An incomplete list of unusual narrative points of view in fiction includes dog; wolf-dog; horse; dead girl; lizard; seagull; Death; monster; African elephant; cat; bowl; rabbit; mouse; guinea coin. To which we can now add fetus. Along with Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, thanks for thus enlarging the canon go to Ian McEwan, much-decorated author of sixteen previous works of fiction (Amsterdam, Atonement). But equal gratitude here is owed to Shakespeare, from whom McEwan has borrowed the plot in making literal Hamlet’s lament, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
While the choice of an incipient person as narrator might seem to offer a severely limited perspective on human concerns, due to his having had none yet, this is no ordinary fetus. He uses words like “philatelist,” “non-chordate,” “penumbra.” He proves himself an astute critic of poetry with a taste for scansion. He knows both his Latin and his wine (owing to a fifteen-part podcast on the subject listened to by his sleepless mother, not to mention the vintages she and he, by extension, ingest in quantity). He also ponders how to derail the murder plot he has been made to overhear. All in all, a canny egg.
With Nutshell McEwan has accomplished a small miracle: a well-wound thriller inside something bigger, a variegated meditation on folly, on the insistent untenability of this world to which we have given birth even as it gives birth to us, on the ability of art to encapsulate its mysteries. This, in a small package of fewer than two hundred pages. And especially in a small package, for his manifest intention is to create one of those exquisite miniatures that through a narrow scope view expansive territory. An exemplary post-postmodernist, McEwan chooses a form that also characterizes a subject who goes on to remark on the qualities of the form. A bit complicated, true, but that is also the point — and much of the pleasure — of his marvelous construction. “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces,” McEwan’s protagonist muses, going on to name the multitude of works that focus on a detail to imply an entirety: the eighteenth-century novel of manners, the portrait, the Dutch still life, the scientific study of a single organism or search for an atomic particle. “Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.” This speck knows how to take on mind-bendingly large concepts. All of a sudden I am put in mind of a possession I wondered at endlessly as a child: a little bean, capped with a tiny ivory elephant, that contained twelve even tinier replicas. Impossible, yet there it was.
The deepest pleasures of Nutshell are likewise extra-narrative, pleasant as that is: a tasty recipe cooked up of an affair based on hilariously depicted, if queasy, sex. (At one point the put-upon fetus remarks that the “turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing.”) The perpetrator is moreover an idiot, “dull to the point of brilliance,” but who has nonetheless “entranced my mother and banished my father.”
The ego of any writer confident enough to link arms with the greatest poet of the English language is decidedly intact. At the very least, McEwan shows himself the true son of his literary forebear in a bent for wordplay. He deflates the hackneyed by simply making it issue from the mouth of a pre-babe: “I might live with my father, at least for a while,” the narrator prognosticates — “Until I get on my feet.” Late in the pregnancy, “my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged.” A joke one minute, a stunning analysis of large truths the next; I can’t imagine any shrewder account of how and why the demise of a marriage requires the whole-cloth remaking of personal history. Grander still are the pages that deftly collate all the ills afflicting the globe in the current moment: in a couple of disquisitions each no longer than this review, a child not yet born sums up the myriad causes and dismal prospects of a planet on the brink. There are concise op-eds on subjects from greed to self-deception, overconsumption to political malfeasance, art history to lust. The author who devises all this, and does it in prose so smoothly assured it goes down like a good Sancerre, “preferably from Chavignol,” has pulled off one of the neatest tricks in recent literature.
If the diminutive narrator in these pages sounds suspiciously like someone who holds exactly the sort of vaunted CV as the author Ian McEwan, the fact is far less troubling than it is rewarding. Within the confines of Nutshell McEwan aspires to nothing less than compassing Shakespeare. So he works from dialectical plans: on the one hand, the most elevated of themes and execution, and on the other hand (“how I hate that phrase,” rightly opines our young commentator) what amounts to cerebral slapstick.
When all that transpires in utero has had its run, the waters break, and Nutshell at last makes a familiar adage uniquely true: the end is only the beginning.
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Sig Nordal 