According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad \u2014 so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed \u2014 that they\u2019re actually rather good. \u201cSolar,\u201d the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good \u2014 so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off \u2014 that it\u2019s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it\u2019s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There\u2019s so little wrong with it that there\u2019s nothing particularly right about it, either. It\u2019s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are problems with this kind of review. It is easy and tempting \u00a0for unscrupulous\u00a0 marketing types in publishing to misread whiuloe looking for a quote for the paperback \u2013 \u201cingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off\u201d sounds pretty good.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The other is that one looks for other creative works which similarly suffer from over-perfection. I would nominate the film Up in the Air<\/em>. Confusingly, that promising but profoundly irritating film was based on a novel by Walter Kirn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just one now and then, a review appears which takes a step back from the book, film or play under consideration and\u00a0 makes a wider, more significant point. \u00a0 A case in point is Walter Kirn\u2019s recent review in the New York Times of Ian McEwan\u2019s new novel Solar \u2013 a book so good, Kirn\u2019s… Continue reading Impressive to behold – but a virtuous pain to read<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[372,373,374,375,376],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-book-reviews","tag-ian-mcewan","tag-solar","tag-up-in-the-air","tag-walter-kirn","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nImpressive to behold - 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