Ian Mcewan

Ouch. I enjoyed a profile of him in the New Yorker and recalled enjoying his work as I read it in Granta years ago...Yeeeeaaars ago it seems.

I mentioned watching "Atonement".

This passage from the New Yorker piece smacked of Vonnegut and Dangerfield (Greg is Mr. Mcewan's son):

'Galen Strawson, a philosopher who lives in Oxford, said that the breakup freed McEwan to “become radically more scientific than any one of us.” McEwan’s next novel was “Enduring Love.” Whereas in “Black Dogs” the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose’s logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remembers that not every reader accepted the point: “Poor Greg had to study ‘Enduring Love’ in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”'