The Cement Garden(1978),The Child in Time(1987),The Innocent(1990),Enduring
Love(1997),Amsterdam(1998),Atonement(2002),Saturday(2005),On Chesil
Beach(2007),Solar (2010) andSweet Tooth (2012). He is commercially the most
productive and successful of these novelists. His grip on narrative, strongly visual-
ized scene-setting and dialogue is stronger than his characterization or his sense of
wider contexts. A master of the Alfred Hitchcock surprise, the traumatic scenes and
disturbing subjects which draw him have become more public or more historical,
requiring research. McEwan is at his best in the long short story, as exemplified in
The Cement Garden, an unforgettably bleak tale sparely told. In a dysfunctional poor
family, the father dies, then the mother; the disturbed children bury her in the cellar.
The consequence is foreseeable. A body in the cellar is a stock motif of Gothic,
whether in Transylvania or in an outer London suburb. Such modern Gothic reports
miserable and sexually aberrant lives in close physiological detail; the reader’s reac-
tion is one of pathos, horror and distaste. The smell from the cellar gets worse, the
elder daughter’s boyfriend calls the police, and the story ends with flashing blue
lights. McEwan’s later novels are either short stories thickened out, as in On Chesil
Beach,or, as in Atonement,short stories stitched together. He is a gifted short story
writer; but publishers want novels, not short stories.Martin Amis
Martin Amis, son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, grew up in the limelight. Perhaps
in reaction to the hothouse, he shows his teeth: aspiring, from The Rachel Papers
(1973) onwards, to be a kind of middleweight champion of literature. Unlike his
father, he enjoys the USA, and lives now in Brooklyn. He has won almost as many
literary prizes as McEwan, and has more opinions. A chip off the old block, he
enjoye d wro nging the ancientry, beginning with his father, Sir Kingsley. Early
satires,Success(1978),and Other People: A Mystery Story(1981),feature macho,
sarcastic urban youth. In the ambitious London trilogy,Money: A Suicide Note
(1984),London Fields(1989) and The Information(1995),ugly lives are projected
with a startling inventiveness in narration and in the writing. Nazi atrocities are the
subject ofTime’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence(1991), approached through
fractured time-schemes and points of view. The atrocities of the Soviet regime,
which preoccupied his father’s friends, are dealt with more plainly in Koba the
Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million(2002),a political memoir.Experience
(2000) is a memoir of parents, mentors, friends, wives and children. Amis is now
also an essayist and commentator, as seen in The War Against ClichéinEssays and
Reviews(2001),often dealing with American subjects and American fiction. A
website devoted to him said of a book then forthcoming,House of Meetings, that it
couples two of the political stories that emerged from the events surrounding
Se ptember 11,The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, and In the Palace of the End,with
a novella about two brothers and a Jewish girl in the pogrom-poised Moscow of- The next (in a new four-book contract) is called The Pregnant Widow(2010),
a title a little more hopeful than that of his second book, published in 1975,Dead
Babies.
Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes, McEwan and Amis Jr were teenagers in the 1960s; their earlier books
often deal with young people who regard their parents’ generation with an uncom-
prehending contempt. This is an initial theme of Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending412 15 · CONTEMPORARIES