![]() ![]() The man at the center of this story is Roland Baines. Here, finally, McEwan – who won the Booker Award in 1998 for “Amsterdam” – luxuriates in all the space he needs to record the mysterious interplay of will and chance, time and memory. And for an author famously devoted to brevity, “Lessons” is also his longest novel. ![]() Instead, it depicts an ordinary man, a failed writer, buffeted by intimate and international crises over the course of more than seven decades. While the story shares a few tantalizing similarities with the author’s life, it’s no roman à clef. McEwan’s new novel, “Lessons,” is a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill. And “The Cockroach” squished together Boris Johnson and Gregor Samsa. “Machines Like Me” told the tale of a man cuckolded by a sex robot. “Nutshell,” for instance, was an homage to “Hamlet” narrated by an imperiled fetus. His last three books have been minor, fantastical stories, wormy with weird wit. Readers drawn to Ian McEwan’s gorgeous novel “Atonement” 20 years ago may have drifted away from the writer’s bizarre recent work. ![]()
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