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- [00:00]
Podcast Narrator
This podcast is supported by GSK. Carol picked up a javelin when she was 60. Now she's a silver medalist at the National Senior Games. But even the most active older adults can face unforeseen risks. For Carol, it was rsv, or Respiratory Syncytial Virus, a common virus that can be serious in people 50 or older with certain chronic conditions, as well as anyone 75 or older. Read Caril's story in GSK's advertisement In the Times. Fit, focused and caught off guard How? Ask your doctor about RSV risks and vaccination.
- [00:40]
MJ Franklin
Hello and welcome to another Book Club episode of the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review, and this week we're chatting about Ian McKeown's new novel, what We Can Know. Ian McEwan you may know as the literary master, perhaps best known for his book Atonement. What We Can Know is his latest to publish in September of this year, and our critic Dwight Garner said it's the best thing Ian McEwan has written in ages. So I wanted to dive in and talk about it with fellow readers. And that's what we're here to do today. And joining me in that adventure are two of my brilliant colleagues. First up, we have Sarah Lyle, a writer at large here at the New York Times, and our Thrillers columnist, Sarah, welcome back.
- [01:33]
Sarah Lyle
Thank you.
- [01:34]
MJ Franklin
And Sarah, you interviewed Ian McKeown for the book Review, correct?
- [01:37]
Sarah Lyle
I did a profile of him around this new book a couple months ago.
- [01:42]
MJ Franklin
So I'm excited to tap into your insider knowledge. I want the tea. I want to know the story behind the story. So we're dive into that. And also with us is Leah Greenblatt. Leah is a fellow editor here at the Book Review. You were here last month for Book Club. Leah, welcome back.
- [01:56]
Leah Greenblatt
I have minimal tea, but many opinions.
- [01:58]
MJ Franklin
Yes, because you are an avid McEwan reader and you've read most, if not all of his books.
- [02:02]
Leah Greenblatt
I'd say most. Yeah. Not a full completist, but close.
- [02:06]
MJ Franklin
So we have experts in the house and I am just excited to dive into this book. Before we begin, I have my typical admin notes. I want to get up top first. There will be spoilers in this episode, however, I I know the journey of this novel is part of the fun. So to keep this conversation accessible to all, whether you've read the book or you have not read the book, we are going to keep the first half of this conversation spoiler light. We'll talk about the setup we'll talk about our general thoughts, but we are going to stay away from the big twists or any big revelations. We will save those for the second half of the episode which will be spoiler filled. So choose your own adventure. First half, spoiler light. Second half, spoiler filled. We're going to dive in and and make sure that this conversation is fun, accessible to all that was note number one. Note number two. At the end of the episode, we will reveal our January book club pick. So stay with us if you want to hear what we're reading next. And without further ado, let's get to it. So to get this conversation started, can someone give us a top level setup? What is this book? What we can know about what is this book?
- [03:16]
Leah Greenblatt
I'll tell you what we can know.
- [03:18]
MJ Franklin
Thank you.
- [03:18]
Leah Greenblatt
All right, our setup is it's the year 2119. It's a little bit dystopian. A climate crisis. We're living in this bit of a water world. Our narrator is this literature professor named Tom whose area of Expertise is essentially 1990 to 2030. And he has this fixation on a poet named Francis Blundy. In particular, a poem that he wrote, a sort of legendary epic poem of which there is no known copy, called a Corona for Vivian, who is his wife. He wrote it for her on the occasion of her 54th birthday. There's a dinner party that has become legendary. He is in search of this thing. There is a sort of literary quest that's a treasure hunt. There's romantic drama. There is speculative sci fi fiction elements very much.
- [04:06]
MJ Franklin
I think that's fair considering we're 100 years in the future. Climate has the climate apocalypse has happened basically and people are surviving. Yes.
- [04:15]
Leah Greenblatt
Surprise. It happened just like you thought it would. And all of these elements coming together as well as a very like a real jackknife of a twist that is spicy and divisive and very much worth talking about.
- [04:31]
MJ Franklin
And we will save that for the second half. But Sarah, is there anything that you wanted to throw in?
- [04:36]
Sarah Lyle
I think that's great. Thank you.
- [04:37]
MJ Franklin
Perfect. So that's the setup. And now I want to ask, just top level. Give me your vibe check of the book. Did you love this book? Hate this book. Feel mixed about this book. I want one sentence. Tell me your top level thoughts about this book.
- [04:52]
Sarah Lyle
Obsessed by this book. Interesting. And adored it.
- [04:56]
MJ Franklin
What about you, Leah?
- [04:57]
Leah Greenblatt
Big fan.
- [04:58]
MJ Franklin
Got it.
- [04:59]
Leah Greenblatt
Not to say that it is flawless by any means, but like, what a good read.
- [05:04]
MJ Franklin
See, I feel like I'm mixed positive. I really really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the type of thinking it induced me to do. I liked digging into ideas of the past and history and art and its legacy and all of that good stuff. There were just like specific story elements that worked on me and some didn't, which we'll dive into. So I feel mixed. I feel like for me, there are some books you read and you're like, the story is the meat for me. The story was the vehicle, the themes and the thinking, that was the meat for me. If that makes sense. I'm getting empty stairs.
- [05:41]
Sarah Lyle
No, no, no, I'm not thinking about that.
- [05:43]
Leah Greenblatt
It's not empty. It's full of judgment.
- [05:44]
Sarah Lyle
But I think what you said wasn't. It was almost contradictory. Cause I feel like the book isn't about enjoyment so much, it's about provocation in terms of. It provokes a lot of interesting thinking. I happened to find it very enjoyable. Cause I thought it was so well organized and the mystery of it was so wonderfully done. And I just love his narrative voice.
- [06:06]
MJ Franklin
So I guess I'll clarify for me, what I mean is, I do not care about this dystopia at all. The specifics of it, I just. I was not interested in. I didn't find it to be particularly compelling or electric. But the idea of the dystopia and what that does for the storytelling, that was helpful. But like I've read, especially if this happens in sci fi or fantasy, where the world itself feels just so exciting to me. And. And for me, this dystopia, the world itself was provocative. I loved how it made me think, but I never found myself feeling. You know what I really, really want? I want an encyclopedia of this world.
- [06:50]
Sarah Lyle
Which I do feel that was what he had said himself. This is science fiction without the science. So he's imagined what a world might be like in a hundred years after a lot of climate catastrophes that we're all worried about now. And I don't think he wanted to do a lot of world building the way a proper science fiction author would. So in some ways I found it. I didn't dig deep into the details. I think some of the details were very interesting and they were sort of a nice way to solve some problems that might arise when you think about the future. But it was mostly about, as you said, how that future is in conversation with our present. This sort of really interesting thing we're allowed to do in this book is to look at two different periods, one of whom knows the other one and sees the mistakes people made in the current period and how that might lead to the future period. And I'll just say one final thing about it. I'm not sure dystopia is right. In a way. It's less dystopian than some of the dystopian novels and movies that we've encountered lately, where it's like there's nothing left and a bunch of rabid people are scrabbling in the dirt. For one piece of grizzle among 80,000 people. This is actually a weird. It's like our world, but diminished. Like, people are still have jobs, they're still universities, they still live, they still love, they still care about their standing and their academic specialty. But so it's in a way, almost more hopeful than a lot of those other books. Like, the Earth isn't ruined entirely.
- [08:20]
MJ Franklin
Yeah.
- [08:21]
Leah Greenblatt
But everything is just a little grayer and duller, I would say. The UK now is like an archipelago that's underwater and very hard to navigate. Nigeria has become the center of the free world, it seems, financially and sort of where the political seat is and.
- [08:37]
MJ Franklin
The technological seat, too. They keep saying the Nigerian Internet.
- [08:40]
Sarah Lyle
They're the ones who resurrected the Internet after what the book calls the Great Inundation, which is great.
- [08:45]
Leah Greenblatt
And the Great derangement.
- [08:46]
Sarah Lyle
The great derangement is that separate is a little separate. The great derangement is the notion of climate change and how people in our period, which is part of the book 2014, really knew what was happening. They knew exactly what they might expect, and yet they did nothing about it.
- [09:04]
Leah Greenblatt
That doesn't sound familiar at all.
- [09:06]
Sarah Lyle
And I think the part of it is. That's part of what this sort of the deranged thinking that people had in this whole period about what climate change could look like.
- [09:14]
Leah Greenblatt
And everyone's eating sad little oat cakes, these protein cakes, Right. The idea of luxury has vanished, it seems like.
- [09:21]
Sarah Lyle
Well, and that's one of the things that's interesting about the people in that period studying 2014, because one of the things that they recognize is how lucky we were, how lucky the people in this period, in their little area of study, the food was so good, it was so easy to travel. There was just abundance everywhere, and people didn't appreciate it, including nature.
- [09:45]
MJ Franklin
I guess, to wrap up my point that I have a question is, so for me, I could tell while reading that this build giving us the deep dive into this world was not what he set out to do, that there were other literary considerations that he was pursuing. So I do not fault him for that. But just As a reader, I wanted to want to know more about the world. This is a book that worked my brain and settled in my brain, but I don't know if it settled in my heart in the way that I wanted. But, Sarah, you mentioned you are obsessed with this book. Tell me what it was for.
- [10:18]
Sarah Lyle
For you.
- [10:19]
MJ Franklin
Why are you obsessed? Tell me more.
- [10:21]
Sarah Lyle
I thought it worked on almost every level. First of all, I love his writing. I love his cool prose and how repulsive it is. I've gone back to this after having read it a few months ago and saw probably with renewed eyes, how dense it is in terms of every detail is laid out. It's very, very full of ideas, but also of concrete stuff that people are doing, saying, thinking, eating, reading. And I thought it was unbelievably poignant to have this idea of the future and the present in conversation with each other. And how might people look back on what we're doing now? I also thought the notion of researchers in the future hitting on a particular moment the way all academics do, you know, trying to recreate something through the public record, through everything they can find all that, and trying to find out what happened that night and what this amazing poem that people have been talking about for 100 years, that no one has ever read, what was actually in the poem. And this notion of how much as a historian, you actually know what happened in the past. And I'm just gonna say one more thing about that. So there was something that happened, actually. I'm gonna move on, and I'll try and I'll remember it.
- [11:42]
MJ Franklin
This is the spoiler alert section. So I had something I wanted to add based off what you just said. Just this portrait of the way we try to understand the past and the way we become enthralled with it and how we study it. There's a quote that I loved, and the writing was one thing that I loved about this book, where McEwen writes, Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I've come to love. And I just. That is what it feels like to be so obsessed with something happening in the past or to become so obsessed with your objects of research. And I, as a book nerd, love study time. This book also loves study time. What about you, Leah? You also were really hot on this book.
- [12:25]
Leah Greenblatt
Tell me more for Tom and Rose, these researchers, but really, Tom. Cause he's the driving force in this sort of obsessive pursuit of this poem and this story. To him, I think they call it the second immortal. Second immortal Dinner and the first is with Woodsworth and Yeats and it's this similar sort of moment. But Woodsworth and Yates did not have texts, emails, all this extemporaneous sort of information, which Tom explains, Slash warns, there is no privacy for you if you were living in this era. We have access to this immense archive of, in some cases, very like ordinary or quotidian or just very private.
- [13:11]
Sarah Lyle
So all emails are now available to any scholar, every electronic communication you had. So nobody send any emails anymore who are just listening.
- [13:19]
Leah Greenblatt
But think of your group texts and then imagine scholars poring over those. This book actually made me a little paranoid.
- [13:25]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, same.
- [13:26]
Leah Greenblatt
But I think it's so interesting because he says at some point, for people before his 1990-2030 sort of specialty that he's in, he said there was no new texts, I think only new angles. So if you're working before that. And he even talks, it's so funny that we did Hamnet last month and talked about the dearth of information about Shakespeare because he talks about how little is known of Shakespeare and how little you can assume. But here it's almost in some cases too much. Like it's a little bit of a fire hose of information. And he has to sort through all of this. Hey, to find the needles.
- [14:04]
Sarah Lyle
And what's so fascinating too, is that what we see in the second half, and not to do the spoilers yet, is that even though he has access to every single thing anyone has ever said about this dinner in question and every email they send and everything they wrote in their private journals, more or less, we realize that has not at all added up to the reality. That's what's so interesting. Like you're flooded with all this stuff, but you still don't know. And that gets back to the title. What we can know, what can we know? How do we resurrect the past?
- [14:33]
MJ Franklin
What I loved in thinking about this and what this. I'm gonna keep using the word provocation. What this book prompted and provoked me to think about is just the idea of the record. We're at the New York Times where the paper of record, for instance. I feel like the record is so important, as you pointed out, Leah, the record, what we count as a record, what's included is constantly changing based on technology now, texts, emails, all of that stuff. We think about them as so our quotidian ways of speaking, but they are contributing to a record. And sometimes we realize that and we speak in a certain way, and other times, frequently we don't. And so in the future, it is going to be hard to parse what was going on when someone's looking through all of our texts because we're not talking in any type of legible way for posterity.
- [15:23]
Sarah Lyle
So it's like in the old days, everybody had letters. And when you. It's really a very sad about our current era is that all these great ways of writing about history, when you had access to beautifully written letters and journals really aren't gonna be there anymore.
- [15:40]
Leah Greenblatt
Though I think there's a moment when he says, we even know what kind of potato Vivian was serving for dinner. It was rooster potatoes. And I think a lot of the book, again, not to do spoilers, is Tom's presumption that he has all the information and all he needs to do is crack it.
- [15:58]
Sarah Lyle
All he wants to do is find the poem. Because I'm not sure we mentioned that when this poet wrote this incredible poem, he made a big point of destroying all of his notes and all of his early drafts. And he wrote one fair copy of it on vellum, which I guess is that special.
- [16:16]
Leah Greenblatt
Very special paper.
- [16:17]
Sarah Lyle
Very special paper, and presented it to his wife. And a few years after this dinner where he read the poem out loud to his dinner guests, one of the dinner guests wrote an article about it in a newspaper. And that's when it started to become this kind of more and more epic night that everyone started talking about. They started calling it the second immortal dinner. Everyone talked about this extraordinary piece of poetry that no one had ever read. And so what Tom in the future is doing is trying to find somewhere in an archive, somewhere, maybe there's a. Maybe it's found its way. Maybe he'll find the poem.
- [16:53]
Leah Greenblatt
We should explain probably what a Corona is too. Right? It's 15 sonnets. It has lots of rules.
- [16:58]
MJ Franklin
Yeah. One of them is that the last line of the preceding sonnet must be the first line of the next one.
- [17:06]
Sarah Lyle
And the last stanza of all the stanzas. In this case, it's a 15 stanza poem. So it's 15 sonnets. The last one is made up of the lines from all the other ones.
- [17:17]
MJ Franklin
Oh.
- [17:18]
Sarah Lyle
And so it's really hard to do technically. And then it has to follow the rules of syllables in a sonnet and the lines in a sonnet as well. Each separate sonnet.
- [17:26]
Leah Greenblatt
I don't want to besmirch this book, but it's almost like if you had a very, very literary Da Vinci Code. It's like he's pursuing this mystery. Right. I love that he's trying to find.
- [17:37]
Sarah Lyle
This thing and of course, remember the book.
- [17:39]
Leah Greenblatt
Yes.
- [17:40]
Sarah Lyle
Asiat, which was another literary research mystery set in two different eras.
- [17:45]
Leah Greenblatt
Academic obsession.
- [17:46]
Sarah Lyle
Academic obsession.
- [17:47]
Leah Greenblatt
Which is, I guess, a genre.
- [17:48]
MJ Franklin
So I'm gonna throw it back to you. Tell me more about what it was about this book that you loved that, like, sank its teeth into you.
- [17:55]
Leah Greenblatt
As I say, I was reading the first few pages and he used the word marsupialy as an adjective. And I was like, mm, Ian, welcome home. Just this sort of like. And I have to say, as a young, impressionable reader, his nickname when he started out in his career, I think, was Ian Macabre, because, oh, my God, the darkness in this man's writing. There is incest, there is murder, there is the parts of human nature that are very elemental and very ugly. And also in his books, so many of his books, including Atonement on Chesil beach, these sort of like the real big ones in his catalog hinge on really small moments with devastating long term impact. That's sort of his signature move. And this is not that.
- [18:42]
Sarah Lyle
Well, it is a little quiet. Quiet in the same way. Think about it when you find out.
- [18:46]
Leah Greenblatt
In an evening, but it radiates out in a different way. I used to struggle reading him just because I felt so badly for everyone that this, in some cases, innocent sort of moment just turns into a sort of spiraling nightmare. And this doesn't have that quality, but it still has so much intrigue.
- [19:04]
MJ Franklin
So let me make sure. I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So this you loved because it was like a Homecoming for Ian McEwan, minus some of the darkness. That could be a little bit unsettling. Am I understanding that correctly?
- [19:17]
Leah Greenblatt
Yeah. And I think we heard from a lot of readers since our best list came out or our notables list that is there anything I can enjoy? Right. And I wouldn't say strictly that you would enjoy certain McEwan books because they are about really hard topics and difficult outcomes and sometimes very remorseless protagonists who do terrible things. And this is not quite that. So it has so many of the qualities of McEwen, which is just the brilliance of his mind, the agility of his writing. And I feel like we're making him this very vaunted person. But it's so readable. This is a galloping read to me. And I just found myself charging through it same. And I genuinely wasn't sure where we were going. And I think we'll get into that again later. But I think that he. I'm very curious to hear from Sarah how much of this was mapped out for him as he was writing it? Because I know it came from the seed of an idea from his friend with this poem, I think another corona. But I wondered whether he knew ultimately where he was taking it from the jump.
- [20:24]
Sarah Lyle
That's interesting. I didn't speak to him about whether he knew what the ending would be, but I have a sense he has a pretty good idea of what he's gonna write before he writes it. Like he does map things out very. He's very care. And just a couple things. His first few books were, as you say, during his Ian Macabre period. Books like the Comfort of Strangers, First Love Strike. And there is. There's weird sex, there's incest, there's murder, there's people burying each other in the garden. And what he'll say is those first few books were his sort of starting to spread his wings a little bit or just unfurl his wings and he.
- [21:00]
Leah Greenblatt
His bat wings. Yeah.
- [21:04]
Sarah Lyle
He found every sentence quite a struggle. And he enjoyed the sort of learning how to write through those books. But 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. Philosophy and music and art and poetry and literature and history. And that's what he's done in almost all of his subsequent books, some more successfully than others.
- [21:31]
MJ Franklin
Did you learn anything else that felt pivotal, that felt interesting, that you feel like readers should know about the story behind the story? You got to Talk to Ian McEwan. What were your takeaways?
- [21:40]
Sarah Lyle
It's fun to hear how it came about. Cause it came about like a lot of writers. He has things in the back of his head and then they all kind of coalesce. So one of them was he had been reading a book about this, the first Immortal Dinner, which was this 19th century dinner with Wordsworth and Keats and Charles Lamb. And someone who was at the dinner wrote about it 20 years later and christened it the Immortal Dinner. Because he said they were reading poetry and talking about this. And it was so intellectual and so extraordinary. And one of the points he makes with that is, who knows if that's true? This guy could have just been mismaking the way the Bible was written way later by people who wanted to present a particular point of view from the past. So that was really interesting. He also wanted to talk about climate and how we're talking about it now and what that might mean for the future. He also had been. He read a poem called A Corona for Prue, that appeared a few years ago in England by a poet, an elderly poet, writing about his wife and his long marriage, I think a 60 year marriage and is the most beautiful piece of writing. It's so wonderful and it's about them walking around and thinking about their life together, but thinking about death. And he read it and was so moved by it and so excited by it that he planted that in the back of his mind as well. And he'd also read a literary biography that's quoted in the epigraph of his book, where the biographer is musing about how much you can really know about the person you're obsessed with and are writing about in the future. And it's what we can know.
- [23:20]
MJ Franklin
So one thing that I love based off of that origin story is we've been talking about this book. We're talking about the record and the archive and like the future. But it sounds to me like this book has an origin and I guess a theme of just the way gossip spreads and spirals and grows.
- [23:39]
Leah Greenblatt
I was gonna say we're making it sound in some ways like it's such a vaunted book and operating on this very petty level, but it also is so gorgeously petty.
- [23:51]
MJ Franklin
Yes.
- [23:52]
Leah Greenblatt
We have this dinner party where you have, you know, the first couple that arrives. It turns out they're both having affairs. And I want to make one little side note that I love is one of them is a novelist, Mary Sheldrake. And then I was doing a little spelunking around, reading, and apparently this may be a takedown of Rachel Cusk, which I love.
- [24:10]
MJ Franklin
Interesting.
- [24:11]
Leah Greenblatt
But then another couple shows up. One of them is from, quote, a magazine called Vanity Fair, because, of course, Tom wouldn't know that in 2119. And her husband, who's a builder. And so Francis the poet was initially very snobby about letting this man into his world because he's not that kind of artist. And just the sort of small little backstories, these little snapshots of all the people who are in play at this dinner party, including Frances brother in law, who was his archivist, his biographer, but sort of the Saleri to his Mozart, very jealous. So there's just these very fun, almost soapy elements to it that I really enjoyed.
- [24:54]
Sarah Lyle
It's a sign of his real artistic ability, I think, to sketch out these people without a lot and really makes them full characters. And really. So he's saying a lot in the book that doesn't depend on what sort of people days are. But he makes every character here really be real. So well done.
- [25:12]
MJ Franklin
So I want to get to the second half of the book, but before we exit spoiler free land, are there any other general things that you think all readers should know that you're thinking about before we dive into what happens in the second half of the book?
- [25:26]
Leah Greenblatt
I would say if you think this is a man's story from a man's perspective, that is the joy of the flip, the switch that comes.
- [25:35]
Sarah Lyle
He's very good on women and women's perspectives anyway. But I would say, and this is where anyone listening to this who hasn't read it yet probably shouldn't listen to the rest of it because it's so interesting how it changes in the second half. And I would say it reminded me a bit of Atonement, which you read and then you learn that all you've read is not what you thought it was and it's so shocking. And I found the same thing happen in this too. So if I hadn't read this yet, I wouldn't listen to the rest of this podcast. Sorry to lose all the lists listeners.
- [26:06]
MJ Franklin
And we will help make sure that if you don't want spoilers, it's easy. You have a break to get off the train because I think before we dive into spoilers, we should take a quick break.
- [26:28]
Podcast Narrator
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- [28:07]
MJ Franklin
And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm with Leah Greenblatt and Sarah Lyle and we're discussing what We can know by Ian McEwan before we jump back into our conversation in the studio, I wanted to share some comments from readers who have been joining us online. We have an article up right now on the New York Times Headline Book Club. Read what We can know by Ian McEwan with the book Review and we've gotten a ton of really good comments and conversation there. Here are a few that I loved. Ian from Kenya writes, I regard this book as McEwan's best since Atonement and Saturday. The more the reader puts into the first 100 pages, which require thought and patience, the the more they would derive from the rest of the book as the pace speeds up. However, other people felt mixed. Elizabeth from Connecticut writes, I'd give this book mixed reviews given the marked difference in palpability I felt between the two sections. I found the first section tedious and the premise obsession over a lost poem dull, which surprised and even disappointed me. Given my love of poetry. I found the whole climate issue in both sections a bit contrived and poorly integrated into the storyline. Despite my struggle through the first section, I felt rewarded. In the second section there was also another exchange I really love between two readers. BK from Buffalo I finished this book recently, excited to read it after the reviews. I was dazzled at the first, but so disappointed as I finished. The writing itself is, as always, superb. It's the stories and the characters that disappoint. The book is really two stories and for me they didn't meld. However, Kate from Melbourne responded that she felt the opposite. She wrote, I found the mode between timelines was extraordinary precisely because it reflects the impossibility of knowing the past in any embodied way. This disjuncture is what we actually experience. So those are just a few comments online. Continue the conversation there and now we're going to jump back into our discussion in the studio. I'm just going to reset the table and just fully reveal stuff.
- [30:14]
Leah Greenblatt
New cutlery. Let's go.
- [30:16]
MJ Franklin
So the first half you're with Tom, this researcher in the Future who's looking back on this 2014 dinner and trying to find this long lost poem. And you find out that he gets a clue, and he thinks he can find it. And he gets this, like, mysterious box.
- [30:32]
Leah Greenblatt
Coordinates to find it. It's all very. Yes.
- [30:35]
Sarah Lyle
And he thinks it's a phone number from the 20th century or 21st century. And then it's. It turns out to be coordinates that he has to paddle to get there. And there's no cell service. And they're like.
- [30:46]
Leah Greenblatt
He eats many oat cakes.
- [30:47]
Sarah Lyle
They're going through. It's really bad terrain. And then.
- [30:51]
MJ Franklin
Then he gets there, he finds it. He gets the box, he opens it up, and it is not the poem, it's a diary. And then curtain closes, we open up section two, and we are now with Vivian, the person who the poem is written for. And we get her perspective, and she has a quite harrowing tale to tell herself. Can someone tell us a little bit more about what that is?
- [31:16]
Leah Greenblatt
So this is where we learn more about Vivian's first marriage to a man named Percy, who seems like a lovely man and a pretty happy marriage until he gets an early onset Alzheimer's, a terrible, debilitating dementia. And she's. She's essentially living with a child, a recalcitrant child who's really hard to deal with. And that's when she meets Frances. So we learn there are hints, because it's interesting that Vivian seems to be this very accomplished woman on her own. And then she becomes a sort of. I don't know what you would say. Like, she essentially takes care of Francis.
- [31:52]
Sarah Lyle
She's like a helpmeet to his genius. So she does his almost and does all the house stuff, but she also is his secretary. It's so annoying.
- [32:01]
Leah Greenblatt
Yeah. Personally, I was a little like, oh, that's. That sucks for Vivian. And then you learn that she is very much her own person. And there are elements of the story.
- [32:12]
Sarah Lyle
Okay.
- [32:12]
Leah Greenblatt
We can say, yeah, she has many, many affairs. Yes. And there is a murder.
- [32:18]
MJ Franklin
There's a murder.
- [32:19]
Leah Greenblatt
There's a straight up murder involving Frances and Vivian. And so there's this collusion that ties Frances and Vivian together in these ways that we weren't aware of. And a sort of idea of owning the other person, but also owning their silence.
- [32:36]
MJ Franklin
And the last thing I will say in this resetting the table, the last piece of cutlery I bring out is that you also learn that Vivian has her own pretty devastating history that she's been holding with her that she's brought with her to her Relationship with Percy, to her relationship with Frances, to the affairs that she's had.
- [32:55]
Leah Greenblatt
She is no obedient housewife.
- [32:56]
MJ Franklin
She is no obedient housewife. So with that reset done, I want to ask, what do we make of the second half? What do we make of where the novel takes us?
- [33:06]
Sarah Lyle
I think the first thing you notice is that the voice is so very different from the first half. And it's such a great accomplishment to go. You're thrust in the middle of this woman's inner self and her writing, which is different from the narration of the first one. And that's really great. It's. Honestly, I'm not a researcher, but I was so excited to get. It's like a voice from the grave really telling you the real story. And so much of what she narrates as you describe her first marriage, how she met Vivian. I'm sorry, how she met Frances, how Vivian met Frances. And their marriage is so different from the way it had been set up for you in the first place. Then when she gets to the bit about what actually happened that night and what the poem really was and what she did with it, that's also just shocking. And you start thinking about poor Tom in the 21st century, who's now reading this diary, his life, work, everything he thought. One of our colleagues texted me after he read this, and he's like, this makes our work seem so terrible, because you can never know anything. And I was like, no, because he finds out in the end. I mean, if we all were able to get the final document that told us everything we needed to know, wouldn't that be great?
- [34:16]
MJ Franklin
And at the same time, I feel like I'm developing a reputation for being, like, that weird optimist on the podcast. But who knows? I would say the optimistic thing in that is that we see we can't know everything about this poem. In fact, the people who are inspired by this poem through the ages have not read a single word of it. And yet the poem does inspire. It inspires so much change and action, and it really brings together a community of people. And so, to that colleague.
- [34:44]
Sarah Lyle
Well, yeah, I'd say yes. One of the really funny things, I think, is that the accounts of this night have all said, these people all sat around listening to Francis Blundy declaim this thing, and they're all, like, in awe. And they're like, we know it's genius. This is, like, the best thing since Shakespeare. And then when you hear the real account, like, half of them were too drunk to even listen all the way.
- [35:04]
Leah Greenblatt
Through they were bored, preoccupied with their.
- [35:06]
Sarah Lyle
Private jobs, their affairs, their stomach hurt. They went out, a baby at home. And so it wasn't anything like we were told it was. And that's really quite funny.
- [35:17]
MJ Franklin
What about you, Leah? How did you feel about where the novel goes and where McEwan takes us?
- [35:24]
Leah Greenblatt
I've enjoyed that. You get to see Frances as a full buffoon, essentially, and very insecure and very much thinking about his legacy and his place. And one of the things we learn, we do learn a lot about the Corona for not having a single line of it. And one of the things we learned is that it's so pastoral and. And this man doesn't know, like a creek from a river.
- [35:44]
MJ Franklin
Not only does he not know it, he hates the creek and he hates the river.
- [35:48]
Sarah Lyle
He's really not interested in nature at all.
- [35:49]
Leah Greenblatt
No, no, no. He's an indoor cat.
- [35:51]
MJ Franklin
Yeah.
- [35:51]
Leah Greenblatt
And so we learn that this whole thing. And they say at one point he had written this beautiful poem for his wife and he's not a man who habitually gives gifts. And of course his idea of a gift is essentially like dead ing a dinner party. By reading the world's longest poem. It's like he might as well have shown a slideshow of his vacation. And you're just thinking, yeah, it's a punct. We discuss this book a lot within the books department. And it was such a Rorschach to see how people felt about the narrative switch once Vivian takes over. And also what the contents of Vivian's narration are, which are partly. Vivian was wild in the sheets.
- [36:29]
MJ Franklin
True.
- [36:30]
Leah Greenblatt
She. It turns out she was having mad affairs, including, I believe, with the brother in law. Right.
- [36:37]
MJ Franklin
Yeah.
- [36:37]
Leah Greenblatt
So it wasn't about status for her. It wasn't necessarily even about sexuality. In some ways it was about sticking it to Frances, which I really like. Those were. It was almost like a War of the Roses where only she was fighting the war and Frances didn't know.
- [36:51]
MJ Franklin
But then she's also like, Francis is probably having affairs too. And based on the fact that because.
- [36:56]
Leah Greenblatt
They started as an affair and then he has in the midst of their affair.
- [37:01]
MJ Franklin
But you said this was a big topic or conversation on the desk. It's also been a big topic of conversation with readers. People are really divided.
- [37:09]
Sarah Lyle
If people don't like it. I'm so surprised.
- [37:11]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, some people.
- [37:12]
Sarah Lyle
Why don't they like it?
- [37:13]
Leah Greenblatt
Team Vivian. I'm alpha.
- [37:15]
Sarah Lyle
Me too.
- [37:16]
MJ Franklin
That's a good question. Why don't they like it?
- [37:18]
Leah Greenblatt
I know that one of our colleagues Thought that tonally it turned into a little bit of a melodrama, which is fair. There is a sort of pile on of events. But we should say the switch is not an exact half. It's about 185 pages into a 300 page book. So you get less of Vivian than you do of Tom. And I found it very satisfying. I felt that we had earned this sort of spleen venting that we get from Vivian and this truth telling. And it didn't feel arbitrary or unearned to me.
- [37:51]
MJ Franklin
For me, I did think the second half was a little bit melodramatic and that directly conflicts.
- [37:57]
Leah Greenblatt
Maybe Sarah and I are just drama queens.
- [37:59]
MJ Franklin
Well. Cause like every possible bad thing that could happen does happen to Vivian in some type of way. Right. She has this really rough childhood. She escapes, she has a daughter, the daughter dies, she has this affair, she gets married, her husband has all sorts.
- [38:15]
Leah Greenblatt
Of murders that forgot about the dead child.
- [38:17]
MJ Franklin
Like, it does pile up.
- [38:20]
Sarah Lyle
But for me, no, I feel like it's a life, you know, it's people, really. You live a long time, bad things happen to you. I'm really. I'm not kidding. And I feel that.
- [38:29]
MJ Franklin
I think this is why people are divided, though. Some people are like.
- [38:31]
Sarah Lyle
It's like, I don't feel like it's over the top. And one thing we haven't mentioned about. You think it's over the top.
- [38:36]
MJ Franklin
Frances sneaks in the night, climbs through a window and smashes Percy's head with a small hammer. Like, sure things like that.
- [38:43]
Leah Greenblatt
What? Like you've never been in love.
- [38:46]
MJ Franklin
Like, I feel like we could debate whether, like, it's earned or not, but that's such, like a heightened over the top scene.
- [38:53]
Sarah Lyle
It's melodramatic, obviously, but it's not like her whole life was a melodrama. She's living like the upper middle class life in a beautiful house in the Cotswolds.
- [39:01]
MJ Franklin
Very fair, very fair. But the thing that I did love about the second half is the textures and layers. It adds to this consideration of what we can know. Like the idea of the first half as someone trying to discover a past. And the second half with this Alzheimer plot is someone losing theirs. That is so fascinating to me. Or with Vivian, who's holding this history with her but not revealing it. It's like this past sitting with her. These, the storylines and the story elements, the way they weave together to form the larger consideration of this novel, I thought was so smart and entertaining and deft, and I loved it. That, for me, was the Joy of this book, both getting to dive into some of the individual elements, but then just watching, like a puzzle as they just snap into place.
- [39:51]
Sarah Lyle
This is where you have the transparent piece of paper and it has some outline. You put it down, then there's one above it, and you put it on, and each time it fills it out more. That's how it felt to me, exactly.
- [40:01]
Leah Greenblatt
I think, too, it's interesting. There's a bit of a theme of nostalgia and idealizing the past. And the way that McEwen sort of dismantles those ideas I thought were really interesting because Tom really seems to be longing to go back. Not just because you could eat more delicious foods and walk a beautiful nature path and all these sorts of things. But I think we talked about these sort of small character sketches that are. That feel so complete. And I think even Percy, the way that she's dealing with his dementia is so interesting because she loves this man who's gone. His body is there, but he's like a child, and he drives her mad. And she has to watch cartoons for hours. And, like, he'll be so obstinate. She can't even. Like, she's losing her mind, essentially. So a lot of these choices make sense because she is trapped in this sort of nightmare of a marriage that turns into a trap.
- [40:54]
Sarah Lyle
Also, you know, Ian McKeown is in his late 70s. And those sorts of issues are really foremost in older people's minds, I think. You know, the being with someone you love who's starting to lose their grip on their memory and what your marriage looks like then and how much of themselves they still are.
- [41:13]
MJ Franklin
One thing that I was thinking about, I'm curious if you have any insight into this, but when I was reading it, I was thinking, yeah, Ian McEwen's in his 70s. He's probably thinking about his own legacy. And to take some of those considerations and morph it into this book. If I were to read a novel about a poet thinking about directly his legacy, that would feel so pedantic, right? I feel like he's taken these larger ideas and topics and just. He's made it art. He's made it entertaining. I loved, for me, thinking about some of the core that must have been inside of him.
- [41:45]
Sarah Lyle
So I think many of his books in the most recent years are like that, where they. I'm not sure. I wouldn't have thought that he's like, this book will be my legacy versus, you know, it's everything I ever thought will be in this. If you look back to Atonement. It's about fiction. It's about the role of fiction in our lives in some ways. Other ones, he looks at climate change, he looks at artificial intelligence, machines, all sorts of things. And this is one in a series of books where he grapples with various issues that are out there. The war. There's one book that has a lot to do with the Iraq war, Saturday.
- [42:19]
MJ Franklin
That leads me to ask, actually, so you're both Ian McEwen experts, you've read most, if not all of his books. How does this book fit into his catalog? Are these perennial ideas he's exploring, does it take him somewhere new? Can you situate what we can know?
- [42:35]
Sarah Lyle
For me, I think it's up there with Atonement. I think those are his two masterpieces and I love a lot of the other ones, mostly because I love his writing so much and he can do a set piece like no One's Business. Remember Enduring Love? I've never read anything like that.
- [42:52]
Leah Greenblatt
That the description of the man who dies early in Enduring Love stayed with me from when I was a teenager, literally. I can still conjure that paragraph. I think for me, I was able to enjoy this book in a different way because as I was saying earlier, the darkness of a lot of his characters and their essential ungoodness I think is very central to him as a writer. And this one had very flawed people, but didn't have that same sense of me grinding my teeth as a bystander at what these people were doing to themselves and each other. I was more honestly cheering. I was in the ovation section.
- [43:33]
MJ Franklin
So do you know that meme I support women's rights and I support women's wrongs.
- [43:40]
Leah Greenblatt
That is very Vivian.
- [43:43]
MJ Franklin
So we're running a little bit long in this conversation. We have a fun third segment of recommendations. But before we pivot to that, I just want to ask, are there any last you want to say about this book? Anything we haven't gotten around to that you're like, it needs to be discussed.
- [43:55]
Leah Greenblatt
The only thing I would say is that again, a lot of readers were saying, like, I want a big juicy read. This is one of the very few from this year that I've recommended, as you said, to quote, unquote, non readers, people who maybe only read a handful of novels a year. This is like the old fashioned definition of just a real good novel.
- [44:16]
Sarah Lyle
I agree. I don't know anyone who I've recommended this to who didn't love it. And you read it so fast. It's one of those Books where you read because you want to find out what happens, and then you realize you've missed so much of the texture of it and maybe you want to go back and read it again.
- [44:30]
MJ Franklin
I completely agree. I read this over one weekend and it was like the most delightful weekend. And I just. It was one of those books that I were thinking, when you're not reading it, you're like, okay, but what happened?
- [44:39]
Sarah Lyle
What is it like, reads you because his prose is so good, among other things, it just pulls you along.
- [44:46]
MJ Franklin
Are there any other last things you wanted to mention, Sarah?
- [44:48]
Sarah Lyle
I would just tell everyone to read it.
- [44:51]
MJ Franklin
Go read it. My last thing is maybe I'm reading too into it. But I feel like there is in the second half a meta fictional flair to it. There's the question of what we can know. We're getting Vivian's side, We're getting her record, but there are enough lines where she points out that she knows she's writing for someone else, and she's like, oh, for posterity. For posterity. When I tell this version of this story, this is what I say. And that adds another wrinkle of doubt to once again what we're reading and how truthful it is. It's changing the record, but isn't necessarily correcting the record. Is it.
- [45:26]
Sarah Lyle
Is it like a transcript of what actually happened or. It can't be. It's her view of it. I was thinking, wouldn't it be interesting? And how would you guys have felt if the book ended where he finds the journal but we don't find out what was in it, or he never finds it at all. Or he finds it and he doesn't publish it. Because when you get to the end of the book, you realize he publishes her journal as the confession of Vivian Blundy.
- [45:51]
MJ Franklin
There's an author's note, a fake author's note from Tom, who's published what he's found. Yeah.
- [45:55]
Sarah Lyle
Or what if we had access to it as readers ourselves, but he never found out? How would you have felt about the book then? I say, like, this didn't get out into the world of the fiction, but it got out into our world.
- [46:06]
MJ Franklin
I say, like, the past possibilities we can't possibly know.
- [46:10]
Sarah Lyle
Sometimes I feel like if you go back to Atonement, where there's a play with what's real and what isn't and what's fiction and what isn't, I felt the same way. Like, I felt like I wanted in the story, people to know, and I felt like the story was so real. To me that I cared what the people knew in the story.
- [46:27]
Leah Greenblatt
And it's interesting cause Atonement is the opposite, where he gives you a bit of a happy ending and then tells you the reality is so much bleaker.
- [46:35]
Sarah Lyle
I couldn't dare it. I was so upset.
- [46:37]
Leah Greenblatt
And this is a little bit of a. To me, not a happy ending necessarily satisfying, but a very satisfying ending satisfying. Ooh, Jinx. Yeah.
- [46:45]
MJ Franklin
Well, you mentioned a ton. And that actually leads me to our last segment, which is recommendations. I want to know what you would recommend readers pick up after they've read what we can know. And that could be for whatever reason. Maybe it's a book that grapples with similar themes of just like climate dystopia. Maybe it's talking about history in the past. Maybe it's another Ian McEwan book that you want. Maybe it's something totally different. It sounds like everyone would recommend for readers go read Atonement if they have not yet read it after reading this.
- [47:14]
Sarah Lyle
Yeah, absolutely.
- [47:15]
MJ Franklin
But what other books would you recommend readers pick up?
- [47:18]
Leah Greenblatt
I think, as usual, I'm gonna go a little weird, but I'm gonna say the Taffy Brodess or Egner's book. Fleischman is in trouble because that gives us a late female narrator.
- [47:31]
Sarah Lyle
Kaboom.
- [47:33]
Leah Greenblatt
A switcheroo. I'm speaking all in onomatopoeia right now.
- [47:36]
MJ Franklin
We're not gonna spoil.
- [47:37]
Sarah Lyle
It's such a good idea. I so agree.
- [47:40]
Leah Greenblatt
But I think I love a good literary rug pull. And this yanks the rug so hard. As does Ian McKeown in this. And so that's my pick.
- [47:50]
MJ Franklin
Can I throw in one? Similarly, is that another big rug pull? It's Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. The first half of that, you're following.
- [47:59]
Leah Greenblatt
Toxic artists in, like, really unhealthy relationships also. So a good parallel and then plot twist you get.
- [48:05]
MJ Franklin
You follow an act. A toxic actor, I guess.
- [48:08]
Sarah Lyle
Not toxic meaning no.
- [48:09]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, I guess he's not intentionally toxic, but he's clueless and he takes up a lot of oxygen. And then in the second half, you get his wife's perspective. And it is quite a rug pull.
- [48:19]
Sarah Lyle
So I love that idea of finding out what the other characters think. It's like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Right. I was gonna say this is a little nerdy, but I did this. After I read the book, I went and looked in the Times Literary Supplement and found the poem Marston a Corona for Pru by John Fuller, a great British poet. I'M not very good on poetry, but when you read the poem, it's so beautiful. It's so beautifully done. And then when you read a little bit about what a Corona is and the rules governing it and you realize what an astounding achievement it is, it's.
- [48:49]
MJ Franklin
So worth reading for me, I guess my main ones are. We've mentioned Fates and Furies.
- [48:55]
Leah Greenblatt
I love that pick, by the way. That's great book.
- [48:57]
MJ Franklin
Great book.
- [48:58]
Leah Greenblatt
And a maddening book, too.
- [49:01]
MJ Franklin
I would also recommend this is nonfiction. How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. This is specifically Clint visiting eight sites. I think seven of them are in America and one of them is abroad. I believe that's the construction. But he visits a number of sites related to black history in America. And he goes to talk about not what the history is there, but how are people talking about the history there. And so, for instance, he goes to Monticello and talks to people who are there for a tour and didn't realize that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And it's.
- [49:38]
Sarah Lyle
Where have they been?
- [49:39]
Leah Greenblatt
I was gonna say newsflash.
- [49:40]
Sarah Lyle
And it's them.
- [49:42]
MJ Franklin
It's him listening to people talk about how they understand and narrate history. And it is so good. Clint writes for the Atlantic, and he's a poet and just is a brilliant thinker. So go check that one out. And the other is one that I'm currently in the middle of in the way that, like, I feel like book review editors are constantly in the middle of personal reading because we have so much professional reading to do. I've been reading this slowly since our Alan Hollinghurst Book Club. At the start of the year is our January book, but the Stranger's Child. It opens, I believe, in 1913. We meet an English university student, and he's home for break visiting his family. He brings a classmate to visit. Plot twist. They are gay, closeted, hooking up. The classmate, Cecilisney is his name, writes a poem that our main character, George's sister, believes is for her. Flash to the future. Cecil has died in World War I. He's written a poem, a war poem that made him famous. And so now everyone's digging into his past and revisiting that poem. And then they're trying to talk about what that poem was, what that relationship was. Flash forward to another generation of this family. And it's just, you follow many, many generations, many, many years, as this poem at the center and this poet relationship.
- [51:00]
Sarah Lyle
Can you tell us the title again?
- [51:01]
MJ Franklin
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hahn.
- [51:04]
Sarah Lyle
That's his Most recent novel.
- [51:05]
MJ Franklin
That's an early one.
- [51:06]
Sarah Lyle
Not one. No.
- [51:07]
Leah Greenblatt
I have to say I struggled a little bit with Stranger's Child, but Line of Beauty to me is still great. And if you love that sort of like real lush, literary, British sort of book, if you are a McEwan fan, I think that Line of Beauty is a great one to pick up or.
- [51:24]
MJ Franklin
Read our evenings, which is the one that we talked about in January. Go visit, revisit, talk about revisiting. Revisit the Book Review Book Club.
- [51:31]
Leah Greenblatt
Yes, that's a very interesting point about the poems and the secrets. And that's also such a central thing in Atonement, too, is misunderstandings having to do with epistolary things.
- [51:41]
MJ Franklin
Well, that unfortunately is all the time that we have. I just want to say a big thank you, Sarah, Leah, this was great.
- [51:47]
Sarah Lyle
This is so great.
- [51:48]
MJ Franklin
I feel like it was a little. We kind of disagreed a little bit in a way that, like, it was.
- [51:51]
Leah Greenblatt
A little salty, but we stayed friends.
- [51:52]
MJ Franklin
That's a. That's a good thing. Book club. That's a good book club. I also just want to say a thank you to everyone who read with us this month. Again, we have an article up on the New York Times headline book Club. Read what We can know by Ian McKeown with the book Review. Continue the conversation there. And while we are saying thank yous, it's the end of the year and I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who's read anything with us throughout this year. I want to say a big thank you to all of our guests who have joined us. I want to say thank you to Gilbert for letting us do this book club. To Pedro, our producer, to Maddie, our audio engineer, our regular audio engineer. To Kyle Grandillo, who is our engineer for today.
- [52:32]
Sarah Lyle
Hi, Kyle.
- [52:32]
MJ Franklin
I just want to say a big thank you for making this book club possible. It's been a highlight of my year, so thank you.
- [52:38]
Sarah Lyle
Can we thank mj, too, for being such an excellent host of the book club.
- [52:41]
Leah Greenblatt
Thank you for herding cats all year long.
- [52:45]
MJ Franklin
Herding brilliant colleagues and brilliant readers. I just want to say thank you. And before I go, while we're on this high office love fest, we hope you'll stay with us. We're back in January and our January book club pick is. Drumroll, please. The Hounding by Zenobi Purvis. It's 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 comp to Shirley Jackson. It's so good we are going to be talking about that in in January.
- [53:17]
Leah Greenblatt
Up right now which business?
- [53:19]
MJ Franklin
Which business? Up right now we have an article headlined you can guess the Structure Book Club. Read the Hounding by Zenobi Purvis with the Book Review. We hope you'll join us, but until then, happy reading. Happy New Year. We'll see you next time.
- [53:40]
Podcast Narrator
This podcast is supported by GSK. Carol picked up a javelin when she was 60. Now she's a silver medalist at the National Senior Games. But even the most active older adults can face unforeseen risks. For Carol, it was RSV or respiratory Syncytial virus, a common virus that can be serious in people 50 or older with certain chronic conditions as well as anyone 75 or older. Read Carol's story in GSK's advertisement In the Times. Fit, focused and caught off guard, Ask your doctor about RSV risks and vaccination.