McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2002.

Since you've last heard from me, I've been packing up one apartment and moving to another. I picked up McCarthy's Blood Meridian and could never stay awake beyond five pages. A dull, dull novel. So dull I didn't even want to read for a while. Then I lost it in the move and was so glad.* I picked up this novel instead. Why oh why did I wait so long to discover McEwan?

Not counting the 19th century novels I read this past spring, Atonement rivals probably only American Pastoral for best read of the year. Told in three parts, it tells the story of Briony Tallis, an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl who writes stories of princesses and heroism, and how one observation made out a window of her house leads her to turn away from writing fantasy stories and toward, as McEwan puts it, "the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong" (39).

So: literary fiction. I started out the novel hopelessly enamored with Briony, so precious in her attempts to stage a play with her toddler cousins as silly bad actors, seeking always praise from her mother and older siblings, walking around her house as though she knew so much more than she actually did. And then her convictions get her wrong and, not to spoil the opening section's ingenious shifting, she acts in a way that does another character—someone about whom I'd theretofore felt very little—such stupid harm, it's very hard by the end of Part One not to vehemently hate her.

It has something to do with the fact that Briony is a child in full, not just a child-aged character, not a child in the Home Alone sense—a child onto whom we can safely project our own ids. She's such a child in full that she acts fully like a child, and for a while it's fun and cute to read and spend time in her head, but then as must happen in all novels consequences come into play, and as she continues to act like a child we readers can't forget that we're not children, and our feelings toward Briony become too complicated to get a comfortable hold of.

And then we have 200 more pages to read.

Two more things to share. One is the best thing I've ever read about the cunt, or the word "cunt":

No one in her presence had ever referred to the word's existence and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context [of the letter in which the word appeared to her for the first time] helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly. (114)

The other thing I can't share without ruining the book's entirety for you, so all I'll say is that somewhere in its pages this book provides me with the most indisputable defense of realism's chief lie ("This didn't happen but I'm going to do everything in my power to convince you that it did.") that I've come across in recent memory. This novel argues for realism's unending importance.

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* I found it, alas. And as you may have seen it's on my comp list so I'll have to slug through it eventually. Stay tuned.