PERSONALITIES
Readers opening the pages of the New Yorker last Oct. 30 found an unexpected tidbit in the midst of the usual Talk of the Town items -- a small humor piece entitled "Proverbs According to Dennis Miller ." Among the short parodies of Miller's reference-heavy style: "A bird in the hand ... is dead or alive, depending on one's will," and "What goes up ... will stay up if it has an escape velocity of 11.3 kilometres per second." The byline was Johnny Carson.
Journalists and television execs pricked up their ears. This was peculiar. Carson had waved goodbye to America in 1992 after hosting "The Tonight Show" for 30 years, and then abruptly vanished from the public eye. For eight years, no jokes, no interviews, no follow-up projects. Television's most recognizable figure, gone.
But here was Johnny, right there on the page, spoofing the pseudo-intellectual Miller's new gig as NFL announcer. According to the New York Times, Carson submitted the piece to the editors on the suggestion of humorist Steve Martin, and they printed it. And then, as if to dispel the sophomore slump, he published another two months later, a recently discovered collection of children's letters to Santa, as if written by Bill Buckley, Chuck Heston and Don Rickles.
Seeing him again was sort of like peeking through the curtains and seeing the divorced dad pull up in the driveway after an extended absence. Carson was a fixture to two generations of boob-tube Americans. Vietnam-era adults saw him as the nightly tonic to a pain-in-the-ass workday. Children sitting up past their bedtime marveled at a cocktailed Golden Age of celebrities, comedians and racy jokes. Each evening I used to hear the show's opening theme "Daaa dat dat da daa!" emanate from my parents' bedroom, accompanied by Ed McMahon's stentorian announcements, and it was like a signal. They were going to watch Johnny until they fell asleep, and I could do whatever I wanted. Until I could drive a car, I watched the show too.
Carson built up his on-screen family of regulars, and viewers learned to quickly identify the established comic premises. Johnny was the sideburned rascal, forever taken to the cleaners by ex-wives. Ed was the tippling Tonto sidekick who pitched for dog food. Doc Severinsen owned impossibly loud clothing and failed racehorses. Tommy Newsom: beige and boring. The shtick never varied; characters like Carnac the Magnificent and the oily Art Fern's Tea Time Theater continued year after year. This was old-school, steeped in vaudeville and radio, with the ribbon mike firmly planted atop the desk. Funny props, cute animals, a few caca jokes, ogle the cleavage, keep things moving. If it ain't broke, it stays in the show.
The most impressive feature was always Carson's opening monologue, sharp and topical, evolving with the nation's moods, delivered with a casual Midwestern air, textbook TV cool, each punchline set up with a completely plausible statement, as if Johnny were standing in line in front of you at the feed store, and turned to say, "Did you see this in the news?" When the material clicked, it killed. (Many maintain that Carson's constant hammering of President Nixon contributed to his eventual resignation.) And when a line bombed, Carson made an art form out of the recovery. ("You didn't boo me when I smothered a grenade at Guadalcanal.") In a narrow-casted, three-network world where comedy meant sitcoms and variety shows, his monologue provided an ideal cultural barometer for the nation, mixing in politics, scientific discoveries, fads and trends, strange news items, his divorces and even bawdy mentions about Dolly Parton or Linda Lovelace. If you craved a peek at the big bad adult world, there was really nowhere else to turn besides the first 10 minutes of "The Tonight Show."
Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, in 1925, and spent his formative years in Norfolk, Neb., performing magic and comedy under the name "The Great Carsoni." He served in the Navy during World War II, entertained college fraternity parties and worked as a radio announcer and disk jockey. While performing for audiences of farmers each day, he spent nights listening to tapes of radio heroes like Jack Benny and Bob Hope, studying their inflections and timing.
When television began to invade America's living rooms, Carson chased the new medium to Los Angeles, where he hosted a handful of low-budget comedy series, conducting phony interviews and performing skits and characters. The material was quirky and occasionally naughty, yet homespun enough to hit home with the heartland. Although he was popular, the shows weren't, and he ended up writing jokes for Red Skelton. His first big break came in 1957 as replacement host of the ABC daytime quiz show "Who Do You Trust?" When Carson inherited the show, he needed to hire an announcer. A big man from Philadelphia showed up for what would be a very bizarre job interview.
In his 1998 autobiography "For Laughing Out Loud," Ed McMahon recalls walking into Carson's office, to find Johnny standing at the window, looking out in silence. Finally he turned and asked McMahon where he went to school.
"Catholic University," McMahon answered. "In Washington, D.C. I studied speech and drama."
Carson replied that was very interesting, and thanked him for coming by. McMahon left confused, thinking perhaps he'd blown it, and didn't hear anything for three weeks, until the show's producer called and told him he will be wearing suits on the show to emphasize his size. He realized he got the job. He also saw a glimpse into the private shyness of a man who would be his employer and friend for the next 35 years.
As celebrities would later guest-host his show, Carson occasionally filled in for Jack Paar on "The Tonight Show," and when Paar left in 1962 Carson slipped into the slot, bringing McMahon along. A longtime jazz fan and sometime drummer, Carson retained Paar's house band, led by Skitch Henderson and featuring a young trumpet player named Doc Severinsen.
For the next three decades Carson crafted a 90-minute nightly cavalcade of sketches and guests that, although shot in New York and Burbank (after 1972), was most accessible to the unwashed masses between the coasts. His studio audiences were primarily tourists from the Midwest, and his writers injected this WASPish heartland flavor throughout every element of the show: a scorn for the pretentious, an appreciation for funny animals and strange eccentrics and a cosmic shrug about the inevitability of taxes, ex-wives and hangovers. The result was hundreds of moments that have become engrained in our psyche:
The segment in which Ed Ames threw a tomahawk at an outline of a human target, the hatchet stuck handle up in the crotch and Johnny ad-libbed, "I didn't even know you were Jewish." The Dragnet-style "Copper Clappers" wordplay bit, with a straight-faced Jack Webb. The scared marmoset that crawled onto Johnny's head and peed on him. The near-masochistic recycling of ukulele oddball Tiny Tim, staging his on-air wedding for 50 million viewers. The actor Jimmy Stewart tearing up while reading a poem about his dog. A man who rendered the national anthem by making flatulent noises with his hands. The winners of a bird-call competition. A loaded Dean Martin secretly tipping cigarette ashes into the cocktail of an oblivious George Gobel. An eccentric old lady who presented her beloved collection of potato chips shaped like faces of celebrities -- when Carson munched blithely on a chip, the woman nearly had a coronary, until he revealed a separate bag behind the desk.
Carson exploited politics, but only for quick one-liners, or to give room for his credible Ronald Reagan impression. The show was never about him, it was about the world he beheld. When he invited guests to come on the show, he listened with curiosity, took them seriously, and the audience followed his cue. Critic Kenneth Tynan profiled him for the New Yorker in 1978, and observed, "It is only fair to remember that he does not pretend to be a pundit, employed to express his own opinions. Rather, he is a professional explorer of other people's egos."
Carson had a soft spot for comedians, from insult king Don Rickles, to his idol Jack Benny, to ponytailed George Carlin, who gave America its first taste of network dope humor. Sweating young comics experienced their show-biz debut via Carson -- among them Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Jay Leno and David Letterman -- anxiously awaiting the "Good stuff!" comment of approval, or even better, the wave to come over and sit down.
Some moments never made the greatest hits clips. One night the material bombed so badly, Carson lit the pages on fire and solemnly tossed them into a wastebasket, accompanied by Severinsen playing "Taps." In 1974, a fat cigar-chomping man carrying a cocktail streaked nude across the set of the show, forcing NBC censors to black out the lower half of the screen; the streaker was arrested and later released, said Carson, for "lack of evidence." A newly successful Eddie Murphy was asked if he enjoyed buying things with his Hollywood money, and he answered mockingly with a blackface accent: "Hey Amos, get a loada that coat -- that's a mighty big watch there." An obviously unhip Carson watched helplessly as Murphy then invited his friend from backstage to come out and do an impression of Prince.
"Tonight Show" guests developed a reputation just for their appearances. A maniacal Mel Brooks ran amok for an entire program, bumping all scheduled guests. Comedian Buddy Hackett spent 15 minutes telling one anecdote about a corned beef sandwich. A seemingly irritable Charles Grodin purposely disagreed with everything Johnny said. Albert Brooks did celebrity impressions while eating various foods. Flamenco guitarist/sexpot Charo was perennially asked back to dance the "hootchie cootchie." A fully made-up Alice Cooper politely drank a can of Budweiser during his interviews. Don Rickles once congratulated McMahon with sincerity upon his recent marriage, then turned to Johnny and barked, "I give it about a week, tops."
Carson hit his professional peak during the indulgent late '60s and early '70s. "The Tonight Show" was then firing on all cylinders, square enough to make Hollywood's old guard feel comfortable, yet hip enough to appropriate the party. The show swung right from the opening theme, when Carson parted the curtain and blinded viewers with a nightly arsenal of Nehru jackets, noisy-patterned sportcoats, and neckties the size of beaver tails. This was America's late-night cocktail lounge, the televised nephews of the original Rat Pack. Guests smoked and drank on camera without guile. Marriage was just a punchline, as gleaming medallions nestled in thatches of chest hair, braless breasts spilled out of dresses. Guests never chuckled -- laughter was accompanied by a thrown-back head, a fit of cigarette coughing, a spill of the bourbon. Carson frequently erupted in a loud cackle, sending him out of his chair. The show often returned after a commercial break to catch Johnny drumming with pencils along with the band, after which he would turn to Ed and joke about their bender the previous night, like a couple of tomcats on the town chasing skirts.
It wasn't always funny business. I remember watching two "Tonight Show" incidents in particular, and thinking this is a window into how Carson really thinks and feels. The first, a bit with Carson chatting with McMahon about a new scientific study concluding that mosquitoes were particularly fond of extremely "warm-blooded, passionate people." Under the desk, Carson had concealed a prop can of insect spray the size of a fire extinguisher. As he mentioned the setup about passionate people, McMahon blurted, "Whoops, there's another one," and slapped his wrist, getting huge laughs and completely upstaging his boss. "Well then," answered Carson, "I guess I won't be needing this $500 prop, then, will I?" He pulled out the prop and tossed it aside, a nice recovery, but accompanied by a brief glare at McMahon.
The other, a moment in the middle of the show where Carson asked the audience if he could get serious. The studio quieted down, and he pulled out a copy of the National Enquirer, which had printed an article about his marriage headed for divorce. He addressed the camera directly: "I have not seen this until this morning. Now, before I get into this or say any more, I want to go on record right here in front of the American public because this is the only forum I have. They have this publication, I have this show. This is absolutely, completely, 100 percent falsehood ... I'm going to call the National Enquirer, and the people who wrote this, liars. Now that's slander. They can sue me for slander. You know where I am, gentlemen."
The move required balls of steel, and said to the world that "The Tonight Show" might be fun and games, but don't fuck with John William Carson. The Enquirer would print more stories about him, but they never sued.
It wasn't easy to be Johnny Carson. Nobody could tape 5,000 shows, interview 23,000 guests, without sacrificing some amount of personal life to the darkness. He ran through three wives and four producers, and developed a reputation as temperamental and emotionally distant. His three sons didn't see him that often, unless they worked on the show. A long struggle with the booze led to headlines for a drunken driving arrest. During one interview, he snapped at a journalist for not doing his homework and walked away from the table, leaving his then-publicist Gary Stevens to defuse the scene. At parties he either did card tricks, or didn't show up at all, preferring to stay home and tinker with hobbies like archery and astronomy. Other than endorsing a men's clothing line and producing the film "The Big Chill," most business investments were washouts: the DeLorean automobile, a savings and loan bank, TV sitcoms with Gabe Kaplan and Angie Dickinson, a bid to purchase the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. His first and only concern was always the show. He'd worked in television since its inception and knew the golden rule: If the ratings dipped, you were history.
Running a talk show takes its toll on the host. Jack Paar would start crying and walk off the set. Dick Cavett has been hospitalized for depression. The newer successors like Letterman, Bill Maher, Conan O'Brien, Miller, Leno -- all of them reek of neuroses. But what sets Carson apart from them is that he exposed so much of himself for so many years. He went through his divorces and experienced colossal business failures, and yet somehow he was able to make it endearing to an audience. With the exception of Letterman on occasion, the next generation seems more internalized and tightly wrapped, less skillful at interviewing and more interested in interrupting with a funny line. What do we really know about any of them, except that Leno works hard and collects cars, Letterman has a mother and Maher jerks off before taping his show?
He threatened to retire for years, but kept renewing his contract, knowing that this was really all he had -- that the audience would never accept him as anything other than himself. Although he was successful as host of the Academy Awards, his lone film appearance was in a forgotten 1964 musical "Looking for Love," with Connie Francis. As the 1990s loomed, Carson found himself competing for ratings with more shows, more networks, more celebrities. Rather than end up like Jack Benny and Bob Hope -- tottering geriatrics, wobbling before the cameras to gasp a final breath of life-giving applause -- Carson saw the writing on the wall. He was in his late '60s, as was McMahon, and producer Freddie DeCordova was even older. America's sensibilities had in many ways surpassed theirs: less sexist, less Anglo-centric, less mannered. "The Tonight Show" was dated. Late-night comedy now belonged to Letterman and "Saturday Night Live." The old men had their fun, they made their money. It was time to step out of the way.
Carson's announcement that he was retiring gave NBC one year to scramble for a replacement, prompting a much-publicized power struggle between Leno and Letterman, whose show Carson had produced. Both men had guest-hosted several times. Whichever was Carson's personal choice, he wisely stayed out of the arguments. Leno got the job, and Letterman jumped ship to CBS.
On May 22, 1992, Carson walked onstage for the last time. No grand prime-time finale packed with celebrities. No guests at all. He just sat on a stool and talked, thanking the viewers and studio audience of friends and family, and ran some clips from over the years. It was a classy exit, and then Johnny Carson, by his own choice, went home with his wife Alex to Malibu and shut the door.
He popped up in a few TV cameos, appearing on Bob Hope's 90th birthday special in 1993, and the following year, during a Los Angeles taping of "The Late Show," was seen driving a convertible, handing Letterman the Top Ten list. But for the most part, he has remained silent -- a little tennis and poker, an African safari, a cruise on his boat to watch whales. Close friends were shocked to hear of his 1999 heart attack and quadruple-bypass operation. Nobody had realized he was even ill.
What has kept Carson busy is his John W. Carson Foundation, which over the years has donated millions to various charities, including medical causes in the United States and Africa, animal conservation leagues, a South Central Los Angeles youth group and an educational foundation set up by legendary fraud-buster James Randi. Carson's hometown of Norfolk, Neb., also boasts the Carson Regional Cancer Center and the high school's Johnny Carson Theatre.
Carson's most lasting legacy is the perfecting of television's late-night format. Leno, Letterman and O'Brien continue the traditional "Tonight Show" structure of an opening monologue, a live band and studio audience, the phony plants and city skyline, taped segments outside the studio. Bill Maher and Dennis Miller have both unabashedly copped Carson's delivery: standing in one place, hands behind their back, heels lifting off the floor. And Richard Simmons has inherited the Tiny Tim role of everyone's exploitable freak-guest. But with all the expanded cable channels and entertainment outlets, these programs are more a coveted opportunity to plug product, and less a forum for quirky potato chip collectors and has-beens with funny stories about sandwiches.
As he sits in Malibu, surfing through the channels, Johnny Carson must shake his head at television's evolution into the current jungle of hyperkinetic teenagers and staged "reality" shows and the endless parade of professional wrestling. He did what he could with the new medium, had a lot of fun, made a lot of money and met a lot of people, even if he'd rather not talk to them. And if he feels like contributing more to the world, there's always the New Yorker.
If I could rearrange history, I'd add to the last episode of Carson's "Tonight Show" his ingenious 1991 monologue "What Democracy Means to Me," delivered as a tribute to the Soviet republics created after the fall of communism. As Doc and the band played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the background, Johnny summed up the totality of life in the land of the free:
Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two ineffective political parties. ... Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto -- usually a mop or a leaf blower. It means that with proper timing and scrupulous bookkeeping, anyone can die owing the government a huge amount of money. ... Democracy means free television, not good television, but free. ... And finally, democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head -- this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle. I thank you.
IAN McEWAN'S SATURDAY
It is the opening of Tate Modern and Tony Blair is in his cool Britannia heyday, feeling pleased with himself for correctly identifying a pile of bricks as an exhibit. He seizes the hand of the nearest scruff and tells him, with that customary stare of sincerity, how much he admires his art. Which would be mighty flattering, except his new best friend is actually a neurosurgeon. Even allowing for Ian McEwan's magical powers of imagination, the scene from his new novel, Saturday, seems too vivid to be pure fiction. "Yes, it was actually me meeting Blair," the Booker prize-winning author smiles sheepishly. "I just changed it from being a writer to a brain surgeon. Nick Serota, the Tate's director, introduced us, saying, 'This is Ian McEwan', and Blair took my hand in that political way and said, 'I really love your work. I've got two of your paintings'."
McEwan corrected him, but Blair still insisted that he had McEwans on his walls: proof that nobody does sincerity as convincingly as Blair, because his lies deceive even himself. In Saturday, set on the day of London's anti-Iraq war march, McEwan uses the insight to weigh up the prime minister's truthfulness; the neurosurgeon watches Blair on television spelling out his case for war. There is no discernible doubt.
McEwan used to be as miserable and as macabre as he was right-on and left-wing. But at 56 he has suddenly turned warm and cheerful. His hero in Saturday is happily married and even enjoys sex - with his wife. This might reflect a change in McEwan's life. He endured a horrible divorce a decade ago (Penny Allen, his former wife, went public on her marriage hell) and an even worse custody battle after she defied a court order and took one of their sons to France. Later he was stricken with grief for his mother, who died after a long slide into dementia. Now he is remarried, re-energised and rejoicing in even greater popularity.
McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes: for a quarter of a century they have been the three graces of English letters. And Saturday confirms how they, particularly McEwan, tower over the competition. McEwan thinks it might be because they had to work harder to get a start. "It used to be virtually impossible to get published. Now there are too many novels. There seem to be more authors than readers," he says. Despite the rivalry, he insists he is still good muckers with Amis, who he thinks receives an inexplicably hostile press, and Barnes, who he says has been in hiding finishing a novel.
He and his second wife Annalena are heading out to Uruguay to stay with Amis; there should be some lively debates poolside. For while Blair comes out of the book badly, anti-war protesters fare even worse. McEwan admits he has found himself "at odds" with friends in the liberal intelligentsia "with whom I'd naturally expect to agree". Indeed, his donnish uniform - blue cords, woolly jumper - would point to a different set of opinions but, as he says, this war is unusual. He was appalled by articles cheering on the insurgents. "I would have thought that was a vote for anarchy and probably another one-party state."
He loathed the anti-war slogan Not In My Name. "Its cloying self-importance suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumer of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice." Walking past marchers rather than with them, he says: "I was troubled by the sheer level of happiness on the street. I did think whatever the reasoning of America for going in, history has offered us this chance to get rid of Saddam. If you decide you don't want that, it is probably a very reasonable view, but it is a vote for more torture, more genocide. It's a sombre, grave choice." He began as an opponent of war, having "megalomaniac, insomniac" fantasies of getting to Blair and managing to talk him out of it. "There were anxieties Baghdad would be razed, the UN estimated there would be 3m million refugees and half a million dead, although we might get there yet. I did feel there was a humanitarian argument to be made and was very disappointed the government never made it."
But he was certain the invasion was going to happen anyway. "When it did I fervently wanted it to succeed even though a big chunk of left liberal opinion really wanted it to fail." Far from feeling slighted by Blair that day at the Tate, he was struck by "the helplessness of power. You're wheeled around, you are introduced to the press and then someone says from the front door 'Tony, you've got one minute'."
Without giving away the ending of Saturday, the reader is left relieved as horror is avoided. Once that would have been unimaginable, McEwan's novels being characterised by damaging sexual relationships and sadistic violence. "One of the resources available to me is that I know my readers. They think it highly likely that something far worse than they can imagine is about to happen," he says. And for once, it doesn't. "I got interested in the idea of a man who thought he was extremely lucky because the woman he loved also happened to be his wife and (because this is so rare) he was actually troubled that he was a freak of nature: 'hey, there must be something wrong with me '."
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To write about a neurosurgeon, McEwan spent a year watching one at work, even in the operating theatre. Imagine coming round from brain surgery and staring into McEwan's eyes, realising that macabre brain was taking an unnaturally close interest in yours. "I thought I would faint, but actually I was all right." Instead, McEwan focuses on how humdrum brain surgery is for its practitioners, who chat about mortgage tax relief and what music to saw and chisel to. "It is amazing how work is sorely missing in literary novels. People don't seem to have jobs; they're having affairs or having a terrible time with teenage children. You have to look to Kipling to find a real celebration of work. I thought, 'Whether he's going to be a shipbuilder or an architect, I'm going to enter this world, watch and absorb'." As a slushy pop song simpers away in the bar of a London hotel, he agrees that unhappy marriages have always been thought to be easier to write about. As he puts it in the novel: "For the professors in the academy, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack." But McEwan saw this as a challenge.
"I thought, why not devise a character who actually is happy in his marriage, loves his work, gets on with his children and then finds what's left to trouble him: the world outside. There is plenty of anxiety in the book, but there is also a celebration of cooking, wine, sex, love, children, work. "We can be desperately, genuinely concerned about the misery created by the tsunami in the middle of the Indian Ocean, then 20 minutes later we're having a nice time drinking a glass of wine with a friend. These things go in boxes." McEwan talks about his children - now grown up - with such affection they seem to be the central loves of his life. When he tells me how lucky I am to have small children he says so with passion. Still, he concedes he is now freer to travel and has moved from north Oxford back to north London. Recent operations on both knees have filled his head with morbid thoughts about impending decrepitude and - worse - losing at squash. He writes: "Here's how it starts, the long process by which you become your children's children. Until one day you might hear them say, 'Dad, if you start crying again we're taking you home'."
Perhaps McEwan sees it from both ends. He says that as his mother's dementia worsened, visits became excruciating. "As soon as you left she would not remember you had been. It is very painful." Who needs wars when there is that much anguish at home? Does he think any real people are as happy as those in his novel? "No, if only," he smiles ruefully. But McEwan, at last, seems to have come as close to happiness as we are ever likely to get - to a state of acceptance. And far from weakening his work, this has lent it a refreshing sense of humanity. If Blair really learnt to appreciate McEwan's work, it might make him a better human being.
Guardian Review
It's odd now to think that Ian McEwan once lacked confidence as a novelist. His first two attempts at the longer form - The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers - felt like the work of a born short-story writer being stretched on a rack by his publisher and literary tradition, needing help from typeface and spacing to qualify even as novellas. But with his last but one novel ( Amsterdam ) having won the Booker Prize and the last ( Atonement ) out-selling John Grisham and Tom Clancy in some weeks' book charts, McEwan has the swagger - the literary equivalent of a tennis player in the first tournament after winning Wimbledon - of a novelist who could do almost anything.
What he has done is Saturday, which resembles Amsterdam in sardonically examining the interior life of the contemporary middle classes but departs starkly from the century-long focus of Atonement by taking place over 24 hours, on what is supposed to be the day off of Henry Perowne, a noted London neurosurgeon.
A recent edition of Granta carried an extract from Saturday, in which Perowne drives out of Oxford in the morning to visit his brain-hazed mother. I had assumed that this was the beginning of the novel but it turns out to be page 152 of a book of less than 300 pages. It's a measure of the level of incident in Henry's day - and the meticulous close-stitching of McEwan's work as a word-surgeon - that, before his Mercedes S500 reaches the Westway, en route to his mother, he has already witnessed a potential terrorist attack, discussed the Iraq war with his son, made love with his wife, come close to murder on a central London street, lost a game of squash and shopped for a fish stew.
Yet, while the novel is clearly an attempt to set down the textures of everyday life - close reading could improve your cooking, your squash game and even tip you off about what sort of kettle to buy - McEwan has larger concerns than, say, Nicholson Baker in the close auditing of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature . Saturday catalogues the local only in order to focus on the global. For the day on which we take account of Henry is Saturday 15 February 2003. As the neuro-surgeon tries to mind his own business, hundreds of thousands of marchers are gathering in London to protest against Tony Blair's support for the American attack on Iraq. As the background tramping and shouting begins to intrude on the quiet order of Henry's life, it becomes clear that, if Saturday were to have another eight-letter S-word as its title, it would be Security .
By recording with such loving care the elements of one rich Englishman's life, Saturday explores the question of to what extent it is possible to insulate yourself against the world's concerns. Centrally heated, pension-planned, air-bag protected, permanently loved and frequently fucked by his wife, healthy and even able to give health to others, Henry lives within a protective sac of satisfaction and achievement. But, as Henry knows from his profession, such sacs are not always enough to protect against disastrous impact and, on this day of rest, he takes his hit.
The most recurrent theme in McEwan's 10 novels is the sudden ambush of the safe and smug. Go shopping and you'll never see your kid again ( The Child in Time ). Take a hike and the hounds of hell are just around the corner ( Black Dogs ). Fall in love and the next thing you know you're carving up a cadaver ( The Innocent ). Go for a picnic and one man dies while a nutter claims you as his soul-mate ( Enduring Love ). A similar external menace is pushing at Henry's bubble. Between his uxorious love-making and his squash game, he bumps into Baxter, an aggressive driver who believes that Henry shouldn't have been where he was. We'd think, colloquially, that Baxter needs his head seeing to and has a funny look. Neurosurgeon Perowne immediately understands the eruptions happening in the man's skull. As Saturday (like Enduring Love ) is in part a story of suspense, a summary needs to be protective, but Baxter comes to challenge both the surgeon's domestic instincts and his professional skills.
Most of the fictions provoked by post-9/11 politics have taken up positions as clearly as a party spokesman. But Saturday , in common with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , is subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either intervention or against isolationism. Is the foreign policy of Henry's government exposing him to danger, or is his moneyed, bouillabaisse-eating existence a self-delusion in a threatening world? As in the best political novels, the evidence and arguments are distributed with careful ambiguity.
The novel is inevitably and properly clearer about its position on another internal debate. Perowne, although an exemplar of the civilised upper middle classes, doesn't believe in literature. He has no time to read and even becomes confused when his daughter Daisy, about to have her first poems published by Faber & Faber, uses the tricky jargon word "stanza". The surgeon especially can't see the point of novels which tell you about someone's life in great detail. Surely it's quite easy to note these things down and then type them out. McEwan gives Henry an even chance of victory on the squash court but, in this bit of sport about whether novels have a point, the novelist thrashes his hero in every line. In giving his central character not only a poet daughter and a father-in-law who writes verse but a wife who works at a newspaper, the writer could be accused of locating the story on home turf. But a considerable technical achievement of Saturday is that it succeeds in going inside the mind of a brain surgeon. In the early stages, there is a certain nervousness about whether the author is simply transcribing research notes - "Then he let Rodney take the lead in another burr hole for a chronic subdural" - but, by the end, there is no doubt that Perowne has the hands, eyes and thoughts of a neurosurgeon rather than a novelist.
Medical language, though, is only one of the registers in the prose. McEwan is one of the least flashy stylists of his generation, less quotable than Martin Amis or Julian Barnes, but, especially in Atonement and now this book, his voice has settled into scrupulous, sensual rhythms in which even something as simple as a 24-hour news bulletin is subject to careful choices of adjective and noun: "The synthesised bleeps, the sleepless anchor and his dependable jaw."
In a novel of great sureness at the level of both action and language, McEwan makes one curious choice: the quotations from Daisy Perowne's debut volume of poetry are actually published lines by Craig Raine, giving the book an additional subplot in which, beyond the plot's call on various sections of the Metropolitan police, you expect the literary cops to arrive and arrest Daisy for plagiarism. It's a matter of debate whether it's the reader or the writer who is being too clever here. For the rest of its length, though, Saturday gives no sense of McEwan's talent taking a day off. One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world. The only consolation for McEwan's contemporaries, I suppose, is that they could taunt him that he can't seem to write short stories any more.
Review:
Saturday is a closely circumscribed novel, a detailed day in the life. The life is London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne's, the weekend day -- away from work -- not quite typical or everyday. The Saturday is 15 February, 2003, the day on which hundreds of thousands would march in the capital in protest against the proposed war against Iraq, the teeming masses a constant backdrop (though always kept at some distance, whether on television or on the streets). Perowne's day is one largely of simple routine and leisurely errands, scheduled to culminate in the evening with a family get-together at dinner.
Prowne's daughter, Daisy, is about to have her first book of poetry published, and is coming home for the first time in six months -- the longest she's ever been away. Son Theo, who abandoned school and has found fulfilment as a blues musician, still lives at home; like Daisy he gets along very well with his father. Perowne is happily married too, to Rosalind, a lawyer for a newspaper (constantly trying "to steer her newspaper away from the courts") -- who has the annoyance of an injunction to fight this Saturday. The final guest expected for dinner is Rosalind's father, John Grammaticus, himself a well-known poet, living in France -- the one possibly disruptive presence, a strong personality who hasn't quite mended a rift with Daisy.
Perowne isn't much of a reader, but Daisy has been trying to educate him, making up reading lists for him. He still doesn't quite get it, but for the most part he's willing to try. But some of the books she suggests -- the "irksome confections" of the magical realist school -- are too much for him to take:
the actual, not the magical should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.
He pleads with his daughter: "No more magic midget drummers". Ian McEwan is, of course, not known for his magic midget drummers or similar flights of fancy; it's not magical but clinical realism he offers, and in Saturday, built entirely around neurosurgeon Perowne, McEwan can indulge himself to his heart's (and mind's --though one is tempted to say: cerebrum's --) content. Indulge he does, carefully constructing his novel around what happens to Perowne on that Saturday. From the leftover workweek (it lingers into the weekend) to the usual Saturday routine (a squash game, a visit to his mother (who has, perhaps too predictably, almost entirely lost her mind)) as well as the demands of this particular day (shopping, cooking, going to hear Theo and his band rehearse), McEwan slowly and carefully describes what Perowne does and thinks, and what happens to and around him. Necessary background -- how he met Rosalind, his relationship with his father-in-law and with his children, some work-detail -- is woven in, not quite effortlessly, but easily enough. Bit by bit the character-portrait is built up. But even McEwan isn't satisfied simply with the everyday (and setting it on a day with such a significant backdrop -- the march, and the world-events behind it -- would make it hard to completely keep the world at bay in any case).
From the beginning, there is also a sense of menace in the novel. In the earliest morning hours Perowne wakes and, looking out the window, sees what he first believes to be a comet but then recognises as an airplane that is on fire heading for Heathrow, what looks like an impending catastrophe he is helpless to do anything about. Later in the day, everywhere he turns, the mass of marchers is also a presence -- peaceful, yet their enormous size and potential threatening. The plane and the marchers -- like the danger in Iraq, both Saddam Hussein's criminal rule and the violent solution that is being considered -- are all kept at a distance: the world is close, but does not really intrude. Indeed, Saturday is an intimate novel, McEwan focussing on Perowne's one-on-one interactions, only rarely bringing several people together at the same time -- and, not surprisingly, when the scene does get crowded, things get very ugly.
Perowne's world isn't upset, as might be expected, by the marchers, but by a fender-bender. Not much of one: "By the standards of contemporary road traffic accidents -- Henry has done a total of five years in Accident and Emergency -- this is a trivial matter." Indeed, it turns out there's barely any damage at all to his fancy car. But it's an odd accident: because of the march the streets are deserted, no other cars, no other people. Worse, for Perowne, is who the other party is: three men in a red BMW ("a vehicle he associates for no very good reason with criminality, drug dealing" -- McEwan trying too hard to make sure readers feel the growing menace). Led by Baxter, they seem like thugs, and certainly act it. They and Perowne have different ideas about how to settle this sort of thing, and the scene escalates into one of inescapable violence.
Except that neurosurgeon and sharp-eyed diagnostician Perowne realises that there's something wrong with Baxter. The man has Huntington's Disease, a cruel, debilitating ailment. Baxter knows (and knows what awaits him), and when he realises Perowne knows he backs off (and has his mates back off too). It's enough to allow Perowne to escape -- though the memory of what happened, and how he acted, haunts him for most of the rest of the day. And then there's that red BMW he thinks he repeatedly sees as he drives about town .....
Needless to say, Perowne does not manage to escape Baxter entirely, and it comes to another confrontation. Baxter's disease makes him dangerous: "a man who believes he has no future and is therefore free of consequences". The disease also manifests itself in mood swings and unpredictable behaviour. Perowne is curious about the case, from a medical point of view, and can't help but try to regard and analyse it as he would with any patient in his office. He also sincerely wants to help, though it is difficult to balance that with Baxter's threatening actions. Ironically (if not entirely surprisingly), it is art -- poetry, a tool that Perowne doesn't have at his disposal -- that prevents the situation from getting out of hand at the most critical point. (It is this, surely, that drives Perowne to head back to work that Saturday night, the need to reassert his own life-and-death power, the operating theatre the only place he knows he is in control.) Saturday is a book filled with tension, but also strikingly anticlimactic. Potential disaster -- the burning plane, the march that might explode into violence -- is constantly averted. Arguably the most unpleasant confrontation does not even involve Baxter -- scenes that are the most brutal but also over relatively quickly -- but Perowne's drawn out squash-game with a friend and co-worker, the bitter aftertaste of which lingers (but is also ultimately resolved). Tension isn't a bad thing, Perowne feels: "when things are difficult, tension is best maintained".
In Saturday McEwan depicts a man who has done well and leads a comfortable life, happily married, a proud father, a respected professional. But the world at large, dealing with others or with questions of politics (repeatedly touched upon, especially regarding Iraq), makes for complications that, if not entirely baffling, do leave him ill at ease. He's only really comfortable with the inner circle of closest family, and, especially, in his operating theatre:
Though things sometimes go wrong, he can control outcomes here, he has resources, controlled conditions. McEwan also chooses to emphasise -- a bit too strongly -- the loss of control that approaches, and Perowne's reluctant acknowledgement of the inevitable. He gives himself just a bit more time at squash, and one more London marathon, he knows in a few years he'll be doing more administrative work than surgery. Bashing the point of a comfortable world gently unravelling home with an oversized hammer, McEwan offers not only the demented mother, but ultimately the news that the daughter and son are well and truly set to begin their own, independent lives as well.
Despite all that happens, and all that Perowne learns, it really is almost just another Saturday, a typical mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. McEwan almost pulls it off, but he tries too hard. Not quite inhabiting Perowne's mind, but closely following his actions and meandering thoughts, McEwan does offer an interesting character study -- but he tries to do just a bit too much (too much of import comes together here), revealing the book as a construct, rather than simply a narrative in the process. What McEwan excels at is in the details, the page after page descriptions of what and who Perowne encounters and experiences and remembers, especially the small gestures or specific details, be they a clinical diagnosis or some realisation about one of his children. Some scenes go on too long -- the squash game, for example -- but overall McEwan leads the reader on quite nicely. Saturday also remains unpredictable: as in life, few things play out exactly as one expects.
There are also some very nice small bits of the past woven in, including how Perowne and his wife came together, or Daisy's relationship with her grandfather. And McEwan even manages a perfectly placed blow against Tony Blair, describing Perowne's one encounter with the man; it has nothing to do with the crisis of this day (Iraq), and yet devastatingly pegs the PM as a man unwilling and unable to see anything but what he has set his mind on.
Saturday is a well-crafted book, carefully and adeptly written. Tension ripples through it -- yet it returns always to calm. It remains focussed on a small world, even as unsettling events and figures, small and large, threaten to intrude on it. The central character's world is a small, fixed one, where he is able to maintain control -- even, still, on this Saturday -- but this is a day that reminds him that it won't always be this way. A strange mix of ambition and restraint, Saturday isn't entirely satisfactory, but in its relentless focus on "the actual, not the magical" it is an interesting and largely successful work. Some readers may be disappointed that there isn't more action to it, but there's something to be said for McEwan's reserved approach too -- something McEwan does better than most anyone writing nowadays..
Readers opening the pages of the New Yorker last Oct. 30 found an unexpected tidbit in the midst of the usual Talk of the Town items -- a small humor piece entitled "Proverbs According to Dennis Miller ." Among the short parodies of Miller's reference-heavy style: "A bird in the hand ... is dead or alive, depending on one's will," and "What goes up ... will stay up if it has an escape velocity of 11.3 kilometres per second." The byline was Johnny Carson.
Journalists and television execs pricked up their ears. This was peculiar. Carson had waved goodbye to America in 1992 after hosting "The Tonight Show" for 30 years, and then abruptly vanished from the public eye. For eight years, no jokes, no interviews, no follow-up projects. Television's most recognizable figure, gone.
But here was Johnny, right there on the page, spoofing the pseudo-intellectual Miller's new gig as NFL announcer. According to the New York Times, Carson submitted the piece to the editors on the suggestion of humorist Steve Martin, and they printed it. And then, as if to dispel the sophomore slump, he published another two months later, a recently discovered collection of children's letters to Santa, as if written by Bill Buckley, Chuck Heston and Don Rickles.
Seeing him again was sort of like peeking through the curtains and seeing the divorced dad pull up in the driveway after an extended absence. Carson was a fixture to two generations of boob-tube Americans. Vietnam-era adults saw him as the nightly tonic to a pain-in-the-ass workday. Children sitting up past their bedtime marveled at a cocktailed Golden Age of celebrities, comedians and racy jokes. Each evening I used to hear the show's opening theme "Daaa dat dat da daa!" emanate from my parents' bedroom, accompanied by Ed McMahon's stentorian announcements, and it was like a signal. They were going to watch Johnny until they fell asleep, and I could do whatever I wanted. Until I could drive a car, I watched the show too.
Carson built up his on-screen family of regulars, and viewers learned to quickly identify the established comic premises. Johnny was the sideburned rascal, forever taken to the cleaners by ex-wives. Ed was the tippling Tonto sidekick who pitched for dog food. Doc Severinsen owned impossibly loud clothing and failed racehorses. Tommy Newsom: beige and boring. The shtick never varied; characters like Carnac the Magnificent and the oily Art Fern's Tea Time Theater continued year after year. This was old-school, steeped in vaudeville and radio, with the ribbon mike firmly planted atop the desk. Funny props, cute animals, a few caca jokes, ogle the cleavage, keep things moving. If it ain't broke, it stays in the show.
The most impressive feature was always Carson's opening monologue, sharp and topical, evolving with the nation's moods, delivered with a casual Midwestern air, textbook TV cool, each punchline set up with a completely plausible statement, as if Johnny were standing in line in front of you at the feed store, and turned to say, "Did you see this in the news?" When the material clicked, it killed. (Many maintain that Carson's constant hammering of President Nixon contributed to his eventual resignation.) And when a line bombed, Carson made an art form out of the recovery. ("You didn't boo me when I smothered a grenade at Guadalcanal.") In a narrow-casted, three-network world where comedy meant sitcoms and variety shows, his monologue provided an ideal cultural barometer for the nation, mixing in politics, scientific discoveries, fads and trends, strange news items, his divorces and even bawdy mentions about Dolly Parton or Linda Lovelace. If you craved a peek at the big bad adult world, there was really nowhere else to turn besides the first 10 minutes of "The Tonight Show."
Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, in 1925, and spent his formative years in Norfolk, Neb., performing magic and comedy under the name "The Great Carsoni." He served in the Navy during World War II, entertained college fraternity parties and worked as a radio announcer and disk jockey. While performing for audiences of farmers each day, he spent nights listening to tapes of radio heroes like Jack Benny and Bob Hope, studying their inflections and timing.
When television began to invade America's living rooms, Carson chased the new medium to Los Angeles, where he hosted a handful of low-budget comedy series, conducting phony interviews and performing skits and characters. The material was quirky and occasionally naughty, yet homespun enough to hit home with the heartland. Although he was popular, the shows weren't, and he ended up writing jokes for Red Skelton. His first big break came in 1957 as replacement host of the ABC daytime quiz show "Who Do You Trust?" When Carson inherited the show, he needed to hire an announcer. A big man from Philadelphia showed up for what would be a very bizarre job interview.
In his 1998 autobiography "For Laughing Out Loud," Ed McMahon recalls walking into Carson's office, to find Johnny standing at the window, looking out in silence. Finally he turned and asked McMahon where he went to school.
"Catholic University," McMahon answered. "In Washington, D.C. I studied speech and drama."
Carson replied that was very interesting, and thanked him for coming by. McMahon left confused, thinking perhaps he'd blown it, and didn't hear anything for three weeks, until the show's producer called and told him he will be wearing suits on the show to emphasize his size. He realized he got the job. He also saw a glimpse into the private shyness of a man who would be his employer and friend for the next 35 years.
As celebrities would later guest-host his show, Carson occasionally filled in for Jack Paar on "The Tonight Show," and when Paar left in 1962 Carson slipped into the slot, bringing McMahon along. A longtime jazz fan and sometime drummer, Carson retained Paar's house band, led by Skitch Henderson and featuring a young trumpet player named Doc Severinsen.
For the next three decades Carson crafted a 90-minute nightly cavalcade of sketches and guests that, although shot in New York and Burbank (after 1972), was most accessible to the unwashed masses between the coasts. His studio audiences were primarily tourists from the Midwest, and his writers injected this WASPish heartland flavor throughout every element of the show: a scorn for the pretentious, an appreciation for funny animals and strange eccentrics and a cosmic shrug about the inevitability of taxes, ex-wives and hangovers. The result was hundreds of moments that have become engrained in our psyche:
The segment in which Ed Ames threw a tomahawk at an outline of a human target, the hatchet stuck handle up in the crotch and Johnny ad-libbed, "I didn't even know you were Jewish." The Dragnet-style "Copper Clappers" wordplay bit, with a straight-faced Jack Webb. The scared marmoset that crawled onto Johnny's head and peed on him. The near-masochistic recycling of ukulele oddball Tiny Tim, staging his on-air wedding for 50 million viewers. The actor Jimmy Stewart tearing up while reading a poem about his dog. A man who rendered the national anthem by making flatulent noises with his hands. The winners of a bird-call competition. A loaded Dean Martin secretly tipping cigarette ashes into the cocktail of an oblivious George Gobel. An eccentric old lady who presented her beloved collection of potato chips shaped like faces of celebrities -- when Carson munched blithely on a chip, the woman nearly had a coronary, until he revealed a separate bag behind the desk.
Carson exploited politics, but only for quick one-liners, or to give room for his credible Ronald Reagan impression. The show was never about him, it was about the world he beheld. When he invited guests to come on the show, he listened with curiosity, took them seriously, and the audience followed his cue. Critic Kenneth Tynan profiled him for the New Yorker in 1978, and observed, "It is only fair to remember that he does not pretend to be a pundit, employed to express his own opinions. Rather, he is a professional explorer of other people's egos."
Carson had a soft spot for comedians, from insult king Don Rickles, to his idol Jack Benny, to ponytailed George Carlin, who gave America its first taste of network dope humor. Sweating young comics experienced their show-biz debut via Carson -- among them Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Jay Leno and David Letterman -- anxiously awaiting the "Good stuff!" comment of approval, or even better, the wave to come over and sit down.
Some moments never made the greatest hits clips. One night the material bombed so badly, Carson lit the pages on fire and solemnly tossed them into a wastebasket, accompanied by Severinsen playing "Taps." In 1974, a fat cigar-chomping man carrying a cocktail streaked nude across the set of the show, forcing NBC censors to black out the lower half of the screen; the streaker was arrested and later released, said Carson, for "lack of evidence." A newly successful Eddie Murphy was asked if he enjoyed buying things with his Hollywood money, and he answered mockingly with a blackface accent: "Hey Amos, get a loada that coat -- that's a mighty big watch there." An obviously unhip Carson watched helplessly as Murphy then invited his friend from backstage to come out and do an impression of Prince.
"Tonight Show" guests developed a reputation just for their appearances. A maniacal Mel Brooks ran amok for an entire program, bumping all scheduled guests. Comedian Buddy Hackett spent 15 minutes telling one anecdote about a corned beef sandwich. A seemingly irritable Charles Grodin purposely disagreed with everything Johnny said. Albert Brooks did celebrity impressions while eating various foods. Flamenco guitarist/sexpot Charo was perennially asked back to dance the "hootchie cootchie." A fully made-up Alice Cooper politely drank a can of Budweiser during his interviews. Don Rickles once congratulated McMahon with sincerity upon his recent marriage, then turned to Johnny and barked, "I give it about a week, tops."
Carson hit his professional peak during the indulgent late '60s and early '70s. "The Tonight Show" was then firing on all cylinders, square enough to make Hollywood's old guard feel comfortable, yet hip enough to appropriate the party. The show swung right from the opening theme, when Carson parted the curtain and blinded viewers with a nightly arsenal of Nehru jackets, noisy-patterned sportcoats, and neckties the size of beaver tails. This was America's late-night cocktail lounge, the televised nephews of the original Rat Pack. Guests smoked and drank on camera without guile. Marriage was just a punchline, as gleaming medallions nestled in thatches of chest hair, braless breasts spilled out of dresses. Guests never chuckled -- laughter was accompanied by a thrown-back head, a fit of cigarette coughing, a spill of the bourbon. Carson frequently erupted in a loud cackle, sending him out of his chair. The show often returned after a commercial break to catch Johnny drumming with pencils along with the band, after which he would turn to Ed and joke about their bender the previous night, like a couple of tomcats on the town chasing skirts.
It wasn't always funny business. I remember watching two "Tonight Show" incidents in particular, and thinking this is a window into how Carson really thinks and feels. The first, a bit with Carson chatting with McMahon about a new scientific study concluding that mosquitoes were particularly fond of extremely "warm-blooded, passionate people." Under the desk, Carson had concealed a prop can of insect spray the size of a fire extinguisher. As he mentioned the setup about passionate people, McMahon blurted, "Whoops, there's another one," and slapped his wrist, getting huge laughs and completely upstaging his boss. "Well then," answered Carson, "I guess I won't be needing this $500 prop, then, will I?" He pulled out the prop and tossed it aside, a nice recovery, but accompanied by a brief glare at McMahon.
The other, a moment in the middle of the show where Carson asked the audience if he could get serious. The studio quieted down, and he pulled out a copy of the National Enquirer, which had printed an article about his marriage headed for divorce. He addressed the camera directly: "I have not seen this until this morning. Now, before I get into this or say any more, I want to go on record right here in front of the American public because this is the only forum I have. They have this publication, I have this show. This is absolutely, completely, 100 percent falsehood ... I'm going to call the National Enquirer, and the people who wrote this, liars. Now that's slander. They can sue me for slander. You know where I am, gentlemen."
The move required balls of steel, and said to the world that "The Tonight Show" might be fun and games, but don't fuck with John William Carson. The Enquirer would print more stories about him, but they never sued.
It wasn't easy to be Johnny Carson. Nobody could tape 5,000 shows, interview 23,000 guests, without sacrificing some amount of personal life to the darkness. He ran through three wives and four producers, and developed a reputation as temperamental and emotionally distant. His three sons didn't see him that often, unless they worked on the show. A long struggle with the booze led to headlines for a drunken driving arrest. During one interview, he snapped at a journalist for not doing his homework and walked away from the table, leaving his then-publicist Gary Stevens to defuse the scene. At parties he either did card tricks, or didn't show up at all, preferring to stay home and tinker with hobbies like archery and astronomy. Other than endorsing a men's clothing line and producing the film "The Big Chill," most business investments were washouts: the DeLorean automobile, a savings and loan bank, TV sitcoms with Gabe Kaplan and Angie Dickinson, a bid to purchase the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. His first and only concern was always the show. He'd worked in television since its inception and knew the golden rule: If the ratings dipped, you were history.
Running a talk show takes its toll on the host. Jack Paar would start crying and walk off the set. Dick Cavett has been hospitalized for depression. The newer successors like Letterman, Bill Maher, Conan O'Brien, Miller, Leno -- all of them reek of neuroses. But what sets Carson apart from them is that he exposed so much of himself for so many years. He went through his divorces and experienced colossal business failures, and yet somehow he was able to make it endearing to an audience. With the exception of Letterman on occasion, the next generation seems more internalized and tightly wrapped, less skillful at interviewing and more interested in interrupting with a funny line. What do we really know about any of them, except that Leno works hard and collects cars, Letterman has a mother and Maher jerks off before taping his show?
He threatened to retire for years, but kept renewing his contract, knowing that this was really all he had -- that the audience would never accept him as anything other than himself. Although he was successful as host of the Academy Awards, his lone film appearance was in a forgotten 1964 musical "Looking for Love," with Connie Francis. As the 1990s loomed, Carson found himself competing for ratings with more shows, more networks, more celebrities. Rather than end up like Jack Benny and Bob Hope -- tottering geriatrics, wobbling before the cameras to gasp a final breath of life-giving applause -- Carson saw the writing on the wall. He was in his late '60s, as was McMahon, and producer Freddie DeCordova was even older. America's sensibilities had in many ways surpassed theirs: less sexist, less Anglo-centric, less mannered. "The Tonight Show" was dated. Late-night comedy now belonged to Letterman and "Saturday Night Live." The old men had their fun, they made their money. It was time to step out of the way.
Carson's announcement that he was retiring gave NBC one year to scramble for a replacement, prompting a much-publicized power struggle between Leno and Letterman, whose show Carson had produced. Both men had guest-hosted several times. Whichever was Carson's personal choice, he wisely stayed out of the arguments. Leno got the job, and Letterman jumped ship to CBS.
On May 22, 1992, Carson walked onstage for the last time. No grand prime-time finale packed with celebrities. No guests at all. He just sat on a stool and talked, thanking the viewers and studio audience of friends and family, and ran some clips from over the years. It was a classy exit, and then Johnny Carson, by his own choice, went home with his wife Alex to Malibu and shut the door.
He popped up in a few TV cameos, appearing on Bob Hope's 90th birthday special in 1993, and the following year, during a Los Angeles taping of "The Late Show," was seen driving a convertible, handing Letterman the Top Ten list. But for the most part, he has remained silent -- a little tennis and poker, an African safari, a cruise on his boat to watch whales. Close friends were shocked to hear of his 1999 heart attack and quadruple-bypass operation. Nobody had realized he was even ill.
What has kept Carson busy is his John W. Carson Foundation, which over the years has donated millions to various charities, including medical causes in the United States and Africa, animal conservation leagues, a South Central Los Angeles youth group and an educational foundation set up by legendary fraud-buster James Randi. Carson's hometown of Norfolk, Neb., also boasts the Carson Regional Cancer Center and the high school's Johnny Carson Theatre.
Carson's most lasting legacy is the perfecting of television's late-night format. Leno, Letterman and O'Brien continue the traditional "Tonight Show" structure of an opening monologue, a live band and studio audience, the phony plants and city skyline, taped segments outside the studio. Bill Maher and Dennis Miller have both unabashedly copped Carson's delivery: standing in one place, hands behind their back, heels lifting off the floor. And Richard Simmons has inherited the Tiny Tim role of everyone's exploitable freak-guest. But with all the expanded cable channels and entertainment outlets, these programs are more a coveted opportunity to plug product, and less a forum for quirky potato chip collectors and has-beens with funny stories about sandwiches.
As he sits in Malibu, surfing through the channels, Johnny Carson must shake his head at television's evolution into the current jungle of hyperkinetic teenagers and staged "reality" shows and the endless parade of professional wrestling. He did what he could with the new medium, had a lot of fun, made a lot of money and met a lot of people, even if he'd rather not talk to them. And if he feels like contributing more to the world, there's always the New Yorker.
If I could rearrange history, I'd add to the last episode of Carson's "Tonight Show" his ingenious 1991 monologue "What Democracy Means to Me," delivered as a tribute to the Soviet republics created after the fall of communism. As Doc and the band played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the background, Johnny summed up the totality of life in the land of the free:
Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two ineffective political parties. ... Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto -- usually a mop or a leaf blower. It means that with proper timing and scrupulous bookkeeping, anyone can die owing the government a huge amount of money. ... Democracy means free television, not good television, but free. ... And finally, democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head -- this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle. I thank you.
IAN McEWAN'S SATURDAY
It is the opening of Tate Modern and Tony Blair is in his cool Britannia heyday, feeling pleased with himself for correctly identifying a pile of bricks as an exhibit. He seizes the hand of the nearest scruff and tells him, with that customary stare of sincerity, how much he admires his art. Which would be mighty flattering, except his new best friend is actually a neurosurgeon. Even allowing for Ian McEwan's magical powers of imagination, the scene from his new novel, Saturday, seems too vivid to be pure fiction. "Yes, it was actually me meeting Blair," the Booker prize-winning author smiles sheepishly. "I just changed it from being a writer to a brain surgeon. Nick Serota, the Tate's director, introduced us, saying, 'This is Ian McEwan', and Blair took my hand in that political way and said, 'I really love your work. I've got two of your paintings'."
McEwan corrected him, but Blair still insisted that he had McEwans on his walls: proof that nobody does sincerity as convincingly as Blair, because his lies deceive even himself. In Saturday, set on the day of London's anti-Iraq war march, McEwan uses the insight to weigh up the prime minister's truthfulness; the neurosurgeon watches Blair on television spelling out his case for war. There is no discernible doubt.
McEwan used to be as miserable and as macabre as he was right-on and left-wing. But at 56 he has suddenly turned warm and cheerful. His hero in Saturday is happily married and even enjoys sex - with his wife. This might reflect a change in McEwan's life. He endured a horrible divorce a decade ago (Penny Allen, his former wife, went public on her marriage hell) and an even worse custody battle after she defied a court order and took one of their sons to France. Later he was stricken with grief for his mother, who died after a long slide into dementia. Now he is remarried, re-energised and rejoicing in even greater popularity.
McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes: for a quarter of a century they have been the three graces of English letters. And Saturday confirms how they, particularly McEwan, tower over the competition. McEwan thinks it might be because they had to work harder to get a start. "It used to be virtually impossible to get published. Now there are too many novels. There seem to be more authors than readers," he says. Despite the rivalry, he insists he is still good muckers with Amis, who he thinks receives an inexplicably hostile press, and Barnes, who he says has been in hiding finishing a novel.
He and his second wife Annalena are heading out to Uruguay to stay with Amis; there should be some lively debates poolside. For while Blair comes out of the book badly, anti-war protesters fare even worse. McEwan admits he has found himself "at odds" with friends in the liberal intelligentsia "with whom I'd naturally expect to agree". Indeed, his donnish uniform - blue cords, woolly jumper - would point to a different set of opinions but, as he says, this war is unusual. He was appalled by articles cheering on the insurgents. "I would have thought that was a vote for anarchy and probably another one-party state."
He loathed the anti-war slogan Not In My Name. "Its cloying self-importance suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumer of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice." Walking past marchers rather than with them, he says: "I was troubled by the sheer level of happiness on the street. I did think whatever the reasoning of America for going in, history has offered us this chance to get rid of Saddam. If you decide you don't want that, it is probably a very reasonable view, but it is a vote for more torture, more genocide. It's a sombre, grave choice." He began as an opponent of war, having "megalomaniac, insomniac" fantasies of getting to Blair and managing to talk him out of it. "There were anxieties Baghdad would be razed, the UN estimated there would be 3m million refugees and half a million dead, although we might get there yet. I did feel there was a humanitarian argument to be made and was very disappointed the government never made it."
But he was certain the invasion was going to happen anyway. "When it did I fervently wanted it to succeed even though a big chunk of left liberal opinion really wanted it to fail." Far from feeling slighted by Blair that day at the Tate, he was struck by "the helplessness of power. You're wheeled around, you are introduced to the press and then someone says from the front door 'Tony, you've got one minute'."
Without giving away the ending of Saturday, the reader is left relieved as horror is avoided. Once that would have been unimaginable, McEwan's novels being characterised by damaging sexual relationships and sadistic violence. "One of the resources available to me is that I know my readers. They think it highly likely that something far worse than they can imagine is about to happen," he says. And for once, it doesn't. "I got interested in the idea of a man who thought he was extremely lucky because the woman he loved also happened to be his wife and (because this is so rare) he was actually troubled that he was a freak of nature: 'hey, there must be something wrong with me '."
Review:
To write about a neurosurgeon, McEwan spent a year watching one at work, even in the operating theatre. Imagine coming round from brain surgery and staring into McEwan's eyes, realising that macabre brain was taking an unnaturally close interest in yours. "I thought I would faint, but actually I was all right." Instead, McEwan focuses on how humdrum brain surgery is for its practitioners, who chat about mortgage tax relief and what music to saw and chisel to. "It is amazing how work is sorely missing in literary novels. People don't seem to have jobs; they're having affairs or having a terrible time with teenage children. You have to look to Kipling to find a real celebration of work. I thought, 'Whether he's going to be a shipbuilder or an architect, I'm going to enter this world, watch and absorb'." As a slushy pop song simpers away in the bar of a London hotel, he agrees that unhappy marriages have always been thought to be easier to write about. As he puts it in the novel: "For the professors in the academy, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack." But McEwan saw this as a challenge.
"I thought, why not devise a character who actually is happy in his marriage, loves his work, gets on with his children and then finds what's left to trouble him: the world outside. There is plenty of anxiety in the book, but there is also a celebration of cooking, wine, sex, love, children, work. "We can be desperately, genuinely concerned about the misery created by the tsunami in the middle of the Indian Ocean, then 20 minutes later we're having a nice time drinking a glass of wine with a friend. These things go in boxes." McEwan talks about his children - now grown up - with such affection they seem to be the central loves of his life. When he tells me how lucky I am to have small children he says so with passion. Still, he concedes he is now freer to travel and has moved from north Oxford back to north London. Recent operations on both knees have filled his head with morbid thoughts about impending decrepitude and - worse - losing at squash. He writes: "Here's how it starts, the long process by which you become your children's children. Until one day you might hear them say, 'Dad, if you start crying again we're taking you home'."
Perhaps McEwan sees it from both ends. He says that as his mother's dementia worsened, visits became excruciating. "As soon as you left she would not remember you had been. It is very painful." Who needs wars when there is that much anguish at home? Does he think any real people are as happy as those in his novel? "No, if only," he smiles ruefully. But McEwan, at last, seems to have come as close to happiness as we are ever likely to get - to a state of acceptance. And far from weakening his work, this has lent it a refreshing sense of humanity. If Blair really learnt to appreciate McEwan's work, it might make him a better human being.
Guardian Review
It's odd now to think that Ian McEwan once lacked confidence as a novelist. His first two attempts at the longer form - The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers - felt like the work of a born short-story writer being stretched on a rack by his publisher and literary tradition, needing help from typeface and spacing to qualify even as novellas. But with his last but one novel ( Amsterdam ) having won the Booker Prize and the last ( Atonement ) out-selling John Grisham and Tom Clancy in some weeks' book charts, McEwan has the swagger - the literary equivalent of a tennis player in the first tournament after winning Wimbledon - of a novelist who could do almost anything.
What he has done is Saturday, which resembles Amsterdam in sardonically examining the interior life of the contemporary middle classes but departs starkly from the century-long focus of Atonement by taking place over 24 hours, on what is supposed to be the day off of Henry Perowne, a noted London neurosurgeon.
A recent edition of Granta carried an extract from Saturday, in which Perowne drives out of Oxford in the morning to visit his brain-hazed mother. I had assumed that this was the beginning of the novel but it turns out to be page 152 of a book of less than 300 pages. It's a measure of the level of incident in Henry's day - and the meticulous close-stitching of McEwan's work as a word-surgeon - that, before his Mercedes S500 reaches the Westway, en route to his mother, he has already witnessed a potential terrorist attack, discussed the Iraq war with his son, made love with his wife, come close to murder on a central London street, lost a game of squash and shopped for a fish stew.
Yet, while the novel is clearly an attempt to set down the textures of everyday life - close reading could improve your cooking, your squash game and even tip you off about what sort of kettle to buy - McEwan has larger concerns than, say, Nicholson Baker in the close auditing of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature . Saturday catalogues the local only in order to focus on the global. For the day on which we take account of Henry is Saturday 15 February 2003. As the neuro-surgeon tries to mind his own business, hundreds of thousands of marchers are gathering in London to protest against Tony Blair's support for the American attack on Iraq. As the background tramping and shouting begins to intrude on the quiet order of Henry's life, it becomes clear that, if Saturday were to have another eight-letter S-word as its title, it would be Security .
By recording with such loving care the elements of one rich Englishman's life, Saturday explores the question of to what extent it is possible to insulate yourself against the world's concerns. Centrally heated, pension-planned, air-bag protected, permanently loved and frequently fucked by his wife, healthy and even able to give health to others, Henry lives within a protective sac of satisfaction and achievement. But, as Henry knows from his profession, such sacs are not always enough to protect against disastrous impact and, on this day of rest, he takes his hit.
The most recurrent theme in McEwan's 10 novels is the sudden ambush of the safe and smug. Go shopping and you'll never see your kid again ( The Child in Time ). Take a hike and the hounds of hell are just around the corner ( Black Dogs ). Fall in love and the next thing you know you're carving up a cadaver ( The Innocent ). Go for a picnic and one man dies while a nutter claims you as his soul-mate ( Enduring Love ). A similar external menace is pushing at Henry's bubble. Between his uxorious love-making and his squash game, he bumps into Baxter, an aggressive driver who believes that Henry shouldn't have been where he was. We'd think, colloquially, that Baxter needs his head seeing to and has a funny look. Neurosurgeon Perowne immediately understands the eruptions happening in the man's skull. As Saturday (like Enduring Love ) is in part a story of suspense, a summary needs to be protective, but Baxter comes to challenge both the surgeon's domestic instincts and his professional skills.
Most of the fictions provoked by post-9/11 politics have taken up positions as clearly as a party spokesman. But Saturday , in common with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , is subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either intervention or against isolationism. Is the foreign policy of Henry's government exposing him to danger, or is his moneyed, bouillabaisse-eating existence a self-delusion in a threatening world? As in the best political novels, the evidence and arguments are distributed with careful ambiguity.
The novel is inevitably and properly clearer about its position on another internal debate. Perowne, although an exemplar of the civilised upper middle classes, doesn't believe in literature. He has no time to read and even becomes confused when his daughter Daisy, about to have her first poems published by Faber & Faber, uses the tricky jargon word "stanza". The surgeon especially can't see the point of novels which tell you about someone's life in great detail. Surely it's quite easy to note these things down and then type them out. McEwan gives Henry an even chance of victory on the squash court but, in this bit of sport about whether novels have a point, the novelist thrashes his hero in every line. In giving his central character not only a poet daughter and a father-in-law who writes verse but a wife who works at a newspaper, the writer could be accused of locating the story on home turf. But a considerable technical achievement of Saturday is that it succeeds in going inside the mind of a brain surgeon. In the early stages, there is a certain nervousness about whether the author is simply transcribing research notes - "Then he let Rodney take the lead in another burr hole for a chronic subdural" - but, by the end, there is no doubt that Perowne has the hands, eyes and thoughts of a neurosurgeon rather than a novelist.
Medical language, though, is only one of the registers in the prose. McEwan is one of the least flashy stylists of his generation, less quotable than Martin Amis or Julian Barnes, but, especially in Atonement and now this book, his voice has settled into scrupulous, sensual rhythms in which even something as simple as a 24-hour news bulletin is subject to careful choices of adjective and noun: "The synthesised bleeps, the sleepless anchor and his dependable jaw."
In a novel of great sureness at the level of both action and language, McEwan makes one curious choice: the quotations from Daisy Perowne's debut volume of poetry are actually published lines by Craig Raine, giving the book an additional subplot in which, beyond the plot's call on various sections of the Metropolitan police, you expect the literary cops to arrive and arrest Daisy for plagiarism. It's a matter of debate whether it's the reader or the writer who is being too clever here. For the rest of its length, though, Saturday gives no sense of McEwan's talent taking a day off. One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world. The only consolation for McEwan's contemporaries, I suppose, is that they could taunt him that he can't seem to write short stories any more.
Review:
Saturday is a closely circumscribed novel, a detailed day in the life. The life is London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne's, the weekend day -- away from work -- not quite typical or everyday. The Saturday is 15 February, 2003, the day on which hundreds of thousands would march in the capital in protest against the proposed war against Iraq, the teeming masses a constant backdrop (though always kept at some distance, whether on television or on the streets). Perowne's day is one largely of simple routine and leisurely errands, scheduled to culminate in the evening with a family get-together at dinner.
Prowne's daughter, Daisy, is about to have her first book of poetry published, and is coming home for the first time in six months -- the longest she's ever been away. Son Theo, who abandoned school and has found fulfilment as a blues musician, still lives at home; like Daisy he gets along very well with his father. Perowne is happily married too, to Rosalind, a lawyer for a newspaper (constantly trying "to steer her newspaper away from the courts") -- who has the annoyance of an injunction to fight this Saturday. The final guest expected for dinner is Rosalind's father, John Grammaticus, himself a well-known poet, living in France -- the one possibly disruptive presence, a strong personality who hasn't quite mended a rift with Daisy.
Perowne isn't much of a reader, but Daisy has been trying to educate him, making up reading lists for him. He still doesn't quite get it, but for the most part he's willing to try. But some of the books she suggests -- the "irksome confections" of the magical realist school -- are too much for him to take:
the actual, not the magical should be the challenge. This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.
He pleads with his daughter: "No more magic midget drummers". Ian McEwan is, of course, not known for his magic midget drummers or similar flights of fancy; it's not magical but clinical realism he offers, and in Saturday, built entirely around neurosurgeon Perowne, McEwan can indulge himself to his heart's (and mind's --though one is tempted to say: cerebrum's --) content. Indulge he does, carefully constructing his novel around what happens to Perowne on that Saturday. From the leftover workweek (it lingers into the weekend) to the usual Saturday routine (a squash game, a visit to his mother (who has, perhaps too predictably, almost entirely lost her mind)) as well as the demands of this particular day (shopping, cooking, going to hear Theo and his band rehearse), McEwan slowly and carefully describes what Perowne does and thinks, and what happens to and around him. Necessary background -- how he met Rosalind, his relationship with his father-in-law and with his children, some work-detail -- is woven in, not quite effortlessly, but easily enough. Bit by bit the character-portrait is built up. But even McEwan isn't satisfied simply with the everyday (and setting it on a day with such a significant backdrop -- the march, and the world-events behind it -- would make it hard to completely keep the world at bay in any case).
From the beginning, there is also a sense of menace in the novel. In the earliest morning hours Perowne wakes and, looking out the window, sees what he first believes to be a comet but then recognises as an airplane that is on fire heading for Heathrow, what looks like an impending catastrophe he is helpless to do anything about. Later in the day, everywhere he turns, the mass of marchers is also a presence -- peaceful, yet their enormous size and potential threatening. The plane and the marchers -- like the danger in Iraq, both Saddam Hussein's criminal rule and the violent solution that is being considered -- are all kept at a distance: the world is close, but does not really intrude. Indeed, Saturday is an intimate novel, McEwan focussing on Perowne's one-on-one interactions, only rarely bringing several people together at the same time -- and, not surprisingly, when the scene does get crowded, things get very ugly.
Perowne's world isn't upset, as might be expected, by the marchers, but by a fender-bender. Not much of one: "By the standards of contemporary road traffic accidents -- Henry has done a total of five years in Accident and Emergency -- this is a trivial matter." Indeed, it turns out there's barely any damage at all to his fancy car. But it's an odd accident: because of the march the streets are deserted, no other cars, no other people. Worse, for Perowne, is who the other party is: three men in a red BMW ("a vehicle he associates for no very good reason with criminality, drug dealing" -- McEwan trying too hard to make sure readers feel the growing menace). Led by Baxter, they seem like thugs, and certainly act it. They and Perowne have different ideas about how to settle this sort of thing, and the scene escalates into one of inescapable violence.
Except that neurosurgeon and sharp-eyed diagnostician Perowne realises that there's something wrong with Baxter. The man has Huntington's Disease, a cruel, debilitating ailment. Baxter knows (and knows what awaits him), and when he realises Perowne knows he backs off (and has his mates back off too). It's enough to allow Perowne to escape -- though the memory of what happened, and how he acted, haunts him for most of the rest of the day. And then there's that red BMW he thinks he repeatedly sees as he drives about town .....
Needless to say, Perowne does not manage to escape Baxter entirely, and it comes to another confrontation. Baxter's disease makes him dangerous: "a man who believes he has no future and is therefore free of consequences". The disease also manifests itself in mood swings and unpredictable behaviour. Perowne is curious about the case, from a medical point of view, and can't help but try to regard and analyse it as he would with any patient in his office. He also sincerely wants to help, though it is difficult to balance that with Baxter's threatening actions. Ironically (if not entirely surprisingly), it is art -- poetry, a tool that Perowne doesn't have at his disposal -- that prevents the situation from getting out of hand at the most critical point. (It is this, surely, that drives Perowne to head back to work that Saturday night, the need to reassert his own life-and-death power, the operating theatre the only place he knows he is in control.) Saturday is a book filled with tension, but also strikingly anticlimactic. Potential disaster -- the burning plane, the march that might explode into violence -- is constantly averted. Arguably the most unpleasant confrontation does not even involve Baxter -- scenes that are the most brutal but also over relatively quickly -- but Perowne's drawn out squash-game with a friend and co-worker, the bitter aftertaste of which lingers (but is also ultimately resolved). Tension isn't a bad thing, Perowne feels: "when things are difficult, tension is best maintained".
In Saturday McEwan depicts a man who has done well and leads a comfortable life, happily married, a proud father, a respected professional. But the world at large, dealing with others or with questions of politics (repeatedly touched upon, especially regarding Iraq), makes for complications that, if not entirely baffling, do leave him ill at ease. He's only really comfortable with the inner circle of closest family, and, especially, in his operating theatre:
Though things sometimes go wrong, he can control outcomes here, he has resources, controlled conditions. McEwan also chooses to emphasise -- a bit too strongly -- the loss of control that approaches, and Perowne's reluctant acknowledgement of the inevitable. He gives himself just a bit more time at squash, and one more London marathon, he knows in a few years he'll be doing more administrative work than surgery. Bashing the point of a comfortable world gently unravelling home with an oversized hammer, McEwan offers not only the demented mother, but ultimately the news that the daughter and son are well and truly set to begin their own, independent lives as well.
Despite all that happens, and all that Perowne learns, it really is almost just another Saturday, a typical mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. McEwan almost pulls it off, but he tries too hard. Not quite inhabiting Perowne's mind, but closely following his actions and meandering thoughts, McEwan does offer an interesting character study -- but he tries to do just a bit too much (too much of import comes together here), revealing the book as a construct, rather than simply a narrative in the process. What McEwan excels at is in the details, the page after page descriptions of what and who Perowne encounters and experiences and remembers, especially the small gestures or specific details, be they a clinical diagnosis or some realisation about one of his children. Some scenes go on too long -- the squash game, for example -- but overall McEwan leads the reader on quite nicely. Saturday also remains unpredictable: as in life, few things play out exactly as one expects.
There are also some very nice small bits of the past woven in, including how Perowne and his wife came together, or Daisy's relationship with her grandfather. And McEwan even manages a perfectly placed blow against Tony Blair, describing Perowne's one encounter with the man; it has nothing to do with the crisis of this day (Iraq), and yet devastatingly pegs the PM as a man unwilling and unable to see anything but what he has set his mind on.
Saturday is a well-crafted book, carefully and adeptly written. Tension ripples through it -- yet it returns always to calm. It remains focussed on a small world, even as unsettling events and figures, small and large, threaten to intrude on it. The central character's world is a small, fixed one, where he is able to maintain control -- even, still, on this Saturday -- but this is a day that reminds him that it won't always be this way. A strange mix of ambition and restraint, Saturday isn't entirely satisfactory, but in its relentless focus on "the actual, not the magical" it is an interesting and largely successful work. Some readers may be disappointed that there isn't more action to it, but there's something to be said for McEwan's reserved approach too -- something McEwan does better than most anyone writing nowadays..
posted by D @ 5:35 AM
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