T A B L E+T A L K What recent books will be future classics? Make your picks in the Books area of Table Talk A L S O+T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Dorothy Allison (03/31/98) R E C E N T L Y Nadine Gordimer By Dwight Garner (03/09/98) P.D. James By Jennifer Reese (02/26/98) Stanley Crouch By Jonathan Broder (02/25/98) Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Short History of a Prince By Jane Hamilton A meditative novel, set in Wisconsin, about a former ballet dancer trying to come to terms with his new life (03/31/98)		_[ T H E _S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W ] ________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Ian McEwan BRITAIN'S ERSTWHILE BAD BOY OF DARK CONTEMPORARY FICTION TURNS 50 AND REFLECTS ON HIS PASSION FOR SCIENCE, THE CONUNDRUM OF SELFISHNESS AND THE PLEASURES OF BEING AN AGING WRITER. BY DWIGHT GARNER | "Ian McEwan is contemporary fiction's black magician. In novel after novel, beginning with "The Cement Garden" (1978), his crisp, almost clinically precise prose -- part Kafka, part "Lord of the Flies"-era William Golding -- sucks you into worlds that spin with violence, sexual aberration and paranoia. In the U.K., where he was among British fiction's angriest young men of the 1970s, he's long been dubbed Ian Macabre. McEwan is now 50, and the "Macabre" label fits him less snugly. In person he is amiable and almost shy. And after years of exploring such subjects as sadomasochistic intrigue (in 1981's "The Comfort of Strangers") and children who lapse into feral states (in "The Cement Garden"), his fiction has come to seem more open and humane -- while losing none of its potency. "Not many things in life get better as you get older," McEwan says. Writing, he implies, is one of them. McEwan's seventh novel, "Enduring Love," opens with a remarkable image -- a hot-air balloon is falling into an open field, and a series of onlookers rush toward it, hoping to rescue its two occupants. What none of these onlookers knows is that this moment, and its tragic aftermath, will alter their lives forever. Particularly haunted is the novel's protagonist, Joe Rose, a science writer who ultimately becomes the object of a religiously deranged man's affection. By its close, "Enduring Love" has become a striking meditation on rationality and religion, on love's wilder states and on the nature of selfishness. McEwan recently spoke with Salon in New York, where he was on tour for "Enduring Love." He talked about not only his new novel but a variety of subjects -- his concerns about the "tabloid" interest in writers, the high virtues of gossip, his love of science and some of the "creepy" Web sites devoted to him. He was an engagingly urbane speaker; there was not a hint of Ian Macabre in the air. Last night, I entered your name into a few Internet search engines ... some of the sites about you are slightly creepy. You've got some obsessive fans. Sometimes they are creepy. Some of the ones you stumble across are incredibly illiterate; some of them are nice. But some of them are fizzing and popping with all kinds of lonely madness. I don't really want to meet these people. Let me ask you about the somewhat creepy, somewhat beautiful image that opens your new novel. There's a helium balloon falling to earth in a field, and people are rushing toward it. Was this image the genesis of the book? No, it wasn't the beginning. I'd already gathered quite a lot of the book from different quarters. I was looking for a device to bring together complete strangers, and to bring them together in a kind of emotional heat. Something like a car accident might have been right, but I wanted something unusual. I heard this true story about a man and his son who were hauled away by a balloon they were trying to tether in some field in Germany. What immediately struck me was the dilemma of knowing that if you all hang on, you can bring this balloon down to earth. But as soon as anyone breaks rank, then madness follows. The issue is selfishness. And that seems to me to be the underlying basic moral factor about ourselves. We're descended from generations of people who survived, who acted successfully. But who also cooperated successfully; so we clearly need to save our own skins and look out for own interests, but we're social animals and we need other people dearly. The issue is constantly with us. I think I could place everyone I know somewhere on that scale of 0-to-10 -- are they slightly more self-absorbed? Some people are completely selfless; they only give. It's self-destructive, possibly. Although I wasn't thinking about it that metaphorically at that point. I felt I was writing a novel of ideas, but I did want a very strong narrative shelter. I thought, if I'm going to do this I might as well hit the ground running. We discover these characters in this process. So it offered all kinds of possibilities -- and dangers, too. I knew that if I wrote a racy first chapter there's the danger of falling off. For a long time, I thought the scene of the attempted murder in the restaurant would be first. I'd do it there and work the novel in a less chronological fashion. In the end, I thought: No, I want a simple, clean time line for this kind of thing so that it would give me the freedom to be more complicated about other things. Do you make false starts often? Not often, actually. I often have spent a while writing a paragraph that I know is a first paragraph of a novel. I just let that paragraph sit there for eight weeks. These sentences are like keys; they really can just turn a lock. Do you have a lot of paragraphs like that sitting around? Keys waiting to be inserted in locks? If I only did! I wouldn't be sitting here now talking to you. The first chapter of "Black Dogs" came in just that way. Often what I'm thinking about is some kind of tone or prose style or voice and a paragraph can really tell me everything I need to know. I think of novels somewhat in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate itself must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. I'm careful not to overload with information, but not to deny too much either. Is it ever a concern that the next key won't be there when you want it? I used to worry about that. I think that's a reasonable worry, not a paranoia. It's a pretty active concern for any writer, especially at the beginning of his or her career. The sort of panic that, "I did it once but can I do it again?" But I've been doing it for 25 years. The only thing that would really make me dry up is some kind of emotional distress, not creative block as such but lacking a certain amount of calm. I'm actually on a roll. Not many things in life get better as you get older. But in a writer's life, perhaps there's a little plateau that you hit somewhere in your mid-40s to your mid-50s. You've still got the physical stamina to write a novel without too much pressure, thoughts of mortality. You've sometimes been charged with being misanthropic, how do you respond to that? I think one does get more misanthropic as one gets older. What some people would call misanthropy, others might call a kind of insouciance, almost a delight in saying what you want to say. I think that issues of mortality do becomes a writer's subject matter. There's no getting round it. It's coming to an end and it's extraordinary and comic and tragic. There's a real tension, in "Enduring Love," between rationality and religious belief. The protagonist, Joe, is a science writer and a professional skeptic. He's pursued, almost romantically, by a man who is religiously obsessed. At one point a character says, "Rationality is its own kind of innocence." I'm wondering what you mean by that. Oh, Clarissa [Joe's girlfriend] says that. There's a certain kind of insight that she feels he's missing by sticking too closely to a method. With his organized mind he can take things too literally. There is something about Clarissa's take on the world that Joe badly needs. But I wrote the book in a spirit of investigation, rather than try to give a lot of answers to either how people should live or whether one could live a good life by scientific method. There's a funny moment in the book in which Joe is looking at all the novels in a library, and he thinks to himself: How dare people regard literature more highly than science. I'm being a little provocative here. I do think that the discovery of scientific method and the achievements of inquiring scientific minds do rank with the highest artistic achievements. They rank with the work of Shakespeare, or the painting of the Sistine Chapel. It bothers me that so many people I know who value the life of the mind, and live by it, seem to live by it with one eye shut to that great triumph. Are you at ease in the world of scientific thought? Do you take a particular interest? Yes, a massive interest. This novel was written after a long period of reading in a number of fields in science. It wasn't ever conscious research. I'm always fascinated by the subject. I think we've been very fortunate -- we've had a golden age in science, for 15 years. The number of highly literate scientists writing for an intelligent lay public is extraordinary. There's a kind of science writing that seems to bridge the gap between informing laymen but also informing other sciences. To take an immediate example -- Steven Pinker's book on language certainly addresses not just lay people like myself but other scientists outside his immediate field. Similarly, my own particular intellectual hero is E.O. Wilson. He's a biologist. He wrote "The Diversity of Life," and that was just genius. The thing that really interested me was the extent to which scientists are now trespassing into other areas. How so? Well, there is a subject matter which would have been completely ruled out of court 15 years ago as a matter of scientific inquiry, and now it's central. It's called human nature. That interface between biology and social sciences, between biology and psychology, is increasingly clear. And by, from the other end, a new spirit perhaps in anthropology that is now exploring not how exotically different we are from each other, but how exotically similar we are. Which seems to me a really fascinating problem -- to go to a hunter-gatherer tribe and discover the emotional range, the expression of emotion, certain kinds of social institutions exist right across the board whether in Manhattan or North Kalahari. I think that tells us a great deal more about what we are than Margaret Mead ever did with her tales of the mischievous young Samoans. Do you find yourself reading scientific books in the same way you would a novel? I have this twin hunger. I need fiction, although I find it harder to find any that really satisfies. But I nearly always have two books. At the moment, I'm reading the Ted Hughes poems and I'm finishing the latest Updike and I'm reading Steven Pinker's book on the brain. I do have to hump around two or three books at once. N E X T+P A G E +| Ian McEwan, guitar player - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY CHANG PARK