Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon, is detouring around a mammoth anti-war demonstration when his Mercedes has a minor collision with another car. For a man with an enviable career, a perfect marriage, two talented children, and a friendly squash date still to keep, the accident itself is no big deal. But Perowne inadvertently humiliates the other driver by diagnosing that he's suffering from a degenerative neurological illness. For the rest of Perowne's day, this brief encounter lingers in his mind as fresh evidence that he is somehow misusing the advantages that life has bestowed on him. At dinnertime, the other driver reappears, and turns that worry into fear.
Welcome to 'œthe novel of the year,' said Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun. Adopting the technique of Virginia Wolff's Mrs. Dalloway and Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, Ian McEwan has built a whole book around the thoughts and actions that occupy one character over the course of a single day. It is, of course, the 'œmost direct' way possible to 'œtake the temperature' of our 'œpanicky' post-9/11 age, and McEwan, the award-winning author of Atonement, proves fully equal to the challenge. Though McEwan's prose in Saturday is never flashy, said Michael Gorra in the Los Angeles Times, 'œevery other sentence seems to offer an arresting phrase.' The book offers a scan of 'œmass urban life' that's as omnivorous as anything Don DeLillo has produced. Saturday's sense of 'œunderstated dread,' on the other hand, is both a signature McEwan touch and indispensable to a portrait of our time.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”