"Amsterdam," Ian McEwan

I fully expected to hate this book, and I'm pretty sure that my not hating it is contingent on reading it after finishing a third-rate thriller. Still, I didn't hate it. In fact, there were several points where I laughed out loud.

Then again, I was reading it not as Great Prize-Winning Literature but as a thriller, or a parody of a thriller. I wonder if the book was written as a piss-take of the format. Or just as a piss-take in general. I mean, come on, who the hell writes something like:

'I can never remember sex,' he said after a pause. 'I'm sure it was brilliant. But I do remember her teaching me all about porcini, picking them, cooking them.'

with totally serious intent? There are also gloriously long passages on how to write a symphony, which must be the museum member's equivalent of those passages in Tom Clancy books about ships and guns, and since it's a McEwan novel of course there's sexual violence. Everything is in this novel, except a realistic description of how anything worked in the existing world, ever. Maybe that's why I liked it.

A few years later McEwan would use the exact same silly bourgeois stereotypes in "Saturday," only now they were bulwarks of Western civilization and also they had magic powers (don't tell me that fending off muggers and robbers with poetry alone isn't magic). Maybe "Saturday" is McEwan's high fantasy novel!