In "Psychopolis," we are in the head of another writer. The British narrator is visiting the United States. He decides to explore what he has heard is one of America's most fascinating cities, Los Angeles. He lives a borrowed life there, from the flat he sublets to the friends he acquires, but feels ambivalent about. He finds the metropolis an exercise in excess and boredom. However, some of the people he observes and associates with catch and hold his attention. There's Mary, his immediate lover, who insists he chain her to his bed and not let her go for a weekend. George is the manager of the shop across the street, which specializes in party goods and rehabilitative care items — wet bars and bedpans. Relationship-obsessed Terence is so malleable he will do anything to please the women he pursues, including urinate on himself in a public place. The protagonist decides L.A. is a city that represents the contemporary psyche gone awry. He experiences an epiphany — rather than allow his life to become mired in the illusions and delusions he is observing, he must break away from the pattern of avoiding change he has fallen into.
Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize for his novel, Amsterdam, in 1988. His longer fiction benefits from the same unblinking observation of not so much what people say as what they do, that makes In Between the Sheets a book a reader will think about long after she has finished it. McEwan offers us a smorgasbord of stories that shows his range as a writer and whets one's appetite for more. His works are sometimes described as dark or even freakish because they intertwine the stuff of nightmares, daydreams and reality. McEwan is a British heir to Sherwood Anderson. If you find grotesquerie disturbing, he is not your cup of Earl Grey.
I acquired this book in one of the best ways possible. A pal who had read and enjoyed it passed it on. However, even if it means parting with a few dollars, I believe you will find McEwan's short stories worthwhile.
My blog, where I write about some of the books I've read, is Mac-a-ro-nies.
Article comments
1 - Caleb Liu
Amsterdam won the Booker in 1998. Wonder if you have picked up McEwan's last book which was Atonement? It is a startling good read and for me his finest work to date. Black Dogs, set towards the collapse of Soviet Communist rule in Europe is also wonderfully subtle.