‘Nutshell,’ by Ian McEwan
There aren’t many writers who can keep surprising us decades into a career that’s already produced multiple tours de force, including “Amsterdam,” “Atonement” and “Saturday,” but Ian McEwan has done it again.
A master of the miniature powerhouse, McEwan pulls all this off in under 200 compact pages that span two momentous days.
In place of Shakespeare’s moody young Dane out to avenge the murder of his father, McEwan’s hero is an unborn baby boy, two weeks from term, “reeling off the walls of my castle, the bouncy castle that is my home.”
Sight unseen (of course), he detests this whistling, “dull-brained yokel” who batters him with every sexual thrust and has usurped his father’s rightful place in the dilapidated but still highly marketable Cairncross family mansion in St. John’s Wood.
Not only do we get a prenatal infant’s alarming perspective on sex and childbirth, this is a fetus who hears everything and understands most of it.
Nurtured on a steady stream of talk radio and podcasts, he’s extraordinarily well informed about world of “self-loving nationalism,” global warming, “the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old” and the “less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen” into which he’s about to be born, a world in which “teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.”
Unlike Shakespeare’s depressive Prince of Denmark, McEwan’s not-so-innocent prenatal princeling is wired for optimism: I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments.
McEwan clearly has fun putting these characters through the paces of a murder plot that hinges on a toxic smoothie, of all things.
The baby’s father, John Cairncross, is a financially strapped poet and small-press publisher who has bored his wife with one too many recitations.
Beyond its “bounded in a nutshell ... king of infinite space” epigram from Shakespeare, McEwan’s clever novel is seeded with sly references to Hamlet, including Danish takeout (there’s a concept) and even a clock “ticking in thoughtful iambs.”
McEwan’s playful tragicomedy is one more smart reason for not shuffling off this mortal coil just yet — despite the unending stream of distressing news.
In addition to The Chronicle, Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Barnes & Noble Review and the Washington Post.