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ON CHESIL BEACH
By Ian McEwan.

203 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.

The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle — the pebbles, that is — that forms its 18 miles: the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and textures, so that the beach forms a spatial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole. Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil Beach, of a given stone.

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences,

like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan’s form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan’s books have the air of thrillers even when, as in “On Chesil Beach,” he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes — death and its attendant horrors — with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret.

... young, educated ... virgins ... wedding night ... sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan’s new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan’s first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols’s bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book’s perfect piece of ad copy. (Here’s my spoiler warning: “On Chesil Beach” is far too lean and pure for me to muse on more than a few of its sentences without giving some secrets away. If you’re inspired by the hook above, read the book — it’ll be nearly as quick as reading my review, and more fun.) Then comes a second thought: But it is never easy. With startling ease these five words deepen and complicate the book. Who speaks, and from what historical vantage? The sentence entrenches the facts that precede it — and the facts to follow — in the oceanic retrospect of a ruminative mind, even as they claim to universalize the lovers’ predicament, to forgive them their place in the history of sexual discomfort.

With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved around inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. ... He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet. ... She understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small-scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen.

The bulk of “On Chesil Beach” consists of a single sex scene, one played, because of the novel’s brevity and accessibility, in something like “real time.” Edward and Florence have retreated, on their wedding night, to a hotel suite overlooking Chesil Beach. Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn’t. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls “the secret affair between disgust and joy.” That horror is located in the distance between two selves, two subjectivities: humans who will themselves to be “as one,” and fail miserably. The horror is in the distance between these sentences, which reside terrifyingly near to one another on the page: Florence: In deciding to be married, she had agreed to exactly this. She had agreed it was right to do this and have this done to her. Edward: When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. The horror further exfoliates in the (utterly normal) physical calamity that ensues: Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He ... emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities. ... If his jugular had burst, it could not have seemed more terrible. By this point McEwan hardly needs the specter of murder to convince us that mortal stakes lie behind closed doors. Embarrassment is the death of possibility.

If “On Chesil Beach” is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones: The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. After mumbling about the summoning bell by the fireplace — it must be pressed hard and held down — the lads withdrew, closing the door behind them with immense care. Then came the tinkling of the trolley retreating down the corridor, then, after the silence, a whoop or a hoot that could easily have come from the hotel bar downstairs. For need of surviving the folly of his own desire, Edward mustn’t observe the satirical similarity in McEwan’s descriptive language (pressed hard and held down, withdrew, immense care, trolley retreating down the corridor) to the language of pornography, to paraphrases of what will or won’t occur soon in the suite’s four-poster bed: The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were. He held down a sudden impulse to laugh at the idea of them, a solemn queue stretching out into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time. It was important not to think about them: comedy was an erotic poison.

In the painstaking and microscopic one-night structure of “On Chesil Beach,” McEwan advances his exploration of slowness in fiction (early evidenced in “Black Dogs” and “Amsterdam,” and exemplified in the 24-hour time scheme of “Saturday”). This suggests modernist experiment — not only James and Woolf, but even, in its combination with McEwan’s legendarily “forensic” vocabulary (here we’re greeted by the most instrumental pubic hair in the history of fiction), the chilly Alain Robbe-Grillet. But McEwan’s tone is more normative than that of his forebears, and it may be worth asking: Why doesn’t he feel like a “late” modernist? And what does he feel like instead?

The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel’s authority, psychoanalysis and cinema — one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who comes along later, shrugs at such absolutist contests, and has for that matter already engulfed (most brilliantly in “Enduring Love”) the latest challenger to the novel’s throne: neurology. In fact, McEwan may in retrospect be seen as the quintessential example of the recent integration of scientific interest into fiction, precisely because in McEwan (as opposed to, say, Richard Powers) such matters cease to be in any way remarkable.

Similarly, in “Atonement,” McEwan showed a capacity for writing in a more pressured modernist style and then, in the metafictional postlude, to gently amplify it with an air of sympathetic diagnosis. It was as if to say: We want to feel our reading minds bear down on character and consciousness with the intensity of Joyce or Woolf, those stream-of-consciousness titans, but we also want access to the retrospective embrace of our more forgiving and homely hearts. McEwan’s mode is synthesis, his signature the reconciliation of diametric modes — scalpel observation and civilized compassion — into a persuasive and relaxed whole. His style, too easily taken for complacent, is recuperative. His confidence in the authority of his chosen form is absolute, which is why he conveys such dazzling authority of his own. To paraphrase Paul Nelson, as Greil Marcus does in his book “The Old Weird America”: the tests have been passed, and what we’re seeing are the results.

Just before dawn he got up and went through to the sitting room and, standing behind his chair, scraped the solidified gravy from the meat and potatoes on his plate and ate them. After that, he emptied her plate — he did not care whose plate it was. Then he ate all the mints, and then the cheese. In the genuinely heartbreaking aftermath of the newlyweds’ disastrous night, our sympathies are in no way undermined by this late return to mutedly sniggering comedy, and body horror too (the solidified gravy recalling those vigorous but diminishing gouts). How Hitchcockian the linkage between food and sex. And what detail could speak more eloquently of the compulsive, cyclical humiliations of the life of our poor minds (stuck inside our bodies forever, until death do us part) than that we might make note of ourselves gobbling the mints before the cheese?