Saturday by Ian McEwan

I am still working my way through Mer A's pile of books, and I really liked this one. I thought Atonement by McEwan was pretty good, and I'd rate this one similarly. Like Atonement, it was a little slow in some places but not so slow that I lost interest. Unlike Atonement, it took place in the course of one day, a Saturday.

The main character is a neurosurgeon who is planning to cook dinner for his family that evening and thinks the day will be just another Saturday. Instead, he witnesses something early in the morning that changes his mood, then is involved in an altercation later in the day that has an unusual outcome. My father-in-law-to-be's being a neurosurgeon made it immediately intriguing.

My favorite thing about this book is that it taught me that other people's thoughts are as dense as mine; that I'm not the only person who lives a seemingly successful life but has a crowded narrative running in my head all the time. For example, this paragraph describes his making dinner:

"Into the biggest colander he pours the rest of the mussles and scrubs them with a vegetable brush at the sink under running water. The pale greenish clams on the other hand look dainty and pure, and he merely rinses them. One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling. As he pushes it back down with a wooden spatula, the vertebral column breaks, right below T3. Last summer he operated on a teenage girl who broker her back at C5 and T2 falling out of a tree at a pop festival, trying to get a better view of Radiohead. She'd just finished school and wanted to study Russian at Leeds. Now, after eight months' rehab she's doing fine. But he dismisses the memory. He isn't thinking about work; he wants to cook. From the fridge he takes a quarter-full bottle of white wine, a sancere red, and tips it over the tomato mix."

The relationships that he has with his family are also a highlight of the book. His poet daughter and grunge rock son are both well-developed characters, and his love for his wife is clearly described throughout the book, "This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer--a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight."

And finally, I thought the plot and composition of the book were great. All too often I find myself complaining about the ending of a book; in reality, that is probably a complaint about the composition of the book entirely. In this case, no complaints here.