The Book Review Podcast: December Book Club 2025

Host: MJ Franklin with guests Sarah Lyall and Leah Greenblatt
Featured Book: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Date: December 27, 2025

Episode Overview

This Book Club edition dives into Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know—hailed by NYT critic Dwight Garner as McEwan’s best work “in ages.” Editors and critics from The New York Times Book Review, including Sarah Lyall (who profiled McEwan) and Leah Greenblatt (a longtime fan), join host MJ Franklin to unpack the novel’s literary prowess, narrative pivots, and reflections on history, memory, and the limits of understanding. The conversation is carefully split into spoiler-light and spoiler-filled halves, covering both general impressions and the novel’s major twists. Listener comments from the Book Review's online community, plus reading recommendations, round out the show.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Book & Setting Introduction (03:16–04:31)

• Leah Greenblatt (03:18):
  “It’s the year 2119. It’s a little bit dystopian—a climate crisis… Our narrator is this literature professor named Tom… He has this fixation on a poet named Francis Blundy, particularly a legendary poem called A Corona for Vivian, his wife. There’s a treasure hunt, romance, drama, and speculative sci-fi.”
• The future depicted is ravaged by climate change (the UK is now an archipelago) and Nigeria is ascendant politically and technologically.

2. First Impressions & Vibes (04:52–06:05)

• Sarah Lyall (04:52):
  “Obsessed by this book. Interesting. And adored it.”
• Leah Greenblatt (04:56):
  “Big fan. Not to say that it is flawless by any means, but like, what a good read.”
• MJ Franklin (05:03):
  “I feel like I’m mixed positive… The story was the vehicle—the themes and the thinking, that was the meat for me.”

3. The Dystopia as Scaffold, Not Center (06:49–09:45)

• McEwan’s version of a future is less Mad Max, more “diminished normalcy,” with jobs, universities, longing for the lost luxuries of the 2010s.
• Sarah Lyall (08:20):
  “In a way, it’s less dystopian… It’s like our world, but diminished. So it’s in a way almost more hopeful than a lot of those other books.”
• Climate themes are threaded throughout—e.g., “the great derangement” describes the current era’s climate inaction.

4. The Quest for the Past & the Limits of Historical Knowledge (10:18–17:47)

• The main plot is a literary mystery: Tom, an academic from 2119, obsessively searches for Blundy’s lost poem, reconstructing a legendary 2014 dinner party (the “Second Immortal Dinner”) through abundant digital archives.
• Leah Greenblatt (13:25):
  “Think of your group texts and imagine scholars poring over those. This book actually made me a little paranoid.”
• Sarah Lyall (14:03):
  “Even though [Tom] has access to every single thing anyone has ever said about this dinner… we realize that has not added up to the reality.”
• The archival age’s “firehose of information” still can’t guarantee genuine understanding of the past.

Notable Quote

• McEwan, via MJ Franklin (11:42):
  “Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I’ve come to love.”

5. The Book as Bat Signal for Academic Obsession (17:25–19:16)

• “Very, very literary Da Vinci Code” (Leah, 17:25).
• The “corona” format (fifteen interlinked sonnets) is explained in detail.
• Leah Greenblatt (17:54):
  “He used the word marsupially as an adjective. And I was like, mmm, Ian, welcome home.”

6. McEwan’s Trajectory & Inside Insights (21:00–23:19)

• Early “Ian Macabre” phase: incest, murder, darkness; this novel is less grim, more “galloping read.”
• Sarah Lyall recounts McEwan’s inspirations:
  • Fascination with the original Immortal Dinner (Wordsworth, Keats),
  • Interest in climate change,
  • Real-life poem “A Corona for Prue,”
  • The puzzle: How much can you ever really know about someone you reconstruct from records?

7. Gossip, Characterization & Literary Rumor (23:39–25:11)

• The book adeptly balances literary “vauntedness” with everyday pettiness—petty gossip, small rivalries, and marital strife at the heart of the central dinner party.

-- SPOILERS BEGIN -- (Key Spoilers 30:13–46:44)

Structural Flip: Second-Half Narrator Twist (31:06–34:15)

• After part one’s academic quest, Tom finds… not the poem, but Vivian’s diary (31:15).
• The second half is Vivian’s first-person story—revealing a harrowing backstory:
  • Her first husband, Percy, is stricken with early Alzheimer’s,
  • She becomes caregiver, then meets poet Francis Blundy,
  • Their “genius marriage” is more complicated than Tom believed,
  • Vivian herself is no mere “helpmeet”—she has many affairs, and, with Blundy, is complicit in Percy’s murder (!):
  • Sarah Lyall (32:12):
    “She’s like a helpmeet to [Blundy’s] genius… but she also is his secretary. It’s so annoying.”

Major Themes: Memory, Reality, & Melodrama (39:00–40:54)

• The “real” story of the dinner and the poem is messy, boozy, forgettable—not the myth Tom (and posterity) believe.
• Vivian’s narrative is emotionally raw and by turns melodramatic and honest, leading to debate among hosts/readers about whether the second half is “over the top” (38:14).
• MJ Franklin (38:31):
  “Every possible bad thing that could happen does happen to Vivian… Like, it does pile up.”
• Sarah Lyall (38:20):
  “It’s a life. You live a long time, bad things happen.”

The Limits of Testimony: Metafictional Flair (45:25–46:09)

• Vivian herself is aware she’s writing for “posterity,” adding a metafictional note about whether her account is any more “true” than the reconstructed myth.

Book’s Place in McEwan’s Catalog (42:35–43:33)

• Sarah Lyall:
  “For me… up there with Atonement. Those are his two masterpieces.”
• Leah Greenblatt:
  “This one had very flawed people, but didn’t have that same sense of me grinding my teeth as a bystander… I was more honestly cheering. I was in the ovation section.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Leah Greenblatt (15:39):
  “We even know what kind of potato Vivian was serving for dinner. It was rooster potatoes.”
• Sarah Lyall (20:23) [on McEwan’s development]:
  “He found every sentence quite a struggle. What he really wanted to do was write big novels where he was able to give voice to some of the things he’s been thinking about…”
• Listener Comment (28:06):
  “I regard this book as McEwan’s best since Atonement and Saturday. The more the reader puts into the first 100 pages… the more they would derive from the rest…”
• Leah Greenblatt (17:25):
  “It’s almost like if you had a very, very literary Da Vinci Code… he’s pursuing this mystery.”

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|------------------------------------------------------| | 03:16 | Book setup & world-building | | 04:52 | Host & panelist initial reactions (“vibe check”) | | 06:49 | Nature of the dystopia & intentions | | 10:18 | Obsession with the past & academic quest | | 13:25 | The “archive age” and privacy | | 17:25 | Corona poem, literary treasure-hunt | | 21:00 | McEwan’s evolution as a novelist | | 23:39 | Characterization, gossip, and literary pettiness | | 30:13 | SPOILERS: Second-half narrative twist explained | | 33:06 | Panel reaction to shift to Vivian’s voice | | 38:14 | Panel debates “melodrama” in second half | | 42:35 | Placing the book in McEwan’s oeuvre | | 44:16 | Final thoughts: “big juicy read,” reread value | | 47:14 | Book recommendations (post-read) |

Book Recommendations

| Recommender | Book & Rationale | |------------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | Leah Greenblatt | Fleishman Is In Trouble (Taffy Brodesser-Akner): late narrative switch, “rug pull” like McEwan’s novel | | MJ Franklin | Fates and Furies (Lauren Groff): Dual perspectives, marriage secrets | | Sarah Lyall | Marston: A Corona for Prue (John Fuller): Read the actual poem that inspired McEwan | | MJ Franklin | How the Word Is Passed (Clint Smith): Nonfiction on how history is remembered, echoes the novel’s archival anxiety | | Panel consensus | Atonement (Ian McEwan): For fans; shares themes of history, memory, and unreliable narration | | Leah Greenblatt | The Line of Beauty (Alan Hollinghurst): lush British literary fiction | | MJ Franklin | The Stranger’s Child (Alan Hollinghurst): multigenerational mystery around a poem and memory |

Final Thoughts & Reflections

• What We Can Know is a literary puzzle about archives, mythmaking, the fragmentary nature of knowledge, and the sometimes surprising inner lives of those we seek to understand.
• Its structure—a split between a scholarly quest and the unvarnished confessional—flora McEwan’s ongoing fascination with truth, fiction, and the irreducible weirdness of human experience.
• Sarah Lyall (44:51):
  “I would just tell everyone to read it.”
• Leah Greenblatt (43:55):
  “This is like the old-fashioned definition of just a real good novel.”

For Next Month

January Book Club Pick:
The Hounding by Zenobi Purvis
“A parable of a novel about a small English town confronting a rumor that five girls in the night turn into a pack of dogs. It is wild. It’s been comped to Shirley Jackson.”

Find the discussion at NYT Book Review’s online Book Club article.

Summary by an AI podcaster—a full, multilayered tour of obsession, myth, and literary playfulness in Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know as unpacked by The New York Times critics. The perfect listen for McEwan fans, literary sleuths, and anyone pondering what traces the present will leave for those to come.