Saturday by Ian McEwan.

Jonathan Cape, 279 pages.   

Ian McEwan has made a career putting the literary in literary fiction, but with Saturday he outdoes even himself. A novel that manages to be both dense and quiet, Saturday takes us slowly - very slowly - through a day in the life neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, allowing Mr. McEwan to revel in the mundane. Even the act of urinating deserves a paragraph of its own, which may be all you need to know in order to decide if Saturday is for you. Make no mistake: this is an exquisite book that reveals both the poetry and the disquiet in he most mundane of things. But Mr. McEwan is in no hurry to get to his point. Like The Comfort of Strangers, a much earlier novel, this is a book which almost imperceptibly pushes its characters towards an unforseen and startling climax.


Most people discussing "Saturday" would feel almost obligated to mention Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway: all three books feature tightly constrained narratives that take place on a single day, creating an opportunity for the author to write a tour de force and for readers to feel inadequate about how little they do between morning and night. Mr. McEwan's book is no different in this regard: his hero, Henry Perowne manages to have two bouts of sex, a traffic accident, a squash game, a visit to his mother and to perform emergency surgery. Everything's meticulously arranged and the payoff is well worth it - by the end of the day, Perowne is confronted with a unique moral dilemma, one which he is uniquely qualified to both experience and overcome.

It's also tempting to compare Saturday's style with the best of Hemingway - Mr. McEwan also revels in the details at time, revealing aspects of his character solely through action. Under his pen, a morning of squash becomes the seventh game of the World Series and even a visit to the fishmonger is complete with a feeling of menace.

For my money, though, Saturday reminded me most of William Trevor's short story A Day. There, we followed the lonley Mrs. Lewthes through her day, gradually learning all the great tragedies of her life. It's the same here. On the surface, Perowne appears to have it all: a successful career, a beautiful house, a wife he's mad about, children he adores. Yet beneath that is paranoia, apathy, pettiness and a fear of mortality provoked by a mother whose dementia is a problem not even his brilliance can solve. There are other secrets which I won't reveal here, but suffice it to say that just as Trevor unpeels his Mrs. Lewthes, so too does McEwan cleverly use the brain of Henry Perowne to reveal the workings of his heart.

In his review for the New York Review of Books,  John Banville remarked that if a committee was to set out to produce "a novel of our time, the result will surely be something like this."  I liked Saturday a lot more then Banville did, but I do see his point. If I had to take issue with the book, it would have to be that it feels a little too easy to compare it to other things. A dash of Joyce, a dollop of William Trevor - even a sprinkling of some of McEwan's other work. For all its artistic expertise, we're on a well-paved literary road and there's a familiarity to this book, almost as if it was written by referring to a checklist on how to please the world's bookworms. For them, Saturday is a wet dream. Others, like John Banville,  may find themselves reaching for something else.