![]() ![]() In summary, Lessons sounds like a chore: a man’s life, told from childhood to senescence in roughly chronological order. Consciousness here defined as the feeling of what happens McEwan’s true subject, throughout his corpus. It constitutes a late argument in favour of the mainstream realist novel as a tool for thinking – the mainstream realist novel, which, at is best, both represents and interrogates consciousness itself. It mixes modes – realism, political essay, social history, memoir. It gathers up its author’s dazzlements and remixes them – gives them shape and lustre. Lessons is Ian McEwan’s Napoleon Street novel. “What was wrong with Napoleon Street?” wonders Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, brooding on his earliest memories of Depression-era Montreal. These are also the accents you hear when a certain kind of novelist, no longer young, writes an autobiographical novel. That such things should have happened! To me! How astonishing! ![]() Listening to older people talk about the past, you hear the accents of disbelief. ![]() Why should memory dazzle us? Take us by surprise? But it does. ![]()
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