Solar by Ian McEwan

I’m really enjoying Solar, Ian McEwan’s latest book about a narcissistic, overweight, and lecherous Nobel Prize-winning physics professor Michael Beard. It’s definitely impressive that McEwan doesn’t skimp out on the details of physics or green technology. I can’t vouch for how accurate or true they may be, but things surely do sound technical and gives the impression that a lot of research has been done for this book. It’s very much like Saturday, McEwan’s book about a life in the day of a successful neurosurgeon, in the probing of the minute details of the main character’s personal activities and his work. But Beard is cast as a vile slob for most of the story unlike the svelte and scandal-free Henry Perowne, and this makes for a funnier, more piercing read.

As McEwan immerses himself in various worlds for his books — wartime battle in Atonement, medicine in Saturday, science in Solar – I can’t help but to think that some of the knowledge gained from an earlier book seeps into later ones. In Solar, a description of a running Beard, late to a speaking engagement, has a distinctly medical observation, as if some prose has held over from Saturday:

Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed.

I’m going to end with a poor baseball analogy: While sharp observation of human flaws and relationships remain central to McEwan’s writing, much like a batter with a good eye, his meticulous research and penchant for the technical, something not present in his earlier work, has become his steroids — his stories now go more in-depth and further into areas that less committed authors might shy away from, allowing for some richly developed worlds and, sometimes, some showboating.

Filed under: Fiction

Started Some Fiction Again

It’s been a while since I read a novel. I tried to read Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale earlier in the year but gave up about 300+ pages in because all the fantasy and romance stuff stopped resonating with me and the characters were too starkly good vs. evil.

I wanted something easy to read, so I picked up Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which, from what I can tell from reading the inside cover and the first 150 pages, tells the story of a controversial sex ed teacher (a divorcee) and a former rocker/drug addict born-again Christian (who happens to be the soccer coach of the sex ed teacher’s 11-year-old daughter) against a suburban backdrop. I haven’t read Perotta’s Little Children but I did see the movie and this book seems to carry more humor and takes a lighter approach to life in the suburbs. Whereas Little Children was about the suffocating life of a young woman and man raising their respective children with gloomy personal prospects and cold marriages, The Abstinence Teacher has more elements of satire and a less sombre tone.

What stuck out to me is the way that Perotta describes clothing, especially the way the women characters wear them.

A few examples:

On the first day of human sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-helled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn’t have won on a date–not that she was going on a lot of dates these days–let alone to work.

Allison stood in the sunlit, two-story entranced foyer… looking sweetly disheveled in a gold silk robe that Tim had never seen before, tied just loosely enough for him to get a tantalizing glimpse of the sheer black nightgown underneath.

In the name of facing temptation, Tim met Deanna at Starbucks the following Thursday morning. She wore a skirt, high heels, and a shirt with a plunging neckline, and he couldn’t keep from telling her how good she looked.

She stepped inside, wearing sneakers, Lycra shorts, and a pink-and-purple sports bra.

I don’t think it really applies, but I kept thinking about the “male gaze” and how these descriptions, in some ways, sexually objectify women. Maybe not so much in the old classical Hollywood way, but what these women wear seem to reflect their agenda and the effect they hope to have on men.

Maybe that was a real lame way of trying to bring up something I learned in college, but I thought it’d be fun to review (thanks Wikipedia) what I remember about the “male gaze”:

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the “male gaze” that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor. She asserts: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” and as a result contends that in film a woman is the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Mulvey argues that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and ‘looking’ in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.”

I remember reading Mulvey’s essay for a class and feeling a bit guilty since the movies I seemed to enjoy the most almost always allowed me to identify with the on-screen male character, who, most certainly, always had a beautiful, sexually-charged counterpart.

Maybe I’ve done more to describe the male gaze that I personally bring to reading rather than anything Perotta does in the book. I now realize that Perotta does describe, in similar level of detail, the way the men wear their clothes and do their hair and the effect it has on a female character. I probably saw nothing sexual in such a scene and moved quickly through it, but perhaps a female reader may think differently. I should ask my girlfriend.

Filed under: Fiction