atonement book review new yorker

The Trick of Truth

Atonement By  Ian McEwan (Doubleday, 400 pp., $26)

Ian McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive—where storytelling means kinesis, momentum, prowl, suspense, charge. His paragraphs are mined with menace. He is a master of the undetonated bomb and the slow-acting detail: the fizzing fact that slowly dissolves throughout a novel and perturbs everything in its wake, the apparently buried secret that will not stay dead and must have its vampiric midnight. These talents, which are enabled by a penetrating intelligence and a prose style far richer and more flexible than most contemporary writers dream of, have made McEwan an anomalous figure in Britain: perhaps the only truly literary best-selling novelist in that country.

The cost has been high, however. McEwan’s work is very controlled, but its reality is somewhat stifled. More often than not, one emerges from his stories as if from a vault, happy to breathe a more accidental air. In his careful, excessively managed universes, in which everything is made to fit together, the reader is offered many of the true pleasures of fiction, but sometimes starved of the truest difficulties. McEwan’s fictions have been prodigies: they do everything but move us. In his world what is most important is our secrets, not our mysteries.

In other words, McEwan’s fiction has sometimes felt artificial. It should be said, in his favor, that most contemporary novelists feel artificial because they are not competent enough to tell a convincing or interesting story; it is a peculiar excess of proficiency and talent, like McEwan’s—or like Robert Stone’s, W. Somerset Maugham’s, or Graham Greene’s—that produces a fiction so competently told that it also feels artificial. Still, one has tended to read McEwan with the sense that he is beautifully constructing and managing various hypothetical situations rather than freely following and grasping at a great truth. (That this latter mode is also an artifice is only a banal paradox.) In particular, McEwan’s characters, while never less than interesting, lively, and sometimes interestingly weird, have tended not to be quite human. Many of them have neither pasts nor futures, but are frozen in the threatening present. Many of them have parents who died when they were young. They rarely refer to their childhoods, and seem not to have the use of deep memory as such. McEwan, unlike most writers, has not seemed to need any kitty of childhood detail on which to draw. This absence of past stories, of loitering retrospect, allows him to polish the clean lines of his stories. Since his writing rarely dips into the reflective past, it can exist the better as pure novelty. This is the key to McEwan’s extraordinary narrative stealth. His fictions, like detective stories, are always moving forward. They seem to shed their sentences rather than to accumulate them.

Atonement , perhaps following the claim of its title, is a radical break with this earlier McEwan, and it is certainly his finest and most complex novel. It represents a new era in McEwan’s work, and this revolution is achieved in two interesting ways. First, McEwan has loosened the golden ropes that have made his fiction feel so impressively imprisoned. His new book is larger and more ample than anything he has done before, and moves from an English country house in 1935 to an extraordinary description of the British army’s retreat at Dunkirk and a chapter set in wartime London. And second, McEwan uses his new novel to comment on precisely the kind of fiction that he himself has tended to produce in the past. It may be going too far to see  Atonement  as a kind of atonement for fiction’s untruths—not least because  Atonement  is ultimately, I think, a defense of fiction’s untruths. But it is certainly a novel explicitly troubled by fiction’s fictionality—its artificiality—and eager to explore the question of the novel’s responsibility to truth.

OF COURSE, CONFESSING to a sin is not the same as abstaining from it, and  Atonement  might easily have been no more than an over-controlled novel that sought to apologize for being over-controlled. But from the beginning the book has a spaciousness that is new in this writer. Significantly,  Atonement  is chiefly about a child, a little girl named Briony Tallis. The novel opens in 1935; she lives in a large country house in Surrey. Her elder sister, Cecilia, has just come down from Girton College, Cambridge. Her mother, who is subject to migraines, spends much of the time lying in her bedroom. Her father, a civil servant, is a distant presence, usually away in London. Around the house, in addition to the usual staff, is a young man named Robbie Turner, who has also just come down from Cambridge. Robbie’s status is ambiguous: he is the son of the Tallis family’s cleaning lady, and lives with his mother in a nearby cottage, but as a child he was taken under the family’s wing, and his education was paid for by them. He practically grew up with Cecilia, who is in love with him. Alas for Robbie, young Briony, who is thirteen years old, is also in love with him, and Briony will ultimately take her revenge on him, the revenge of the child who feels tempted by, but still exiled from, adulthood.

The novel opens as a house party is about to begin. Briony’s elder brother Leon and his friend Paul Marshall are coming from London. Briony’s young cousins Pierrot, Jackson, and Lola Quincey have just arrived. Briony has always dreamed of writing, and she is eager for her three cousins to act the parts of her new verse play, The Trials of Arabella . Mansfield Park , with its staged play in a country house, and its reflection on the dangerous excesses of the theater, is an obvious progenitor. McEwan has an epigraph from Northanger Abbey , and he clearly wants to perform that most difficult literary task, the simultaneous creation of a reality that satisfies as a reality while signaling itself as a fiction. The characters, for instance, have obviously theatrical and outlandish names (Pierrot, Lola, Leon, Briony), which are simply incompatible with verisimilitude.

One of the ways in which McEwan does endow this fictive world with a reality is by genuinely interesting himself in the ambitions and the follies of a little girl. Briony Tallis, a prim, yearning, intelligent child with a rage for order and a tendency to judge before comprehending, is one of the novel’s achievements. McEwan is funny about Briony’s pretentious habit of stealing complicated words from the dictionary, so that her verse melodrama, The Trials of Arabella , opens thus:

This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow. It grieved her parents to see their first born Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne Without permission…

We follow Briony’s furies and daydreams, as her plans for the staging of her play are slowly thwarted (as in Mansfield Park , the play is never successfully performed). McEwan is especially acute in his conjuring of the aimlessness and solitude of childhood. In one typical scene, we watch Briony as she sits and plays with her hands:

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instance before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it?

From here, Briony goes on to consider her own sense of reality: “was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face?” If the answer is yes, Briony thinks, then “the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.” But if the answer is no, she thinks, then Briony “was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had.”

So we follow the vain drift of a child’s logic over a page. A universal experience is evoked, and McEwan subtly makes the banal and childish dilemma—when do I control my fingers?—the spur to those larger frustrations of childhood, the questions of authority, agency, importance. What child has not selfishly thought: is anyone else as real as I am? And McEwan traces this mental discussion with an exemplary tact, the language having the poise and the exactitude of the adult novelist while inhabiting the imperfect simplicity of the child (“the bright and private inside feeling she had”).

BRIONY IS ABOUT to discover that her sister Cecilia does indeed feel as “valuable to herself” as Briony does. Or, rather, Briony is about to ignore this truth, in a moment for which the rest of her life will be an atonement. Staring out of the window, she sees Cecilia and Robbie standing by the large fountain. Suddenly, Cecilia strips down to her underwear while Robbie watches her, and steps into the deep fountain to retrieve something. Cecilia emerges, puts her clothes back on, picks up a vase of flowers that had been hidden by the fountain, and walks into the house. Robbie also walks away. The scene stirs the little girl, who had once confessed her love to Robbie. She has the sense that she has witnessed some adult mystery, perhaps a scene of obscure erotic domination. Briony does not know what McEwan has told us, namely that Cecilia dipped into the fountain to retrieve a piece of the broken vase, and that Cecilia’s provocative stripping had more to do with erotic challenge than submission or fear.

Briony is aware that her dim comprehension of what she has witnessed burdens her with an obligation not to race to judgment. Indeed, after her witnessing, she decides to abandon melodrama (which has been her habitual literary genre) and begin the more difficult task of writing truthfully and impartially. She could write the scene from three different perspectives, she excitedly realizes,

from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive... And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value.

Six decades later, McEwan tells us, when Briony Tallis is a celebrated author of fiction “known for its amorality,” she will recall this year, in newspaper interviews, as a turning point in her literary development.

BUT IN FACT Briony ignores her own caveats, and vandalizes the wise perspectivism that she claims to have discovered. Over the next few hours, the idea that Robbie is an erotic menace, an outsider or even a predator, grows in Briony’s mind. She interrupts Robbie and Cecilia having hurried sex in the library, and again infers from their position that Robbie is forcing Cecilia into something unpleasant. (McEwan tells us that actually the lovers were equally sexually inexperienced and mutually attracted.) When, later that night, Briony’s fifteen-year-old cousin Lola is sexually attacked in the garden, Briony assumes that the shape she saw in the darkness, running away, was Robbie. (Lola was attacked from behind, and seems unable to identify her molester.) Briony tells the police that she is sure that she saw Robbie, and she has other information too, all of it damning to Robbie’s case.

Her determination to accuse Robbie is bound up with her literary impulses. She needs to make a story of it:

Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other... If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.

In part, Briony has been unable to shed her old melodramatic impulses, and is merely showing her age, even as she strives to get beyond it. But in part what is at work in her is the excitement of shaping a story that fits, that makes too much sense. McEwan surely wants us to reflect on the dangerous complicities of fiction, not just of melodrama but of form itself, which insists on sealing and plotting. What Briony saw was in truth plotless, because it could not be made to mean. Yet a plot is exactly what she imposes. Fiction, even very good fiction, often tends to notarize the incomprehensible simply because it insists on its readability. This is exactly the kind of fiction that McEwan has tended to produce in recent years; his last two novels, Enduring Love and Amsterdam , both begin with mysteries that they then efficiently lay bare. Formally and stylistically, both begin novelistically and accelerate into the neat, jigsawed domain of the thriller.  Atonement , by contrast, seems to want to ponder the deformation of tidiness in such fiction, and to propose instead an enriching confusion. McEwan, as Chesterton has it, chooses reality’s battered truth over form’s perfected error.

THE PARADOX, of course, is that it is only through fiction itself that we can see how mistaken Briony is. McEwan’s own wise perspectivism enables us to inhabit that “lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike.” Thanks to his own novel, we discover how terribly Briony misjudged the moment in front of the fountain. Thus  Atonement  is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction’s misuse; and a defense of an ideal. And this doubleness, of apologia and celebration, could not be otherwise, for art is always its own ombudsman, and thus healthier than its own sickness. Art is the foundation of its own anti-foundationalism, and the anti-foundation of its own foundationalism. And from this comes a further paradox: McEwan’s perspectivism, whereby we see all the characters equally, cannot avoid having a shaping torque of its own. There is no such thing, really, as a confused or truly messy fiction; distortion is built into the form like radon underneath sick buildings. The greatest, freest, truest, most lifelike fiction is nothing like life (though some is closer to it than others). McEwan certainly knows this.

So innocent Robbie is arrested, and as Robbie is put into the police car Briony again watches from a window: “The disgrace of it horrified her. It was further confirmation of his guilt, and the beginning of his punishment. It had the look of eternal damnation.” This is a fine example of how subtly McEwan follows the self-serving theatrics of Briony’s mind. The idea that being arrested by the police is confirmation of guilt is a non sequitur indulged in by many people, often to disastrous effect, and probably no more so than to a child, who has rarely if ever seen the police doing their work. It is the final non sequitur from a girl who has consistently allowed the unfinished picture to finish her judgment, who has taken wonders for signs.

In its second and third parts (each about sixty pages long)  Atonement  leaves behind the Tallises’ country house, but it cannot leave behind the shadow of Briony’s false incrimination. In Part Two, we have advanced by five years, and are following Robbie Turner as he retreats, with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, through northern France to Dunkirk. We gather that he has been in prison, that he and Cecilia have been corresponding, and that a remorseful Briony, now eighteen, wants to retract her statement to the police so that Robbie’s name might be cleared. Cecilia, we learn, has not spoken to her parents or brother since 1935 (they sided with Briony against Robbie); and of course there has been no communication between Cecilia and her younger sister.

But in some ways this information is incidental to McEwan’s extraordinary evocation of muddled warfare. I doubt that any English writer has conveyed quite as powerfully the bewilderments and the humiliations of this episode in World War II. After more than twenty years of writing with care and control, McEwan’s anxious, disciplined richness of style finally expands to meet its subject. This section is vivid and unsentimental, and most importantly, though McEwan must have researched the war, there is no inky blot of other books: his details have the vividness and body of imagined things, they feel chosen rather than copied.

There is marvelous writing. Robbie has been wounded; he feels the pain in his side “like a flash of colour.” Day after day, the British soldiers make their weary, undisciplined way to Dunkirk. They can see where they are supposed to be going, because miles away a fuel depot is on fire at the port, the cloud hanging over the landscape “like an angry father.” They are not marching, but walking, slouching. Order has broken down, and a tired anarchy rules. McEwan captures the fatigue—which invades even eating—very well: “Even as he chewed, he felt himself plunging into sleep for seconds on end.” Into this obscure, thudding chaos, discrete and vile happenings explode and then disappear. Occasionally the Luftwaffe’s planes strafe the straggling infantrymen. And one day Robbie turns to hear behind him a rhythmic pounding on the road:

At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road towards them. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second-lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forwards, their arms swinging high. The stragglers stood aside to let them through. These were cynical times, but no one risked a catcall. The show of discipline and cohesion was shaming. It was a relief when the Guards had pounded out of sight and the rest could resume their introspective trudging.

As the soldiers near Dunkirk, Robbie crosses a bridge and sees a barge pass under it. It is like the boat in Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”: ordinary indifferent life continues while Icarus falls. “The boatman sat at his tiller smoking a pipe, looking stolidly ahead. Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps. A line of washing which included women’s smalls was hanging out to dry.” Finally, when the soldiers come upon the beach, they taste the salt—”the taste of holidays”—and then they see the remarkable formlessness of an army waiting to be shipped back to England. Some of the men are swimming, others playing football on the sand. One group is attacking a poor RAF officer, blaming him for the Luftwaffe’s superiority. Others have dug themselves personal holes in the dunes, “from which they peeped out, proprietorial and smug. Like marmosets....” But the majority of the army “wandered about the sands without purpose, like citizens of an Italian town in the hour of the passeggio .”

IN A NOVEL so concerned with fiction’s relation to actuality, this amazing conjuring cannot but fail to have the weird but successful doubleness of the novel’s first section: it has a grave reality, while at the same time necessarily raises questions about its own literary rights to that reality. Was Dunkirk really like this? Stephen Crane’s evocation of Antietam was so vivid that one veteran swore that Crane (who did not fight) was present with him. Like Crane’s descriptions, McEwan’s gather their strength not from the accuracy of their notation but from the accumulation of living human detail, so alive that we are persuaded that such a thing might have occurred even if no one actually witnessed it. The soldiers dug into their own little holes in the dunes, like marmosets, has just such a fictive reality, so that it becomes irrelevant to us were a veteran to say: “this never happened.” McEwan has made it seem plausible, because alive. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that a convincing impossibility is preferable in literature to an unconvincing possibility. Yet this great freedom shows how dangerous fiction can be, and why its transit with lies has historically been subversive and threatening. Again, McEwan wants us to reflect on these matters. He has Robbie ponder: “Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture.” It is fiction, and McEwan’s fiction, which provides “the details” that history may miss. But—and this is a gigantic but, surely, which this novel acknowledges—those details may be invented, may never have happened in history.

In Part Three, we see Briony working as a trainee nurse at a London hospital. We learn that she is terribly sorry for what she did in 1935 and that, in a gesture of atonement, she has forsworn Cambridge, and dedicated herself to nursing. Late in the section, she visits her estranged sister in Clapham, and finds her living with Robbie, who has briefly returned from his army service in France. Again, McEwan writes superbly well, especially in his evocation of Briony’s nursing experiences. Soldiers arrive, looking identical in their dirt and torn clothes, “like a wild race of men from a terrible world.” One of them has had most of his nose blown off, and it falls to Briony to change his dressings. “She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen.” There is great tenderness in this description of the poor soldier’s eye muscles, “so intimate and never intended to be seen.” We may even think of another moment, earlier in Briony’s life, when she also witnessed something “intimate and never intended to be seen.” But the mark of the true writer, the writer who is really looking, really witnessing, is that notation of the soldier’s exposed tongue as “hideously long”—something worthy of Conrad.

ATONEMENT ENDS WITH a devastating twist, a piece of information that changes our sense of everything we have just read. It is convincing enough, but its neatness seems like the reappearance of the old McEwan, unwilling to let the ropes fall from his hands. In an epilogue, set in 1999, we learn that Briony, now a distinguished old novelist, wrote the three sections—the country house scene, the Dunkirk retreat, and the London hospital—that we have just read. Moreover, Robbie and Cecilia were never together, as the third section suggested. Robbie was killed in France in 1940, and Cecilia died in the same year in London, during the German bombing. The conjuring that we have just witnessed has been Briony’s atonement for what she did. She could not resist the chance to spare the young lovers, to continue their lives into fiction, to give the story a happy ending.

This twist, this revelation, further emphasizes the novel’s already explicit ambivalence about being a novel, and makes the book a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators. But it is unnecessary, unless the slightly self-defeating point is to signal that the author is himself finally incapable of resisting the distortions of tidiness. It is unnecessary because the novel has already raised, powerfully but murmuringly, the questions that this final revelation shouts out. And it is unnecessary because the fineness of the book as a novel, as a distinguished and complex evocation of English life before and during the war, burns away the theoretical, and implants in the memory a living, flaming presence.

This article originally ran in the March 25, 2002 issue of the magazine.

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Why the End of Atonement Is a Triumph for Unreliable Narrators

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement opens with a description of what it’s like to invent a world. Briony Tallis, 13 years old and enthralled by the power of storytelling (“you had only to write it down and you could have the world”) has written a little play for her family. She’s also “designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper.” Every aspect of production of the seven-page drama, “written by her in a two-day tempest of composition,” fiercely belongs to her, and McEwan hovers over her labors like God dictating the Genesis story.

It’s easy to forget the beginning of a novel that became famous, in part, for its tablecloth-pulling ending. But Atonement has the power to send you scurrying back to its first pages once you finish, ready to play whack-a-mole with its wiggly circularity. It’s a book about misinterpretations that McEwan expects to be misinterpreted until its very last pages, when we find out that the entire book we’ve just read is the sixth draft of a novel by a much-older, quite successful Briony, making her both the unreliable narrator and the unreliable author. In between is a plot borne of Austen and Richardson that sweeps through the long 19th century of realist sagas, wiggles into Modernism, and ends on a postmodern questioning of the worth of the novel itself. It’s a feat of pastiche that transcends pastiche: It preserves the intoxication of narrative fiction while admitting that it’s farce.

Critics and book buyers agreed it was a masterpiece. Atonement became one of the first additions to the 21st-century canon after its publication in the U.K. twenty years ago, with a quarter million copies going into print in the U.S. alone before it won the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2003. (When he handed in the Atonement manuscript, McEwan told me, he informed his editor they’d be “lucky to sell 10,000 copies … because it’s really a book for other writers about reading and writing.” His editor told him it would sell in huge numbers “because it’s got the three elements that make it a must: a country house, the Second World War, a love affair.” It’s now sold over 2 million copies worldwide.) Academics wrote papers about it with hazy titles like “The Rhetoric of Intermediality” and “Briony’s Being-For” and it was made into a 2007 movie starring period-piece queen Keira Knightley and directed by Joe Wright, fresh off his debut Pride & Prejudic e remake. And readers still gush — and whine — on book forums and reading sites about that witchy ending.

Briony’s revelation at the end that she’s reshaped this story to her whims turns her into a kind of god, master of all narratives and shaper of fates. Which leaves us her pawns, delighted little fools pulled along on a con. Atonement is, as the title asserts, Briony’s apology to the people whose lives she’s used to populate her story. But it’s also her masterpiece, proof that her regrets won’t stop her from plundering one last time. Its ending reminds readers that fiction without misrepresentation is impossible.

Atonement ’s first three parts are told from multiple points of view — including that of Briony, the youngest of three siblings. The first and longest section is set in 1935 over the course of one roasting hot day and night at the Tallis family’s grand country home in the Surrey Hills. Precocious Briony has a “passion for tidiness” of all kinds; the darling of the family, her writing has been praised and encouraged to excess. Her older sister Cecelia, a restless recent graduate of the ladies’ college at Cambridge, is working through a newfound sex-tinged awkwardness with Robbie Turner, their charlady’s son and her childhood playmate. Like any good mother and father in a coming-of-age novel, the Tallis parents are a scant presence.

When Briony sees Cecelia and Robbie arguing by the fountain under her bedroom window, she imagines their quarrel — which is really over a broken heirloom vase — into her own (mis)understanding of how narrative works: Cecelia is the victim, Robbie the dastardly villain. That evening, she’ll misunderstand twice more. First, she sneakily opens a letter from Robbie to Cecelia that ends with the line “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt.” She determines he’s a maniac, and later, when she walks in on them screwing in the family’s library, immediately assumes Robbie is raping her sister. Later, out searching the grounds for her visiting relatives, she makes out two figures in the tall grass, one “backing away from her and beginning to fade,” the other a frantic, disheveled Lola, her 15-year-old cousin. “In an instant, Briony understood completely,” McEwan writes. “She was nauseous with disgust and fear.” She isn’t sure, but tells Lola, “It was Robbie.” Lola never agrees with her, and the narrator hints that Briony is mistaken, but the police believe a child’s version of events, just as we eventually do. Robbie is wrongly branded a child rapist and hauled off.

The next two sections are set five years in the future, in 1940, as Europe steps into war. We first follow Robbie, released from prison to serve in the military, as he walks 25 miles toward the beach at Dunkirk, determined to return home to Cecelia despite the shrapnel lodged just below his heart. The next part returns to London, and to Briony, now 18, training as a war nurse and drafting “Two Figures by a Fountain,” a novella in impressions, based on the argument between Cecelia and Robbie that she saw from her bedroom window. Now wise to her own self-delusion and exhausted by guilt, she visits Cecelia to recant her accusation — and sees her sister reunited with Robbie, who insists that Briony do everything in her power to clear his name. Voilà, it’s the “atonement” readers expect.

Until now, a lovely, straightforward British wartime novel, full of wispy silk chiffon skirts and the buzz of the RAF — but then comes the coda. Leaping forward to 1999, we meet 77-year-old Briony as an established novelist, finishing up what will be her final manuscript: the novel we’ve just read, made of her memories, altered and reframed. She explains that Cecelia and Robbie really died in the Blitz and Dunkirk respectively. But “how could that constitute an ending?” Briony asks. “What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?” Distance, and six full drafts, have allowed her to riff.

This post-postmodern one-two punch knocked readers on their asses. While even the most formidable reviewers adored Atonement ’s genius, calling it “a tour de force” and “a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama,” what criticism they did have was reserved for its last pages. James Wood, then ascendant at the New Republic , considered it “McEwan’s finest and most complex novel” while declaring the twist ending “unnecessary” and decrying its “neatness.” The Sunday Telegraph declared it “frustrating,” and Anita Brookner questioned its wisdom. Hermione Lee in the Guardian called it a “quite familiar fictional trick.” The general public is still at war with itself over how they feel. Last fall, the Washington Post reported on a reader-generated list of literature’s all-time most disappointing endings: Atonement was ranked second, just after Romeo and Juliet. “I was touched,” McEwan told me during a recent phone conversation, to be “right next to Shakespeare.”

“Over the years I’ve encountered many people who will be absolutely infuriated [by the ending],” he said with a little laugh. “But I can’t help feeling very flattered by that. Those are just the people I wanted to address, because they were heavily invested in the story.”

So while the “trick” at the end is the big reveal, the more rewarding aspect is the knowledge that hints about Atonement ’s meticulous construction are hidden along the way. On a first reading, McEwan’s breadcrumb trail is barely visible, but on the second, it’s practically Day-Glo. Perhaps overconfident, (or more indebted to postmodernism herself than she lets on) Briony repeatedly drops hints that she was even manufacturing this story as a child, and that it is shifting and changing even as she writes it from the perch of old age. Just after she witnesses the fountain scene, Briony writes, she knew “that whatever actually happened drew its significance from her published work and would not have been remembered without it.”

In the third section, as an 18-year-old writer, Briony receives a helpful rejection letter from real-life (as in, actually real-life) magazine editor Cyril Connolly. He praises “Two Figures by a Fountain,” as “arresting,” though her style “owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf.” He reminds her to think of her readers: “They retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens.” Those last two phrases are diametrical, of course, which encapsulates the experiment of Atonement itself.

The ending isn’t a feather in the novel’s cap, tacked on unnecessarily as some critics lamented. It’s the novel’s reason for being. The little girl whose play once crumbled into a mire of familial infighting pulls off an incredible caper: She’s both offered a lengthy apology and finally written the ravishing novel that she once imagined, just minutes after watching that argument between Cecelia and Robbie by the fountain: “She sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite pen.” As for Robbie and Cecelia — still loved by her, still dead — she pats herself on the back for reviving them in her fiction, which she calls “a final act of kindness … I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.”

Briony knows that her novel won’t be published until after her death or incapacitation; she won’t experience censure or scandal. Perhaps the most subversive thing about Atonement is that its narrator isn’t hobbled by the weight of her guilt. Instead, she’s victorious: “She was under no obligation to the truth, she had promised no one a chronicle.”

I asked McEwan if some bit of Briony is triumphant. “I would take the Jamesian view,” he demurred, “that she’s lived the examined life.”

One that’s been examined — and fiddled with — until it’s no longer a life. It’s a novel.

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by Ian McEwan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2002

With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed...

McEwan’s latest, both powerful and equisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.

In the first, longest, and most compelling of four parts, McEwan (the Booker-winning Amsterdam , 1998) captures the inner lives of three characters in a moment in 1935: upper-class 13-year-old Briony Tallis; her 18-year-old sister, Cecilia; and Robbie Turner, son of the family’s charlady, whose Cambridge education has been subsidized by their father. Briony is a penetrating look at the nascent artist, vain and inspired, her imagination seizing on everything that comes her way to create stories, numinous but still childish. She witnesses an angry, erotic encounter between her sister and Robbie, sees an improper note, and later finds them hungrily coupling; misunderstanding all of it, when a visiting cousin is sexually assaulted, Briony falsely brings blame to bear on Robbie, setting the course for all their lives. A few years later, we see a wounded and feverish Robbie stumbling across the French countryside in retreat with the rest of the British forces at Dunkirk, while in London Briony and Cecilia, long estranged, have joined the regiment of nurses who treat broken men back from war. At 18, Briony understands and regrets her crime: it is the touchstone event of her life, and she yearns for atonement. Seeking out Cecilia, she inconclusively confronts her and a war-scarred Robbie. In an epilogue, we meet Briony a final time as a 77-year-old novelist facing oblivion, whose confessions reframe everything we’ve read.

Pub Date: March 19, 2002

ISBN: 0-385-50395-4

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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PERSPECTIVES

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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"A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama." ~ John Updike

'This novel had everything': An Oral History of Ian McEwan's Atonement

"Emerging from the ruins of a disregarded sci-fi short story, Atonement was filed rapidly and in parts, the novel’s crucial final section arriving only after production had already begun. Along the way, McEwan changed the title at the last minute, and the publishing house embarked on one of the largest photoshoots it had undertaken to take a risk on what became its most enduring cover. What resulted was a collision of publishing good fortune – and one of the greatest books of the 21st century. In the centenary year of publisher Jonathan Cape, and 20 years since it appeared in bookshelves, here’s how Atonement happened, according to the people who were there." — From the introduction by Alice Vincent

Read the full oral history on the Penguin website .

Select Editions

London: Jonathan Cape, 2001 (371 p., ISBN: 0224062522). New York: Nan A. Talese, 2002 (351 p., ISBN: 0385503954). London: Vintage, 2002 (371 p., ISBN: 0099429799). (Large Print). Bath, England: Chivers Press, 2002 (613 p., ISBN: 0786239212). (Audio / Read by Jill Tanner). Prince Fredrick, MD: Recorded Books, 2002 (10 cassettes, 14 hrs., 15 mins. / ISBN: 1402517963). (Audio / Read by Josephine Bailey). Beverly Hills, CA: The Publishing Mills, 2002 (4 cassettes/ 5 CDs, 6 hrs. / ISBN: 1575111136). (Audio / Read by Carole Boyd). Bath: Chivers Audio Books, 2002 (10 cassettes, 12 hrs., 33 mins. / ISBN: 0754008304; 10 CDs, ISBN: 0754055124). Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2001 (371 p., ISBN: 0676974554). Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002 (371 p., ISBN: 0676974562). (Large Print). Bath: Windsor, 2002 (612 p., ISBN: 0754017524). Expiació (Catalan / Trans. by Puri Gómez Casademont). Barcelona: Empúries Editorial / Anagrama, 2002 (473 p., ISBN: 8475969372). Expiación (Spanish / Trans. by Jaime Zulaika). Barcelona: Anagrama Editorial, 2002 (435 p., ISBN: 8433969757). Boetekleed (Trans. by Rien Verhoef) Amsterdam: De Harmonie, 2002 (320 p., ISBN: 9076168202). Reparação (Brazil / Trans. by Paulo Henriques Britto). Companhia das Letras, 2002 (448 p., ISBN: 853590235X). Lepitus (Estonia / Trans. by Anne Lange). Huma, 2003 (368 p.).

Selected Reviews and Criticism

'A Fiction Triumphant and Tragic', The Times (London), 12 September 2001. Brookner, Anita. ' A Morbid Procedure ', Spectator , 15 September 2001: 44. McEwan, Ian. 'ATONEMENT: DUNKIRK 1940', The Independent (London), 15 September 2001: 1-2. (Excerpt from the novel.) Sutcliffe, William. ' A Master's Voice Lost in a Tempest of Composition ', Independent on Sunday (London), 16 September 2001: 15. Winder, Robert. 'Between the Acts', New Statesman , 17 September 2001: 49-50. 'Saying Sorry', Economist , 22 September 2001: 68. Dyer, Geoff. ' Who's Afraid of Influence? ', The Guardian (London), 22 September 2001: 8. Hermione, Lee. ' If Your Memories Serve You Well ... ', The Observer , 23 September 2001. Macfarlane, Robert. 'A Version of Events', Times Literary Supplement , 5139, 28 September 2001: 23. Billen, Andrew. 'Tea in the Garden of Good and Evil', Sunday Herald , 30 September 2001: 3. Gartner, Zsuzsi. 'Nothing to Atone For', The Globe and Mail (Books), October 2001. Kermode, Frank. ' Point of View ', London Review of Books , 23:19, 4 October 2001. Bouman, Hans. ' Geen boetekleed voor God of de Romanschrijver ', de Volkskrant , 5 October 2001. Smith, Ray. 'Power and Stature', The Gazette (Montreal), 13 October 2001. Richler, Noah. 'A Spectacular Ian McEwan', National Post , 19 October 2001. Wiersema, Robert J. 'Fiction Doesn't Get Any Better', Vancouver Sun , 27 October 2001. Rungren, Lawrence. 'Atonement', Library Journal , 126:19, 15 November 2001: 97. Seaman, Donna. 'Atonement', Booklist , 98:6, 15 November 2001: 523. Taitz, Laurice. ' Book of the Week: Atonement ', Sunday Times (South Africa), 18 November 2001. Zaleski, Jeff. 'Atonement', Publishers Weekly , 248:47: 19 November 2001: 45. Crane, Edythe. 'Disconnect the Phone, Lock the Doors and Wait for the Surprising Ending', Times-Colonist (Victoria BC), 25 November 2001. 'Atonement', Kirkus Reviews , 69:23, 1 December 2001: 1637. 'Atonement', Economist , 22 December 2001: 107. Eagleton, Terry. 'A Beautiful and Elusive Tale', Lancet , 358:9299, 22-29 December 2001: 2177. Marchand, Philip. 'A Trick of the Light', The Toronto Star , 23 December 2001. Kubiacki, Maria. 'In Plain Sight - an Error That Reverberated Through a Lifetime', Ottawa Citizen , 13 January 2002. Bethune, Brian. 'Look Back in Melancholy', Maclean's , 115:2, 14 January 2002: 45-46. Gibbons, Fiachra. 'McEwan's Chance to Turn the Tables', The Guardian (London), 21 January 2002: 1. Messud, Claire. 'The Beauty of the Conjuring', Atlantic Monthly , 289:3, February 2002: 106-109. Caldwell, Gail. 'Summer and Smoke in the Shadow of War: A young girl's misconception is the hinge of Ian McEwan's masterful Atonement', Boston Globe (Books), March 2002. Hattori, Noriyuki. 'Fikushon no "tsugunai"', Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation , 147:12, March 2002: 752. Merkin, Daphne. 'The End of Innocence', Los Angeles Times (Book Review), March 2002. Messud, Claire. ' The Beauty of the Conjuring ', Atlantic Monthly , 289:3, March 2002: 106-109. Miller, Adrienne. 'Big Important Book of the Month: Atonement', Esquire , 137:3, March 2002: 61. Richardson, Elaina. 'An Explosive Untruth Sets in Motion Ian McEwan's Un-Put-Downable Atonement', O Magazine , March 2002. Shone, Tom. 'White Lies', New York Times Book Reviews , March 2002. Updike, John. 'Flesh on Flesh', The New Yorker , March 2002. Walton, David. ' Journey into Terror ', Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , 3 March 2002. Kakutani, Michiko. 'And When She Was Bad She Was...', New York Times , 7 March 2002: E1. Cheuse, Alan. 'Ian McEwan Adds History to His Motifs of Love, Death', Chicago Tribune , 10 March 2002: 14. Merkin, Daphne. 'The End of Innocence', Los Angeles Times Book Review , 10 March 2002: 3. Shone, Tom. ' White Lies ', New York Times Book Review , 10 March 2002: 8-9. Wiegand, David. ' Stumbling Into Fate - Accidents and Choices Trip up the Characters in Ian McEwan's New Novel ', San Francisco Chronicle , 10 March 2002. Wiegand, David. ' Getting Rid of the Ghosts (Q & A: Ian McEwan) ', San Francisco Chronicle , 10 March 2002: M2. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 'Unforgiven', New York Metro (Books), 12 March 2002. Begley, Adam. ' A Novel of Discrete Parts, Blessedly at One with Itself ', New York Observer , 18 March 2002. Tarloff, Erik and Geraldine Brooks. ' The Book Club ', Slate , 18-19 March 2002. Charles, Ron. ' A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Terror ', Christian Science Monitor , 14 March 2002: 19. Rocca, Francis X. 'Atonement', Wall Street Journal , 239:52, 15 March 2002: W8. Caldwell, Gail. 'Summer and Smoke in the Shadow of War', Boston Globe , 17 March 2002: E3. Vidimos, Robin. 'A Separate Penance', Denver Post , 17 March 2002: EE1. Yardley, Jonathan. ' The Wounds of Love ', Washington Post , 17 March 2002: 1. 'Luminous Novel From Dark Master', Newsweek , 139:11, 18 March 2002: 62-63. [Includes interview.] Mendelsohn, Daniel. ' Unforgiven ', New York , 35:9, 18 March 2002: 53. Yardley, Jonathan. ' Ian McEwan, Arriving on Time ', Washington Pos t, 18 March 2002: C2. Patterson, Troy. ' Atonement ', Entertainment Weekly , 20 March 2002. [Also published on the CNN Website as ' Atonement Is a Soulful Game ', 18 March 2002]. Miller, Laura. ' Atonement by Ian McEwan ', Salon.com , 21 March 2002. Gibbon, Maureen. 'Fiction: Atonement ', Star Tribune , 24 March 2002. Shriver, Lionel. ' Classic Novel Lives On ', Philadelphia Inquirer , 24 March 2002. Wood, James. ' The Trick of Truth ', The New Republic , 226:11, 25 March 2002: 28-34. Lacayo, Richard. 'Twisted Sister', Time , 159:12, 25 March 2002: 70. Maryles, Daisy. 'A Booker Hooker', Publishers Weekly , 249:12, 25 March 2002: 18. Papinchak, Robert Allen. 'The Sins of the Child Set 'Atonement' in Motion', USA Today , 26 March 2002: D4. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. 'Quests for Redemption', New Leader , 85:2, March-April 2002: 23-25. Wondolowski, Rupert. 'Atonement', Baltimore City Paper , 3-9 April 2002. McCay, Mary A.. 'Secrets & Lies', Times - Picayune , 7 April 2002: D7. Ezard, John. 'McEwan's Novel Wins Prize at Last', The Guardian (London), 10 April 2002: 1. Lanchester, John. 'The Dangers of Innocence', The New York Review of Books , 49:6, 11 April 2002: 24-26. Cremins, Robert. 'Coming to Be at One', Houston Chronicle , 19 April 2002: Z19. Vellucci, Michelle. 'Atonement', People Weekly , 57:15, 22 April 2002: 43. Gussow, Mel. 'Ian McEwan's Latest Novel Charts an Emotional Journey', New York Times , 23 April 2002: 1. Lezard, Nicholas. 'Pick of the Week: Nicholas Lezard Has Reservations About McEwan's Masterpiece', The Guardian (London), 27 April 2002: 11. Boerner, Margaret. 'A Bad End', Weekly Standard , 7:32, 29 April 2002: 43-46. Wheeler, Edward T.. 'The Lies of Novelists', Commonweal , 129:9, 3 May 2002: 26-28. 'Atonement', Solares Hill , 25:18, 3 May 2002: 14. Gussow, Mel. ' Atoning for His Past ', The Age , 5 May 2002. [Reprinted from the New York Times .] Locke, Scarth. 'Atonement', Willamette Week , 28:27, 8 May 2002: 76. Shone, Tom. 'White Lies', New York Times Book Review , 10 May 2002: 7-8. Houser, Gordon. 'Ripples of Sin', Christian Century , 119:11, 22-29 May 2002: 30-31. Roberts, Rex. 'Quite Write', Insight on the News , 18:19, 27 May 2002: 25. Neufeld, Rob. ' McEwan Creates Delicious Drama in Atonement ', The Asheville Citizen-Times , 31 May 2002. Woodcock, Susan H. 'Atonement', School Library Journal , 48:6, June 2002: 172-173. ' It Master: Ian McEwan ', Entertainment Weekly , 20 June 2002. O'Rourke, Meghan. 'Fiction in Review', Yale Review , 90:3, July 2002: 159+. Park, Ed. 'Atonement', Village Voice , 47:27, 9 July 2002: 40. Breslin, John B. 'Lies and War', America , 187:2, 15-22 July 2002: 22-23. Clark, Katherine. ' A Guilty Pleasure: Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' Richly Deserves Best-seller Status ', Mobile Register (Alabama), 20 July 2002. De Vera, Ruel S. ' McEwan's Book of the Unforgiven ', Inquirer News Service , 28 July 2002. Rüedi, Peter. 'So spannend kann Langeweile sein', Die Weltwoche (Zürich), 29 August 2002. von Lovenberg, Felicitas. ' Vergiftete Zeilen ', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) , 31 August 2002, S. 42, Nr. 202. (Courtesy of F.A.Z.: www.faz.de ) Barrett, Daniel. ' The World Just So ', Yale Review of Books , 5:3, Summer 2002. Stefan-Cole, J. ' Atonement --Ian McEwan: A Non-Review ', Free Williamsburg , 30, September 2002. Pralle, Uwe. ' Schuld und Sühne : Ian McEwan hat einen fast perfekten Roman geschrieben', Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich), 8 October 2002: 67. View .pdf version (Courtesy of NZZ Online: www.nzz.ch ) Gurpegui, José Antonio. 'Untitled', EL CULTURAL , 17-23 October 2002. Bach, Mauricio. ' ENTREVISTA a Ian McEwan, escritor británico, que publica Expiación : "Vivimos entre dos modelos de sociedad sin diálogo posible" ', La Vanguardia, 20 October 2002. (Interview) Compton, Matt. ' Atonement Book Review ', The Carolina Beacon , 2:1, 20 October 2002. Lozano, Antonio. 'Expiación', Que Leer , 70, October 2002. Lozano, Antonio. 'Un perverso exquisito', Que Leer , 71, November 2002. (Interview) Bach, Mauricio. ' La niña que arruinó la vida de un hombre ', La Vanguardia , 13 November 2002. Finney, Brian. ' Briony's Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan's Atonement '. Brian Finney's Website , 2002. Pittau, Martina. 'Nel labirinto della scrittura. Atonement di Ian McEwan', Università di Cagliari, 2001-2002 (relatore Prof.ssa Irene Meloni). Mullan, John. ' Between the Lines ', Guardian , 8 March 2003: 31. [Mullan begins a series of articles on Atonement .] Mullan, John. ' Looking Forward to the Past ', Guardian , 15 March 2003: 32. [Mullan's second article in a series on Atonement .] Mullan, John. ' Turning up the Heat ', Guardian , 22 March 2003: 32. [Mullan's third article in a series on Atonement .] Mullan, John. ' Beyond Fiction ', Guardian , 29 March 2003: 32. [Mullan's fourth article in a series on Atonement .] Apstein, Barbara. 'Ian McEwan's Atonement and "The Techniques of Mrs. Woolf"', Virginia Woolf Miscellany , 64, Fall-Winter 2003: 11-12. Finney, Brian. "Briony's Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement." Journal of Modern Literature , 27:3, Winter 2004: 68-82. Fraga, Jesús. ' Entrevista: Ian McEwan .' La Voz de Galicia , 6 March 2004: 54 [Interview about Expiación ]. Ingersoll, Earl G. 'Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between and Ian McEwan's Atonement ', Forum for Modern Language Studies , 40:3, July 2004: 241-258. Reynier, Christine. 'La Citation in abstentia à l'ouvre dans Atonement de Ian McEwan', EREA 2.1 (printemps 2004): 61-68. < www.e-rea.org > Yata, Keiji. 'Showing Off Damaged Bodies: Ian McEwan's Atonement ', Bulletin of Tokyo Kasei University , 45:1, 2005: 49-58. (English) Hidalgo, Pilar. "Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan's Atonement." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , 46:2, Winter 2005: 82-91. Tabakowska, Elzbieta. "Iconicity as a Function of Point of View." Outside-In-Inside-Out: Iconicity in Language and Literature . Eds. Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer, and William Herlofsky. Amsterdam: Benjamins; 2005. 375-87 [Discusses Atonement ]. Léorat, Nicole. 'Surfaces d'inscription et d'effacement dans le récit palimpsestes d'Ian McEwan, Atonement', in: Marie-Odile Salati (ed.). Jeux de surface (Actes de colloque). Chambery: Université de Savoie. 2006. 13-28. D'Hoker, Elke. "Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, and Ian McEwan." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , 48:1, Fall 2006: 31-43. Parey, Armelle. 'Ordre et chaos dans Atonement d'Ian McEwan', Cercles , Occasional Paper Series (2007) 93-102. < www.cercles.com > Crosthwaite, Paul. "Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan's Atonement." Cultural Politics , 3:1, 2007: 51-70 [ Abstract available ]. Mathews, Peter. "The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan's Atonement" English Studies in Canada 32.1 (March 2006): 147-60. Müller-Wood, Anja. "Enabling Resistance: Teaching Atonement in Germany", in Steven Barfield, Anja Müller-Wood, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson (eds), Teaching Contemporary British Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007): 143-58.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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A : a good story, a good read, very well done

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   Only a few with a few reservations -- but most are very, very impressed    From the Reviews : "The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't do. (�) We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor "A challenging and brilliant work, it rewards careful attention to the writer's art. (�) The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once. Atonement is a most impressive book, one that may indeed be McEwan's finest achievement." - Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal "It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word "masterpiece", but Ian McEwan's new book really deserves to be called one. (�) Atonement (�) is a work of astonishing depth and humanity." - The Economist "Refracting an upper-class nightmare through a war story, McEwan fulfills the conventions he's playing with, and that very play -- in contrast to so much fashionable pomo cleverness -- leads to genuine heartbreak." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly "Avec des pages d'une subtilité époustouflante: spéléologue de nos ab�mes intérieurs, McEwan nous offre une magistrale autopsie de la fragilité humaine, au fil d'un roman qui chatoie comme de la soie. Et qui brûle d'une lumière noire, lorsqu'il explore les inextricables ténèbres de l'âme." - André Clavel, L'Express "In Abbitte widmet sich Ian McEwan seinen alten, den großen Themen -- Liebe und Trennung, Unschuld und Selbsterkenntnis, dem Verstreichen von Zeit --, und er tut dies souveräner, sprachmächtiger und fesselnder denn je." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "If Atonement tells an engrossing story, supremely well, it also meditates, from start to end, on story-telling and its pitfalls. (�) McEwan has never written into, and out of, literary history so brazenly before." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent "Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style -- any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -- all play their part in his larger purpose. On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this" - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian "All this is at the same time an allegory of art and its moral contradictions. (�) (I)t is not hard to read this novel as McEwan's own atonement for a lucrative lifetime of magnificent professional lying. I haven't yet read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang that beat this novel to the Booker Prize. But it must be stupendous." - Terry Eagleton, The Lancet "Ian McEwan's new novel (�) strikes me as easily his finest (�..) McEwan's skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. (�) It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books "Il n'est pas sûr qu' Expiation soit, comme on l'a dit, le livre le plus abouti de Ian McEwan. Des longueurs (les scènes de guerre), l'artifice final (le roman dans le roman) peuvent justifier qu'on continue de lui préférer l'étonnant thriller psychologique qu'était Délire d'amour . Mais, pour la première fois, McEwan s'aventure sur les terrains intimes de la nostalgie, du souvenir, de l'extrême fragilité des liens entre les êtres." - Florence Noiville, Le Monde " Abbitte gehört zu den seltenen Romanen, die so makellos komponiert sind, dass man sie kaum aus der Hand legt, bevor nicht die letzte Seite umgeblättert ist. �ber weite Strecken ist er geradezu ein Roman comme il faut. (�) Daran wird auch wenig ändern, dass ihm -- typisch McEwan -- wieder einmal eine Kleinigkeit gr�ndlich missraten ist. "London 1999", der knapp dreissigseitige Schlussteil, hat das Zeug, als einer der verunglücktesten Romanschlüsse in die englische Literaturhistorie einzugehen." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung "(C)ertainly his finest and most complex novel. (�) Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal." - James Wood, The New Republic "On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. (�) So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it." - Robert Winder, New Statesman "(T)his book, McEwan's grandest and most ambitious yet, is much more than the story of a single act of atonement. (�) It isn't, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan's design -- and the meaning of his title. (�) (T)rust me, Atonement 's postmodern surprise ending is the perfect close to a book that explores, with beauty and rigor, the power of art and the limits of forgiveness. Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York. " Atonement will make you happy in at least three ways: It offers a love story, a war story and a story about stories, and so hits the heart, the guts and the brain. It�s Ian McEwan�s best novel (�..) Atonement is the work of a novelist at peak power; we may hope for more to come." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer "(I)f it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date." - Tom Shone, The New York Times Book Review "The writing is conspicuously good (�) it works an authentic spell." - John Updike, The New Yorker "(I)mpressive, engrossing, deep and surprising (�..) Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now." - Hermione Lee, The Observer "Ian McEwan's latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. (�) Lying is, after all, what Atonement is about as much as it is about guilt, penitence or, for that matter, art." - Laura Miller, Salon "(F)lat-out brilliant (�..) McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "Whether Briony�s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan�s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (�) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life�s work -- and for that work to be crowned with success -- are unconvincing." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator "It might almost be a novel by Elizabeth Bowen. (...) Both sections are immeasurably the most powerful that McEwan, already a master of narrative suspense and horror, has ever written. (...) Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book. Unshowy symmetries and patterns underlie its emotional force and psychological compulsion." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times "So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page." - Richard Lacayo, Time "Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalised the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement ." - Russell Celyn Jones, The Times "My only regret is that because he uses rapid editing and time shifts, too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established in the first half of the book are left unresolved. (�) Still, the first part of the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." - Jason Cowley, The Times "McEwan continues to describe, with characteristic limpidity, the house and the dynamics of its inhabitants. His patience is doubly effective, for it generates not only an authentic environment in which the tragedy can eventually unfurl, but also an ever-burgeoning sense of menace. It would devastate the novel's effect to reveal what does in fact occur. (�) Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement, however, is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms." - Robert McFarland , Times Literary Supplement "Whether it is indeed a masterpiece -- as upon first reading I am inclined to think it is -- can be determined only as time permits it to take its place in the vast body of English literature. Certainly it is the finest book yet by a writer of prodigious skills and, at this point in his career, equally prodigious accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "Ian McEwan hat einen Roman �ber die Literatur geschrieben, der gleichzeitig ein Roman �ber den Menschen ist. Gleichzeitig -- darin liegt die Kunst. Kein Buch, in dem neben diversen Figuren auch einige literaturtheoretische �berlegungen vorkommen, sondern ein Buch, das nach der Moral des Schreibens fragt und Schreiben, also Imaginieren, als besonders heikle Form sittlichen Handelns betrachtet." - Evelyn Finger, Die Zeit Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

       She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the eveing barely memorable

I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened ?

About the Author :

       British author Ian McEwan is the author of many fine novels. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

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Atonement: A Novel Paperback – February 25, 2003

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• Print length 351 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Anchor Books
• Publication date February 25, 2003
• Dimensions 5.22 x 0.81 x 7.9 inches
• ISBN-10 9780385721790
• ISBN-13 978-0385721790
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 038572179X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor Books; First Edition (February 25, 2003)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 351 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780385721790
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385721790
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.22 x 0.81 x 7.9 inches
• #153 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #396 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #1,595 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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by Ian McEwan

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Atonement by Ian McEwan

Book review, freddy lowe published: 01 april 2022.

4 .5 stars for Ian McEwan’s Atonement, one of the most poignant books I have ever read.

The story itself receives a significant 5 stars from me. The sheer scale of the brutality of the tragedy echoes through McEwan’s prose, particularly towards the ending. Fans of classical literature will also be moved by the consistent literary references. The novel opens with an extract from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with which Atonement shares a very clear trait: both feature a female protagonist endowed with a very vivid imagination (influenced by literature) which adds a melodramatic romanticism to their perception of life...with dreadful consequences. (Not dissimilar to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes either!)

In addition to the literary references, Cecilia and Robbie (two of our protagonists) are both very avid readers, referring to works such as Emma, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Lolita, and many others.

The book explores themes of lifelong guilt, the effect it has on people’s mentalities, how poorly thought through actions can sometimes ruin lives, taking responsibility for actions, and the difference between both personal atonement and atoning to other people. All these messages cultivate into what turns into an incredibly poignant and heartwrenching story which is well worth your time: you might think twice before making quick judgements in future.

The book’s one minor point of criticism is the tendency to slightly labour descriptions of fountains, gardens, or the routines of a war soldier or nurse. But if the reader can plough through those rather slow-moving sections, they will find an unforgettably emotional journey depicted in the 372 pages. Would highly recommend!

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Book Review: Atonement

21 December 2020

By lauren e. white.

About five years ago in my youth youth, I put a film called Atonement on one Sunday afternoon. From the beginning, I was hooked. I then found out it was a book. Five years later, one pandemic-stricken summer, I bought the book and kept it next to my bed until I was free to read it. I finished it yesterday and let me say this: I absolutely adored it.

Atonement is one of those novels that captures you from the off. Ian McEwan does admittedly take his time a bit at the beginning, painstakingly recounting a hot summer’s day where a young child, Briony, is forcing her cousins to perform a play. This one day takes up about a third of the book. As the characters all fuss over one another, there is a tension and suspense built up from the off. You just know something bad is about to happen – and that’s why you must keep reading.

Written virtually seamlessly from three different perspectives, you learn nothing factually new in the first part of Atonement , but you learn what’s going on in each key characters’ head: Cecilia loves Robbie, Robbie loves Cecilia, and Briony, the young meddling sister of Cecilia, is confused about it all. And makes a choice that will haunt her forever.

It must be noted that Atonement , first and foremost, is about love. It’s two young people of very different backgrounds, but who are intellectually matched, trying to figure out why they’ve been frosty with each other lately. As we find out in the library , it’s sexual frustration. Hence why Atonement is not for the easily-offended or a younger audience. It’s a little bit rude/very sensual, but most of the book is perfectly fine. Just be warned.

What I loved most about Atonement , though, aside from the ‘stream of consciousness’ style of McEwan’s stellar writing, is the description from Robbie’s – a soldier – perspective of Dunkirk. I can rarely get away with war fiction, but McEwan is different. Every time I opened the book during this part, I felt I was trudging towards the beach with Robbie. You go on a journey in Atonement and you are reminded quite starkly of the horrors of World War Two, from many perspectives; perhaps in a way you’ve never experienced before. After all, there’s something private and intimate about reading a novel, and when there’s an in-depth, direct stream of thought about being at war in front of you, there’s no choice but to be pulled in.

Recommended Reading: Film Review: Dunkirk

And, at the end of McEwan’s incredible tale, there’s a slight plot-twist. It’s tear-inducing, but it’s strangely satisfactory. I found it easier to bear than the film’s ending, which is perhaps why McEwan does what he does. Apologies for the vagueness, but you’ll understand once you’ve read it.

Overall, then, I was so delighted with Atonement . It did not let me down. There are a few negative reviews out there, but pay no heed to them. Atonement is so good that I feel lucky to say it was published in my lifetime. McEwan’s story and writing style is easily something that could have been produced along with the literary classics like Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D’Urbervilles . And that’s some of the highest praise I can afford any novel.

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The Movie Review: 'Atonement'

Atonement opens in 1935, at a stately manor in the English countryside. (Have I just explained in a dozen words why it will be nominated for Best Picture? Perhaps I have.) A thirteen-year-old girl is finishing a play on her typewriter, the typebars banging a martial beat on the white paper. The rat-a-tat-tatting continues, integrating itself into the soundtrack, even as she gets up with her completed draft and marches away. It's a device that recurs throughout the film, effectively (though with decreasing subtlety) linking writing and soldiering, love and war--the two subjects and, to a considerable degree, two halves of the film.

The girl is Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), and she is a child of vivid intelligence and awkward fervors who enjoys trafficking in adult words such as "voluminous" and "evanesce." She also harbors a schoolgirl passion for Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), a housekeeper's son whom Briony's father put through Cambridge and who has since hung around the Tallis estate performing odd bits of labor. Robbie's passions, alas, are directed toward the elder Tallis sister, 23-year-old Cecilia (Keira Knightley). One afternoon, Briony watches from a high window in quiet agony as the two talk next to a deep fountain and Cecilia abruptly strips to her slip and plunges in, to emerge dripping moments later, a barely veiled Venus. We later learn she was fetching a bit of broken vase from the fountain bottom, but Briony's fertile imagination is left to its own conclusions.

Invited to dinner at the manor that night, Robbie composes two letters to Cecilia: One is earnestly amorous and laboriously composed; the other is obscene and anatomical (more typebars punching a virgin page), a private joke to himself. The wrong letter, of course, is entrusted to Briony to deliver and she, of course, reads it before doing so. When she shows it to a young cousin, they concur: "He's a sex maniac." This appraisal seems powerfully confirmed when, that evening, Briony discovers Robbie and Cecilia carnally entangled in the library, his smutty missive having served as an unlikely icebreaker. Shock, jealousy, and anger commingle in her adolescent mind and when, later that night, a real sexual assault seems to take place, Briony accuses Robbie with a certainty that may even seem real to her. It is for this ruinous act that she will spend a lifetime trying to atone.

The latter half of the film takes place five years later, in 1940. Robbie, having served three years in prison, took the state's subsequent offer of release in exchange for Army service, and is now wounded and adrift in the battered French countryside, trying to make his way to the Dunkirk troop evacuation. Cecilia and Briony (now 18 and played by Romola Garai) are estranged from one another but both have become nurses, caring for the broken soldiers shipped back from the war. All three attempt to find solace in the written word: Robbie and Cecilia in letters of deferred love and patient hope sent across the Channel; Briony in a book draft, tapped out secretly at night, about "a young and foolish girl who sees something from her window that she doesn't understand." Will Robbie ever return to Cecilia's embrace? Will Briony find redemption? Atonement takes its time in offering answers, and when it finally does, not all of them are true.

As faithfully adapted by director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel, Atonement is a film out of balance, nimble enough in its first half but oddly scattered and ungainly once it leaves the grounds of the Tallis estate. In part this is thanks to the structure inherited from the novel: After its first leisurely, linear hour, the film becomes more episodic, jumping from France to England, present to past. But even within this perhaps unavoidable format, the film's rhythms are irregular. Robbie's perilous pilgrimage to Dunkirk seems rushed and underdeveloped, as if the filmmakers felt they were running out of time. Yet when he arrives at the coastal troop evacuation, the movie grinds to a halt, as the camera lingeringly casts its eye up and down the shore--at the lonely Ferris wheel bookmarked by two plumes of smoke; at the endless expanse of bedraggled evacuees; at the soldiers shooting horses to deny them to the Germans. It's a beautiful scene, but one so static and overlong that it seems to fetishize set design. (A similar imbalance later occurs at the hospital where Briony works, with context and character again taking a back seat to an extended visual inventory of wounded soldiers.)

A more narrow but still vexing problem is the shift between actresses playing Briony. Could it really be so difficult to find a single performer able to play the girl at both 13 and 18? And even if so, could Wright not at least have found two actresses with features more similar than Irish pixie Ronan and the Hungarian-inflected Garai? (Had the film gone on any longer we'd have needed additional portrayals by Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere.) The situation is worsened by the fact that Briony's temperament, too, has undergone a conversion, from precocious troublemaker to repentant sinner, leaving us with little to connect the former to the latter beyond the name and the bob haircut.

This would be less disconcerting if Briony did not emerge as the closest thing to a central character in the film's latter part, with Robbie ill and exhausted and Cecilia largely absent altogether. For considerable stretches, Briony's repentance is the primary narrative and emotional thread, yet I could scarcely keep from wondering, who is she again? And why does she feel so guilty about what that other girl did?

In the end, Atonement is a workmanlike yet vaguely disappointing adaptation of a masterful novel. Knightley's performance is strong, though apart from one heartbreaking scene before Robbie leaves for France--"Come back to me. Come back to me. Come back," she tells him: a mantra, a prayer, a plea--she isn't asked to do a great deal beyond set her jaw and flash her eyes. McAvoy is likable and magnetic, showing that he can shine when out of the shadow of Aslan and Idi Amin. And, while I'm still not quite sure what to make of Garai's Briony, Ronan's younger version is a marvel, elegantly capturing the narcissism and self-doubt that adhere to precocity.

What's missing is McEwan's prose and ingenuity, which Wright's literalism cannot convey. He transcribes the novel to the screen faithfully, but without ever finding a cinematic language--no, the typewriter clacks don't count--that could make it more than a second-hand work of art, a filmed book. Nowhere is this clearer than at the end, where the filmmakers are faced with the challenge of adapting the novel's gimmicky yet piercing conclusion. McEwan's literary sleight of hand takes the form of an elderly Briony's internal meditation on truth and invention, fidelity and betrayal, the value and the costs of memory.

How do Wright and Hampton transfer these reflections to the big screen? By placing them on the little screen, with Briony (now Vanessa Redgrave) speaking her piece on a TV talk show. It's an alteration that radically, if unwittingly, undermines McEwan's ending: Someone who wishes her fictions to usurp lived history would hardly go on television to tell everyone it was all a big fib. But such are the compromises one must sometimes make on the way to the multiplex. Indeed, the filmmakers seem almost to confess as much with a new line inserted into Briony's final monologue, an admission of literary defeat that could as easily be theirs as hers: "I just couldn't find a way to do it."

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Parenting and its attendant anxieties underlie a number of our recommended books this week, from Jonathan Haidt’s manifesto against technology in the hands of children to Emily Raboteau’s essays about mothering in an age of apocalypse to Clare Beams’s novel about a haunted hospital for expectant mothers.

Also up: a double biography of the Enlightenment-era scientists and bitter rivals who undertook to catalog all of life on Earth, a book arguing that the ancient Greeks’ style of debate holds valuable lessons for the present, and a surprising history of America before the Civil War that shows how German philosophers helped shape abolitionist thinking. In fiction, we recommend an Irish novel about a bungled kidnapping, a political novel based on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and a three-part novel of ideas about the hidden costs of our choices. (That one also deals with parenting anxieties, in its way.) Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

EVERY LIVING THING: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life Jason Roberts

Most of us have heard of the 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his systems of categorization; less familiar is his rival, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In Roberts’s view, this is an injustice with continued repercussions for Western views of race. His vivid double biography is a passionate corrective.

“Roberts stands openly on the side of Buffon, rather than his ‘profoundly prejudiced’ rival. He’s frustrated that human society and its scientific enterprise ignored the better ideas — and the better man.”

From Deborah Blum’s review

Random House | $35

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Jonathan Haidt

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media. Sure to provoke both thought and discussion, his book rejects complacency.

“Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading. … Parents, he argues, should become more like gardeners (to use Alison Gopnik’s formulation) who cultivate conditions for children to independently grow and flourish.”

From Tracy Dennis-Tiwary’s review

Penguin Press | $30

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America Matthew Stewart

In this absorbing intellectual history of the lead up to the Civil War, Stewart shows how German philosophers like Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx influenced the American abolition movement.

“Engaging and often surprising. … Two decades before the outbreak of war, abolitionism was still a skulking pariah, a despised minority in the North as well as the South. The abolitionists clearly needed help. Enter the Germans.”

From S.C. Gwynne’s review

Norton | $32.50

CHOICE Neel Mukherjee

Narratives linked to a frustrated London book editor explore the gap between wealth and poverty, myopia and activism, fact and fiction, in an exquisitely droll heartbreaker of a novel.

“Full of characters deciding how much truth to tell. … To be in the company of his cool, calm, all-noticing prose is to experience something like the helpless wonder his characters experience.”

From Jonathan Lee’s review

Norton | $28.99

THE ANCIENT ART OF THINKING FOR YOURSELF: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times Robin Reames

To bridge our nation’s political divide, we must learn to argue not less but better, contends Reames, a professor of rhetoric, in this wryly informative primer on ancient Greek and Roman oratorical techniques and the Sophists and sages who mastered them.

“Reames’s conceit for the book is intriguing. … In our era of Fox News and chants of ‘from the river to the sea,’ it is difficult not to gaze in admiration upon a people so committed to soberly debating ideas rather than settling for sloganeering.”

From John McWhorter’s review

Basic Books | $30

LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” Emily Raboteau

The perils — political, racial, climatic — multiply fast in this collection of elegant and anguished essays, by Raboteau, a writer and mother struggling to retain hope for the future while bearing witness to the encroaching threats all around her.

“A soulful exploration of the fraught experience of caretaking through crisis. … Her central concern is how to parent responsibly in perilous times, when the earth is warming, the country is divided and even the grown-ups feel lost and afraid.”

From Tiya Miles’s review

Holt | $29.99

THE GARDEN Clare Beams

Maternal body horror finds its eerie apotheosis in Beams’s pleasingly atmospheric novel, in which an isolated home for expectant mothers circa 1948 turns out to contain more life-giving powers than its medical staff lets on. (If you’re thinking “Pet Sematary” meets “Rosemary’s Baby” with a literary sheen, carry on.)

“The genius of the novel is the way Beams continually intertwines fictional elements with true-to-life obstetric practices. … Humor blooms at the least expected junctures. [But] make no mistake, this is a serious story.”

From Claire Oshetsky’s review

Doubleday | $28

WILD HOUSES Colin Barrett

In Barrett’s debut novel, a poorly planned kidnapping upends the lives of several young characters in a rural Irish town. Barrett, the author of two standout story collections, shifts gracefully between the kidnappee, who’s being held in a basement by two unstable brothers, and his intrepid girlfriend, who sets out to find him.

A “heartbreaker of a debut. … The lives of a small collective of mournful souls become vibrant before us, and their yearning is depicted with wistfulness, no small amount of humor and one dangerously ill-tempered goat.”

From Dennis Lehane’s review

Grove | $27

GREAT EXPECTATIONS Vinson Cunningham

In this impressive first novel, a Black campaign aide coolly observes as aspiring power players angle to connect with a candidate who more than resembles Barack Obama.

“Dazzlingly written. … Captures the grind and the mundanity of the campaign with precision and humor.”

From Damon Young’s review

Hogarth | $28

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Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker unearth botany’s buried history  to figure out how our gardens grow.

A new photo book reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime with  a stunning visual celebration of black rodeo.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading . Here’s what made Lord Byron so great.

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume  in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

Bus stations. Traffic stops. Beaches. There’s no telling where you’ll find the next story based in Accra, Ghana’s capital . Peace Adzo Medie shares some of her favorites.

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Joseph Stiglitz and the Meaning of Freedom

By John Cassidy

In the early days of the COVID -19 pandemic, when there was no vaccine in sight and more than a thousand people who had contracted the virus were dying each day in the United States, Joseph Stiglitz, the economics professor and Nobel laureate, was isolating with his wife at home, on the Upper West Side. Stiglitz, who is now eighty-one, was a high-risk individual, and he followed the government’s guidelines on masking and social distancing scrupulously. Not everyone did, of course, and on the political right there were complaints that the mask mandate, in particular, was an unjustified infringement on individual freedom. Stiglitz strongly disagreed. “I thought it was very clear that this was an example where one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom,” he told me recently. “Wearing a mask was a very little infringement on one person’s freedom, and not wearing a mask was potentially a large infringement on others.”

It also struck Stiglitz, who had served as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, that the experience of the pandemic could provide an opportunity for a wide-ranging examination of the question of freedom and unfreedom, which he had been thinking about from an economic perspective for many years. The result is a new book, “ The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society ,” in which he seeks to reclaim the concept of freedom for liberals and progressives. “Freedom is an important value that we do and ought to cherish, but it is more complex and more nuanced than the Right’s invocation,” he writes. “The current conservative reading of what freedom means is superficial, misguided, and ideologically motivated. The Right claims to be the defender of freedom, but I’ll show that the way they define the word and pursue it has led to the opposite result, vastly reducing the freedoms of most citizens.”

Stiglitz’s title is a play on “ The Road to Serfdom ,” Friedrich Hayek’s famous jeremiad against socialism, published in 1944. In making his argument, Stiglitz takes the reader on a broad tour of economic thinking and recent economic history, which encompasses everyone from John Stuart Mill to Hayek and Milton Friedman— the author of the 1962 book “ Capitalism and Freedom ,” which has long been a free-market bible—to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump . The going can get a bit heavy when Stiglitz is explaining some tricky economic concepts, but his essential argument comes across very clearly. It is encapsulated in a quote from Isaiah Berlin, the late Oxford philosopher, which he cites on his first page and returns to repeatedly: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

Stiglitz begins not with pandemic-era mask mandates but with the American plague of gun violence. He notes that there is a simple reason why the United States has far more gun deaths than other countries do. It has far more guns, and, thanks to a tendentious reading of the Second Amendment by the courts, including the Supreme Court, many Americans now regard owning a gun, or even a closet full of semi-automatic rifles, as a constitutionally protected right. “The rights of one group, gun owners, are placed above what most others would view as a more fundamental right, the right to live,” Stiglitz writes. “To rephrase Isaiah Berlin’s quote . . . ‘Freedom for the gun owners has often meant death to schoolchildren and adults killed in mass shootings.’ ”

Gun violence and the spread of diseases by people who refuse to abide by health guidelines are examples of what economists call externalities, an awkward word that is derived from the fact that certain actions (such as refusing to wear a mask) or market transactions (such as the sale of a gun) can have negative (or positive) consequences to the outside world. “Externalities are everywhere,” Stiglitz writes. The biggest and most famous negative externalities are air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful emissions. The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea levels.”

In all these cases, Stiglitz argues, restrictions on behavior are justified by the over-all increase in human welfare and freedom that they produce. In the language of cost-benefit analysis, the costs in terms of infringing on individual freedom of action are much smaller than the societal benefits, so the net benefits are positive. Of course, many gun owners and anti-maskers would argue that this isn’t true. Pointing to the gun-violence figures and to scientific studies showing that masking and social distancing did make a difference to COVID -transmission rates, Stiglitz gives such arguments short shrift, and he insists that the real source of the dispute is a difference in values. “Are there responsible people who really believe that the right to not be inconvenienced by wearing a mask is more important than the right to live?” he asks.

In 2002, five years after he left the White House, Stiglitz published “ Globalization and Its Discontents ,” which was highly critical of the International Monetary Fund, a multilateral lending agency based in Washington. The book’s success—and the Nobel—turned him into a public figure, and, over the years, he followed it up with further titles on the global financial crisis, inequality, the cost of the war in Iraq, and other subjects. As a vocal member of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Stiglitz has expressed support for tighter financial regulations, international debt relief, the Green New Deal , and hefty taxes on very high incomes and large agglomerations of wealth.

During our sit-down interview, Stiglitz told me that, for a long time, he had cavilled at the negative conception of freedom used by conservative economists and politicians, which referred primarily to the ability to escape taxation, regulation, and other forms of government compulsion. As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.

Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism , and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”

Stiglitz’s approach to freedom isn’t exactly new, of course. Rousseau famously remarked that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” In “ Development as Freedom ,” published in 1999, the Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argued, in the context of debates about poverty and economic growth in developing economies, that the goal of development should be to expand people’s “capabilities,” which he defined as their opportunities to do things like nourish themselves, get educated, and exercise political freedoms. “The Road to Freedom” falls in this tradition, which includes another noted philosopher, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Stiglitz cites Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, delivered in January, 1941, in which the President added freedom from want and freedom from fear to freedom of speech and freedom of worship as fundamental liberties that all people should enjoy.

“A person facing extremes of want and fear is not free,” Stiglitz writes. He describes how, at a high-school reunion, he spoke with former classmates from the city he grew up in—Gary, Indiana, which had once been a thriving center of steel production. “When they graduated from high school, they said, they had planned to get a job at the mill just like their fathers. But with another economic downturn hitting they had no choice —no freedom—but to join the military . . . . Deindustrialization was taking away manufacturing jobs, leaving mainly opportunities that made use of their military training, such as the police force.”

Among the hats Stiglitz wears is one as chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. He doesn’t claim to have a surefire recipe for reviving rusting American steel towns. But in the second half of “The Road to Freedom” he calls for the creation of a “progressive capitalism” that would look nothing like the neoliberal variant he has spent the past two decades excoriating. In this “good society,” the government would employ a full range of tax, spending, and regulatory policies to reduce inequality, rein in corporate power, and develop the sorts of capital that don’t appear in G.D.P. figures or corporate profit-and-loss statements: human capital (education), social capital (norms and institutions that foster trust and coöperation), and natural capital (environmental resources, such as a stable climate and clean air). Not-for-profits and workers’ coöperatives would play a larger role than they do now, particularly in sectors where the profit motive can easily lead to abuses, such as caregiving for the sick and elderly.

In political terms, Stiglitz started out as a self-described centrist. Over the years, he has shifted to the left and become ever more gimlet-eyed about how policies and laws are made and upheld, and whom they benefit. In “The Road to Freedom,” he inveighs against the Supreme Court for adopting the perspective of the “white male slave-owning drafters of the Constitution,” and reminds us that conservative billionaires and major corporations underwrote the neoliberal policy revolution, which bestowed upon big corporations what Stiglitz refers to as “The Freedom to Exploit.” He writes, “We cannot divorce the current distribution of income and wealth from the current and historical distribution of power.”

Given this conjuncture, and the rise of authoritarian populists like Trump, Orbán , and Bolsonaro , it is easy to get fatalistic about the prospects for creating the “good society” that Stiglitz describes, in which “freedoms of citizens to flourish, to live up to their potential . . . are most expansive.” He’s under no illusion that winning the battle of ideas would be sufficient to bring about such a transformation. But he’s surely right when he writes that, if “we successfully dismantle the myths about freedom that have been propagated by the Right,” and reshape the popular conception of human liberty in a more mutual and positive direction, it would be an important first step.

And how likely is that? In his book, Stiglitz lists a number of reasons to be pessimistic, including the fact that “neoliberal ideology runs deep in society,” and that people stubbornly “discount information that runs counter to their preconceptions and presumptions.” On the positive side, he points to a widespread rejection, particularly among younger people, of the neoliberal approach to issues like inequality and climate change. During our conversation, he cited the Biden Administration’s industrial policy, which provides generous incentives to green-energy producers and purchasers of electric vehicles, as an example of a “sea change” in views about economic policymaking. “Neoliberalism is on the defensive,” he said. However, he also noted the enduring power of simplistic slogans about freedom and averred that he didn’t want to sound like a Pollyanna. “I am optimistic, over-all,” he said. “But it is going to be a battle.” ♦

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Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

In 1957 Manley Natland, a geologist working for the California-based Richfield Oil Corporation, was sent to the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada, where he hatched a terrible plan. Extracting crude oil from tar sands is a slow, dirty, and expensive task, requiring the separation of bitumen—a thick oil substance—from the sandy peatland of the Canadian forests. Seeking a more efficient method, Natland figured that setting off nuclear bombs might make the process easier.

His idea, later named Project Oilsand, was in line with the nuclear fever dreams of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when scientists and politicians in Canada, Russia, and the United States were considering all variety of ways of “taming the H-bomb.” (Another government initiative, Project Plowshare, championed by Edward Teller—“father of the hydrogen bomb”—was exploring the use of nukes to build canals, dam rivers, and dig for precious metals.) Speaking before the Atomic Energy Research and Development Subcommittee on March 22, 1960, the president of Richfield Oil, W.J. Travers, proposed exploding a nine-kiloton atomic device—just over half the strength of “Little Boy,” the bomb US Air Force pilots dropped on Hiroshima—1,300 feet underground in the Canadian wilderness. “The explosion,” said Travers, “would suddenly liberate 9 trillion calories of heat,” as well as, he hoped, lots of oil.

Setting off radioactive bombs under the earth dangerously contaminates the water and surrounding dirt, but Travers told the committee members that “based on available information, Canadian and United States scientists who have carefully studied the safety problem are convinced that the proposed 9-kiloton test would not result in harmful effects.” The US government not only approved the proposal but agreed to supply the bomb. The plans were eventually set aside without being tried—perhaps owing to fear of Russian espionage rather than safety concerns. Yet given the zeal with which humans in the last three quarters of a century have found other ways to suck vast amounts of petroleum out of the earth, a handful of nukes detonated in the Canadian muskeg would have been just a drop in the barrel of oil’s “harmful effects.”

Few books on climate change have so viscerally captured the destruction we’ve wrought by our reckless addiction to petrochemicals as John Vaillant’s Fire Weather , which takes place mostly in those same boreal tar sands that Natland wanted to detonate. Today the US imports almost four million barrels of oil a day from Canada, about 90 percent of which comes from the tar sands. In May 2016 a wildfire enveloped the boomtown of Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta. It was so powerful that one expert in fire physics, delivering a sort of post-ignis-mortem, said, “The best analogy is the Hamburg firestorm”—the Allied campaign in World War II known as Operation Gomorrah, which dropped 9,000 tons of bombs on the German city, killing around 37,000 people.

Vaillant tells the story of the Fort McMurray fire as a lesson: the myriad comforts of the Petrocene—oil-fueled heating, cooling, transportation, and manufacturing—come at a cost. After an abnormally hot and rainless spring, the forest around the town was bone-dry. Vaillant makes that cost dramatically visible by describing in detail the hellaciously hot towers of flames spawned by a fire tornado that tore through the town; pyrocumulonimbus clouds up to two hundred miles wide that pierced the stratosphere; and spontaneous explosions known as “dragons”:

Godzilla-sized and -shaped eruptions of combusting gas bursting from the crowns of superheated conifer trees can be three hundred feet high and are hot enough to reignite the smoke, soot, and embers above them, driving flames hundreds, even thousands, of feet higher into the smoke column.

The fire burned for fifteen months and spread to nearly a million and a half acres until it was finally extinguished in August 2017. In its first days of life (Vaillant repeatedly attributes organic, almost sentient qualities to fire) it was so hot and destructive that entire houses were rendered into ash heaps in five minutes, “like milk cartons in a bonfire.” In an aside on the 2018 Carr fire in and around Redding, California, Vaillant describes another fire tornado with wind speeds reaching 165 miles per hour and temperatures likely close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—about three times as hot as the ambient temperature on Venus. Fire-flecked Category 5 hurricane–level winds with “metal-melting heat,” Vaillant writes, “seemed gratuitously biblical.” Even seemingly impermeable enamel toilets and cast-iron pans were practically disintegrated by the flames. “Natural fire never did this,” said one fire expert surveying the damage. “It shouldn’t moonscape.” But it did.

This is all captivating, terrifying stuff, especially through Vaillant’s excellent telling. He has a penchant for finding stories of monomania: his first book, The Golden Spruce (2005), is about a logger turned crusading anti-logger who, in a confused act of ecoterrorism, chops down the titular tree—considered sacred by the indigenous Haida people—in British Columbia. His next, The Tiger (2010), chronicles a vindictive, homicidal Siberian tiger and an expert tracker’s efforts to contain him. Vaillant has also written a novel, The Jaguar’s Children (2015), which similarly captures a superhuman will: a young migrant’s attempt to escape from the almost airless tank of a water truck that he is trapped inside with fourteen other passengers in southern Arizona.

Fire Weather paints a less individual portrait of obsession and doom. Despite being virtually unknown outside of the petroleum industry, over the last fifty years the petro-city of Fort McMurray became one of the largest cities in the subarctic. That’s thanks to bitumen. But harvesting bitumen—a process Vaillant calls “the petrochemical equivalent of squeezing blood from stones”—was only profitable enough to have turned a remote Albertan outpost into a boomtown because of generous government subsidies and voracious oil demand.

Wildfires are a part of life in the boreal forest, and Vaillant writes that for residents of Fort McMurray the smoke clouding the horizon in late April 2016 initially

represented a familiar seasonal awareness, occupying the same mental space as the possibility of a thunderstorm or a blizzard—one among many manageable threats long since factored into the calculus of daily concerns.

But the fire that ultimately consumed the city—the area’s ninth so far that year—quickly proved to be uncontainable.

Vaillant follows its first flickers from the unconcerned tone the mayor and municipal fire chief take at a press conference—the chief admits that the situation has gotten hairy, but hopes that “nature’s done its thing and it’ll leave us alone for a little bit”—to, two days later, the gradual realization that the black clouds billowing increasingly close to densely populated neighborhoods are an urgent threat requiring evacuation. As residents scramble to flee, a traffic jam bottlenecks the roads out of town. Meanwhile local and regional firefighters resort to unorthodox methods and begin using enormous bulldozers and backhoes to rip down houses, razing entire blocks in attempts to starve the fire of fuel.

Vaillant is masterful at dropping the reader into such scenes: barbecue propane tanks exploding like bombs; garages storing sundry combustibles, such as gas cans or welding tanks, becoming giant incendiary devices; a man in shorts and T-shirt using a bulldozer blade as a blast shield as flying gravel and embers swirled around him and “stung like hornets.” You almost feel as if the paroxysmal blazes will burn to the last page.

Amazingly no one died as a direct result of the Fort McMurray fire. Over 90,000 people were displaced, and the fire destroyed about 2,400 homes and buildings. Residents were lucky: large parts of town were spared, many people eventually returned, and—what some count as a success—before the fire was even extinguished, oil production, which had plummeted by about a million barrels a day, resumed. But the townspeople also faced long-simmering consequences: property loss, depression, alcoholism. The climate-wrecking single-industry town turned tinderbox seems a paragon of hubris. Yet Vaillant doesn’t point his finger at the residents, or the workers burning all the gas to extract all that crude. Instead he blames the corporate rapacity, the misguided subsidies, the collective blind eye, and the century of oil-fueled momentum that set the town aflame.

Vaillant traces that hubris back to another Canadian town—Enniskillen, Ontario—in 1858, when the “first productive New World oil wells” were dug. The following year in Titusville, Pennsylvania, “so many wells were dug, so quickly and in such close proximity,” Vaillant writes, “it seemed as if the local fields had suddenly sprouted bumper crops of wooden oil derricks.” The process of safely and efficiently getting the oil from under the shale and into a barrel, however, was then and very much remains inexact. A nearby Titusville creek soon began shimmering with iridescent slicks—some of them catching fire. Even in the initial decades of the oil rush, prescient scientists and some common observers knew that we were, quite literally, playing with fire.

Fire is not necessarily bad, of course. It has kept us warm, fended off predators, set the mood, and helped us digest food for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet our reliance on it has become so ubiquitous, with trillions of fires burning across the world every day, according to Vaillant’s calculations (he includes in his tally fires less visible than the forest kind, such as those burning in gas stoves, pilot lights, incinerators, matches, and the combustions of all sorts of engines), that “humans could easily be mistaken for a global fire cult.” To fuel those many trillions of fires, “on any given day, the human race consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil, while another 40 million barrels are in transit around the globe via tanker, pipeline, truck, and train.”

In the last section of Fire Weather , Vaillant walks the reader through the rise of early climate science, showing that we well knew the consequences—dangerously rising global temperatures—of all that smoke. It was the pioneering American “artist, inventor, citizen scientist, and early suffragist” Eunice Newton Foote who conducted what became known as the first-ever climate change experiment. In 1856 Foote filled one glass cylinder with carbon dioxide and let another fill with ordinary air, then recorded how quickly they heated up in the sun: the cylinder with what she called “carbonic acid gas” heated up twice as quickly. In other words: watch out.

Eighty-two years later, in 1938, the English engineer and inventor Guy Callendar was proving not only that “the activities of man could have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale” as the planet’s climate but that it “is actually occurring at the present time.” That year the parts per million of CO 2 in the atmosphere was about 311. Today it is 421—and rising.

Our use of oil, in many ways, has transformed both the planet and humankind’s place in it. Take one specific scenario Vaillant paints:

Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power.

“Today,” Vaillant concludes, “with cheap and plentiful oil at our disposal, everyone’s an emperor.”

Vaclav Smil, in How the World Really Works (2022), estimates that the average adult now “has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.” Translating that into physical labor, Smil calculates that the amount of easily accessible energy people in affluent countries often thoughtlessly burn throughout the day—charging a laptop, checking the time on a nightstand clock, relying on a running refrigerator, or being guided by traffic signals—equals the human power of between 200 and 240 people working for you nonstop, day and night. Having that energy at your disposal may appeal, but underlying that opulence is an inherent volatility.

Such multibillion-dollar fires as Fort McMurray, in which whole cities or neighborhoods succumb to flashover—“sudden and total combustion”—will become more frequent in coming decades. And yet, Vaillant reports, they still seem so unlikely from our perches of comfort that even when they do strike, when the fire is already surrounding a neighborhood or home, people remain in denial. Vaillant relays one woman’s experience: as black clouds sparkling with embers began to blot out the sun and swirl ever closer to the neighborhood, she went to drop off clothes at the dry cleaner. After some hesitation, the worker took the woman’s clothes, logged the drop-off, and said, “Tuesday good?” and the woman responded, “Yeah, next Tuesday’s great.”

But next Tuesday there would be no dry cleaner, no laundry machines, no clothes. Following the author and risk analyst Nassim Taleb, Vaillant refers to such denialism as the Lucretius problem, after the Roman philosopher who noted that a fool believes that the tallest mountain he’s seen is the tallest in existence: “the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally.” Such self-protection only goes so far. We can refuse a thought or deny evidence, but the flames will catch up.

Caught up they have. In June 2021 a heat dome formed and hovered over the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. In British Columbia temperatures topped 121 degrees. At one point, in just a twenty-four-hour period, the temperature in downtown Portland jumped from 76 degrees to 114 degrees. It got so hot, Jeff Goodell writes in his latest book, The Heat Will Kill You First , that “if you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.”

Seattle-area doctors, desperate to lower body temperatures as quickly as possible, filled body bags with ice and zipped people inside. Still, about a hundred people died of the heat. Other deaths more than doubled that month. As bad as it was, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver could have seen much worse. Europe suffered deadly heat waves in 2003 and again in 2022, which killed approximately 70,000 and over 61,000 people, respectively, most of them elderly or with some underlying condition. “A heat wave is a predatory event,” Goodell writes, “one that culls out the most vulnerable people”—especially the poor. The difference in temperature between rich and poor parts of Portland during that 2021 heat wave, largely due to the “urban heat island effect”—dense concentrations of unshaded concrete—was 25 degrees. As Goodell shows, it only takes a couple of notches up on the climatic thermostat to make the difference between sweaty and dead.

Goodell, a contributing writer at Rolling Stone , has focused his reporting on climate change for over two decades. His previous books include Big Coal (2006) and The Water Will Come (2017). Like Vaillant, Goodell mixes doomsaying with useful finger-pointing. “At some point in the not-so-distant future,” he writes, “the question of who burned the fossil fuel that caused the heat wave that killed Jane Doe will become the climate version of who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Jane Doe.”

Researchers, activists, and writers such as Vaillant and Goodell are turning climate crises into whodunnits, which is politically and even existentially useful. One of Goodell’s more uplifting chapters, “Anatomy of a Crime Scene,” tells the story of the rise of “extreme event attribution.” Scientists such as Friederike Otto, a German-born climatologist working in Britain, are studying to what extent climate catastrophes are caused by man-made climate change. It’s the “first science ever developed with the court in mind,” Otto tells Goodell. The hope is to pin climate crimes on polluters, clarifying legal liability and beginning to answer the question, “Who is responsible for trashing the climate, and how can they be held responsible?”

The Heat Will Kill You First spans the globe, with Goodell constantly on assignment, jumping from melting icebergs in Antarctica to the scalding streets of Chennai. His stories make heat, and the dangers it incites, visible in new ways: one of his chapter titles is “What You Can’t See Won’t Hurt You,” a dangerous misconception. In a discussion of the history of Parisian architecture, he shows not only why spikes in summer temperatures fry residents under traditional zinc roofs, but how difficult it will be for such a city in coming decades to adapt and keep cool. Heat-proofing Paris is possible but would be a monumental undertaking. “That’s the thing with cities,” Goodell writes. “Unless you have an emperor like Napoléon III or a power broker like Robert Moses, retrofitting takes time.”

What is decidedly not the ultimate answer to being fried in your own city is air-conditioning, Goodell reports. In the summer of 2018, the same season that temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, crested at 116 degrees—by now this is expected weather—the utility provider Arizona Public Service cut off power to Stephanie Pullman, a seventy-two-year old woman who lived alone with her cat, Cocoa. At the end of August, the company had written her a warning letter, requiring that she pay the $176.84 she owed in the next five days. Pullman, who had been stretching less than a thousand dollars a month in social security payments, paid $125 after receiving the letter, but she was still in arrears. As for many people in Phoenix and the American West, for Pullman air-conditioning was a survival tool. After the utility company turned off her electricity, she died of heat.

Arizona utilities customers are now protected from service shut-offs during extreme weather. Still, Maricopa County, where Phoenix is situated, recorded over six hundred heat-associated deaths in 2023. Most of those who die are poor, often unhoused—a condition Goodell calls “temperature apartheid.”

Goodell interviews Mikhail Chester, a researcher focused on adaptation to climate change who says that Phoenix suffering a major power outage in the summer months—possibly due to a spike in energy usage in reaction to a heat wave, or a wildfire knocking out a power line on a hot day—is inevitable. That could put as many as 1.6 million people into the situation Stephanie Pullman faced: soaring indoor temperatures with no working air conditioners or fans to beat the heat. Chester wondered aloud to Goodell: “What will the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat look like?”

Using AC to save lives and keep comfortable is a problem not only because it makes us dependent on an undependable fix. Such reliance also keeps us from pursuing more responsible mitigation such as building houses with more shade, more airflow, and less heat-absorbent material. Even more concerningly, it creates a feedback loop: millions of people cooling their homes in high heat requires vast amounts of fossil fuel energy, which increases the level of CO 2 in the atmosphere, which further raises temperatures, which requires more cooling, more energy, and then, one day: blackout.

Heat can push human bodies into a similar “lethal feedback loop.” Once your core body temperature rises to 102 or 103 degrees, your heart desperately tries to pump blood toward the surface of your skin to cool it down. But the faster your heart beats, the higher your metabolism rises, which generates more heat, and so the heart pumps faster, creating yet more heat, and then a higher heart rate, and by the time you reach 107 degrees your cells begin to, as Goodell puts it, “denature.”

What is particularly frightening about hyperthermia, the medical term for a body getting just a few degrees warmer than the Goldilocks range—that just-right spot between about 97 and 99 degrees—is that the brain stops working very well. Goodell tells the story of Kelly Watt, an eighteen-year-old track star who went on a too-long run on a too-hot day in Virginia in 2005 and then died. Handprints found on his car suggested that he had likely made it there, but the heat may have so blurred his thinking that he couldn’t figure out how to open the door and turn on the AC , which probably would have saved his life. Reading Goodell and Vaillant you may begin to wonder if civilization itself is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.

Goodell tracks other troubling effects of heat. Researchers estimate that since the 1990s, extreme heat waves have cost the global economy around $16 trillion. “When people are stressed by heat,” Goodell writes, “racial slurs and hate speech in social media spike. Suicides rise. Gun violence increases. There are more rapes and more violent crime.” One study found that people honk their car horns more. Higher temperatures have been linked to the outbreak of civil war and migration. “For every degree Celsius of increase in global mean temperature,” Goodell writes, “yields are expected to decrease by 7 percent for corn, 6 percent for wheat, and 3 percent for rice.”

Vaillant offers some hope at the end of Fire Weather , musing on the concept of revirescence—a capacious term for regrowth and regeneration that he imbues with a shade of spirituality. Less than a month after the Carr fire ripped through towns in Northern California, Vaillant writes, green tendrils “burst through the scorched hardpan, nourished by the still-vital roots of those flayed and blackened trees.” Goodell, overall, isn’t as sanguine. In the course of his research he discovered not only “how easily and quickly heat can kill you” but also “how deeply connected we are to one another and to all living things.” So we will all cook together—slight comfort as the mercury creeps upward and wildfires continue to kindle.

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