HUMAN ORBITS
By Walter Kirn
Published: April 16, 2010, New York Times


SOLAR
By Ian McEwan
287 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. US$26.95
 

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, pic left, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.

“Solar” tells the story of Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning British physicist who’s stumbling comfortably through middle age as a purveyor of expensive lectures, a member of prestigious boards and panels, and the titular head of a government-funded institute devoted to combating global warming with innovative “green” power technologies for which Beard holds out little hope, although he’s happy to be paid for pushing them. The man is a cynic, by nature and by experience. His prominence and the lifestyle it affords him (which resembles a never-ending Mensa society wine-and-cheese reception marked by lofty table talk and naughty cloakroom trysts) stem from a youthful scientific insight that he never repeated and knows he never will. Perhaps to escape the self-loathing of his predicament, he’s let himself become a monster: a five-times-married, childless, overweight, heavy-drinking, amoral solipsist who holds to the pre-Copernican belief that the cosmos revolves around his ego. Like the hedonistic eggheads who populate the works of Bellow and Roth, he’s ripe for comeuppances on every front: romantic, professional, spiritual and physical. How, by whom and with what symbolic overtones these abundant rebukes will be delivered are the only questions the story leaves open.
The full review at NYT.