviews of her novels. So McEwan was faced with the challenge of writing about his own past, knowing no one wants to read about the experiences of overeducated white guys anymore, while incorporating thematic echoes of a famous author who would never make it past the censors today. His solution was to switch around the roles, the identities, so it was a young male student seduced by the older teacher, and an abandoned father witnessing his absconding wife’s spectacular literary success. By stepping into the character of Roland Baines, McEwan transformed himself from oppressor to victim, albeit one prevented from complaining by his awareness of being privileged in other ways. And he does all this while maintaining his authority over all the memories he most wanted to explore. This maneuver, in less skillful hands, could have easily come across as a cheap dodge. But McEwan’s musician and poet manqué is remarkably relatable, remarkably real, despite the artifice.

            Is McEwan at all concerned about spillage or slippage? Indeed, the theme of stories’ impact on our minds recurs often in his work. The dangers he worries about, however, are far removed from those of the clone legions of today’s scholar-activists. McEwan believes the world exists beyond our fears and hopes and desires—he is no linguistic determinist—so he devotes little effort to describing or defining utopia into existence. And he would be loath to yoke his prose to any block of empirically dubious assumptions about how the wrong term written or uttered by the wrong person will redound to the continuing abjection of this or that identity group. That’s not to say he fails to appreciate the real dangers of the wrong types of stories. When asked by an interviewer in 2002 why he put a child at the center of his novel Atonement, his most widely acclaimed work to date, McEwan explained,

During the 90s I’d been very aware of the moral hysteria that swept through the United States—and then Britain—about child abuse and the recovered memory movement. I was struck reading about cases of perfectly innocent men and women who had been sent to jail for unbelievable sentences on the evidence of a child manipulated by social workers, judges, police and parents in a collusion of panic. For a long time I’d been considering a plot in which an innocent person is condemned by a child. The heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a girl completely obsessed by the Gothic novels she’s been reading. She sees the world in their terms and makes a whole set of rather amusing, ludicrous and shaming assumptions that turn out to be baseless. I wanted to elaborate on that and look at storytelling in relation to the imagination and to fiction.

Adding the two elements together, McEwan tells the story of how Briony Tallis, a thirteen-year-old aspiring playwright who experiences life as so many melodramas pitting heroes against villains, misperceives a series of mysterious events, and concludes that an innocent man is guilty of raping her cousin.

            The recovered memory movement had mostly run its course by the time Atonement was published in 2001, but McEwan must have been concerned when he set out writing that he would face fallout from advocates claiming he was siding with abusers. The most obvious perspective from which to tell a story about the circumstances surrounding a mistaken accusation would be that of the falsely accused. But embodying that perspective would make it much easier for critics to fault the author for taking the side of perpetrators by casting doubt on the testimony of victims. So, McEwan instead has us witness the suspicion taking hold and gathering strength in the mind of the accuser.

The confusion initially arises as Briony secretly observes a sequence of encounters which are inscrutable to her but that readers recognize as an awkwardly budding romance. After spying on one especially strange interaction, Briony has a profound revelation about a new style of story she could tell. She realizes she could give up on plays to instead write the story of what she had just witnessed

from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. (38)

Here we have another way of conceptualizing the distinction between commercial and literary fiction. In literature, we need not judge because there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only human beings struggling with being human. And thus, there is no need for a moral. If Briony is right about this, it would suggest all those activist critics on the lookout for problematic messages in literary works are tilting at windmills.

Unfortunately, Briony’s new conception of story is not allowed enough time to root itself in her mind before it gets stress-tested by a horrible crime. After unsealing and sneaking a peek at a letter the housekeeper’s son Robbie asked her to deliver to her sister Cecilia, Briony is disturbed by an obscenity contained therein. These are the same two characters she saw behaving so strangely earlier in the day, and she doesn’t know, as readers do, that Robbie has given her a version of the letter he meant to throw away, while the version he meant to deliver remains an arm’s-length from his typewriter. Suddenly, Briony’s doubts about the division between heroes and villains are forced to contend with her heroic certainty trying to reassert itself.

Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind. (108)

So when she witnesses her fifteen-year-old cousin Lola being sexually assaulted later that night, even though it’s too dark to identify the assailant, she knows it must be Robbie. And her testimony is enough to secure his conviction.

            Atonement then is, among many other things, a retelling of Don Quixote. If you were determined to read a message into the novel, it would have to be that our zeal for identifying evil must be tempered by greater efforts at empathy, a conviction to weigh the motives and circumstances of those we suspect, and a commitment to investigate and rein in our own biases. Had the first chapters of the novel been told from Robbie’s perspective, Briony would be easy to cast as the villain. Instead, McEwan brings her so vividly to life, makes us experience with such immediacy her struggle to understand and name her world, that she stands as a heroine of sorts, battling not some great evil, but her own ignorance and confusion, her own innate impulse to parse humanity according to the logic of us versus them. Only when we make it to later chapters narrated from Robbie’s perspective are we brought face-to-face with the full force of Briony’s mistake. But now we experience it as tragedy instead of injustice because we sympathize with Briony as well. We later learn that the whole story has been written by an elderly Briony as an act of atonement, consummating her efforts at obliterating the tribal funneling of humanity into the categories of heroes and villains, dispelling once and for all the notion that stories serve as mere vehicles for some moral.

            McEwan returns to these themes in the final pages of Lessons. The scene has an elderly Roland sitting in a rocking chair as his granddaughter Stefanie, who has just begun to read on her own, stands beside him. “That afternoon she had read Tomi Ungerer’s Flix,” McEwan writes, “about a dog born to parents who are cats. Roland, without her knowing, had read it too. A moral tale, but funny and clever.” Stefanie tells him about the dog’s adventures and his journey of discovery.

But it can be tough, torn between two cultures. Eventually he becomes a politician and campaigns for mutual respect, equal rights and an end to cat-dog segregation.

When she had finished her account, he said, “Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?”

She looked at him blankly. “Don’t be silly, Opa. It’s about cats and dogs.”

He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson. That could be for later. (430)

He next tells her of a book he has been imagining, encompassing all the events of the twenty-first century, which he of course knows he won’t be around long enough to finish. But then he worries he may have made a mistake in explaining it to her. “It was not a children’s book,” he thinks. “Yes, a mistake to mention such a book when he was passing on to her a damaged world” (431). It’s a moving scene, one almost impossible to imagine being written by Cormac McCarthy or J.M. Coetzee or Martin Amis, other great writers who happen to be white men. How could McEwan’s race or gender possibly account for it? How could any aspect of his identity oblige us to look away?

            Notably, it’s not just stories that exploit our tribal instinct to view society as a conflict between good guys and bad guys, radicals and reactionaries, oppressors and victims, the bigoted and the woke. Plenty of professor types claim to have discovered, by looking through the lens of this or that critical theory, “the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil.” It’s an alluring narrative. Who wouldn’t want to be recognized as such a hero or heroine? Unfortunately, the academics and activists most in need of a lesson on how such simplistic schemas inevitably lead us astray—lead us toward true evil—are also the least likely to pick up books like McEwan’s. Or if they do read them, they simply can’t help pretending to be that hero themselves, working from the assumption that the author, being what he is, must be that evil incarnate, disguising himself in a way only they can see through.

            Of course, Briony’s lesson in storytelling and tribalism need not have been formulated in the mind of a white man. In fact, there was once a prominent black writer and orator who made a similar point, referring specifically to the struggle for racial equality. Addressing the thirty-fourth annual convention of the National Bar Association, he argued that

Our aim must not be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. In an effort to achieve freedom in America, we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Black supremacy is as bad as white supremacy. God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown and yellow men, God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.

Sadly for McEwan, and more so for all the young aspiring novelists who happen to be white men, Dr. King’s approach to combatting bigotry has gone out of fashion. Let’s hope that doesn’t stop them. Let’s hope too that more scholars, critics, and activists realize that the most effective way to foster diversity in literature is to attract more people from a wider range of demographics, not to exclude those in the majority. The likelihood that acknowledging a work by a white male author is worth reading will turn readers from other identity groups away from writing is miniscule. Proclaiming that literature is a tool of white male oppression, on the other hand, all but guarantees diminished readership for every group. The last thing anyone needs these days is another reason not to read.

*****

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