Just finished Ian McEwen’s latest, Solar. NYTimes Review here, for context. A year or two back I had a contentious discussion of McEwen’s insidious misogyny after reading Black Dogs with some friends. I must admit that at the time I didn’t understand their point, but reading Solar was so infuriating, so polarizingly chauvinistic and I am now completely on board.
On the one hand, Solar is an enticing, intellectual romp with heady discussions of physics and academia. Its protagonist is an aging yet promiscuous nobel laureate, who is both a Nabokovian neurotic and an increasingly irrelevant figure in his field. It is fun to inhabit his mind, which is both filthy and extremely clever. On the other hand, all of the female characters are flat caricatures whose redeeming qualities are limited to their sex appeal. Literally every female character lucky enough to receive a first name commits some kind of desperate man-trapping scheme straight out of frat boy lore. We’re talking the infamous Revenge-Affair-With-Your-Colleague, the Ambush-Pregnancy, and even the Demanding-Marriage-Mid-Fuck… the whole nine yards.
I suppose the reader might try to ignore this cartoonish portrayal of women, but the novel is literally divided into three parts devoted to each of the three main female antagonists. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s treatment of these women is utterly abhorrent, so awful that I concluded several times that McEwen is intentionally parodying the archetypal philanderer. But then I reach another section in which McEwen describes the demeanor and actions of a woman (any woman), in an almost preeningly misogynistic way without humor or any apparent literary purpose, and I am forced to conclude that the he is simply channeling his true feelings (and resentments) toward women.
The NYTimes and the Guardian regard this book as a comical and entertaining satire, in which the reader is “sequestered” in the mind of its philandering anti-hero. Perhaps that was the intent, but the execution falls horribly flat, because none of the females is given even the slightest autonomy to act in a rational, human manner. Regardless of your perspective, a woman who intentionally ceases taking birth control to trap her bi-weekly lover into giving her a child is a desperate, two-dimensional figure. The idea that an old, overweight, and pathologically narcissistic physicist is constantly seducing young, beautiful women with his cunning wit and sexual prowess (hah!) is an insult to womankind, and upon its fourth or fifth occurrence it exceeds even the magical realism of a Marquez novel and begins to smack of McEwen’s own drooling personal fantasies.
this began as an email tirade to a few of my much-more-literary-than-I-am friends. I know, I know, recycling is taboo, but I needed momentum dammit!!
I haven’t read the book, but is it possible that the women are portrayed in such a misogynistic manner because the protagonist himself is a misogynist and that is simply the way he perceives women? If the protagonist is, in your description, “filthy and clever” yet in a state of decline, it would seem reasonable for him to project his increasing internal insecurity onto an other, which could manifest as an increasingly negative view of women, i.e. seeing women as vapid conniving golddiggers. If the book is written from a first or close third perspective this would seem far more likely to me, though I’d have to read more Ian McEwen to form a definite opinion.
Perhaps that’s what he intended, but the troubling thing is that even as the book concludes none of the female characters is redeemed. I kept waiting for the moment when one of the women would say or do something nuanced or intelligent, but that moment never came.
Enjoyed this. The part about seducing young women reminds me of Michael Douglas’s character in Wonder Boys.
Too bad you didn’t like, it, though — I’m looking for a new book to read.