Draw me a what’s-it cube
Adam Mars-Jones
- BuySweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Cape, 323 pp, £18.99, August 2012, ISBN 978 0 224 09737 6
A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide (‘I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her’). When he wakes up he vomits on the corpse, a reflex of horror and remorse that amounts to a further assault. Ian McEwan’s first reputation (in the 1970s) was as a writer of scrupulously perverse short stories, an output which placed him in a loose grouping with Martin Amis, labelled the ‘neo-nasties’. The nastiness has long since been disowned though the occasional glint of relished cruelty survives – a body part under the furniture in Enduring Love, an almost witty bomb blast in Atonement – to prevent the reader from feeling too cosy.
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Vol. 34 No. 17 · 13 September 2012 » Adam Mars-Jones » Draw me a what’s-it cube
pages 13-14 | 3106 words