Not My Kind of Saturday

A couple of days ago, I abandoned Ian McEwan's Saturday on page 57. I simply couldn't stomach the idea of spending a day in the life of the neurosurgeon protagonist and his lawyer wife, his high school dropout but brilliant jazz musician 18-year-old son, and his early-20's poet daughter whose upcoming first book has already been described as "rapturous" or some such rot. The hero is obviously very intelligent but the internal dialogue of this guy is just...boring. The Iraq War angle promised to be very boring. The son was dull in the extreme. The wife was lying there asleep, but when she woke up, snooze.

I liked reading the 1-star Amazon reviews to find out that this tedium is momentarily relieved by a ridiculous scene with a criminal: "His manipulation of the scene in which the neurosurgeon, completely unbelievably, is able to control a potentially dangerous individual by diagnosing him with a congenital disease at the scene of the accident, simply by observing his hand tremors, is simply not plausible." Move over, House! (I've never actually seen House, but this sort of deductive work is in line with my perception of the character.)

And wait, in between the chapters of seemingly endless rumination, there's another scene with a criminal: "I cared even less when the lead hood makes the daughter strip naked by holding a knife to the mother. He then (and this is rich) orders the daughter to read aloud from her recently-published book of poetry, and when she does, the miscreant is so overwhelmed by its profound beauty and truth, that he decides not to ransack the home! Ah! The power of poetry!" WTF? It's even sillier given that the only glimpse of her poetry that I saw in the first 57 pages was pretty unimpressive (e.g. describing some lover's penis as an "excited watering can") and that this book is not intended to be satirical.

When I saw the opening quote of the book was from Saul Bellow's Herzog, I should have known this book wouldn't do it for me.

But on the Sally-Fiction Watch: Sally appears on page 5 in the form of one of his two neurosurgical registrars (who we do not meet, of course, but is noted in the context of an interminable description of surgical procedures).

(Note: Amazon is now recommending I buy a book on materials science, All New Square Foot Gardening, and a Vegetarian Times Mexican cookbook. Hmmm. At least it's not a pre-order recommendation for Sunday, the even slower and more boring sequel.)