The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan
Podhoretz, John
dened his slight tome with interesting but meandering disquisitions on the nature of time, an unwarranted intrusion of precious fantasy, and a vulgar bit of political satire. McEwan clearly intends...
...Not only resentment, but even perhaps a little relief that it was he and not she...
...McEwan clearly intends these appurtenances to distinguish his novel, and critics like the Wall Street Journal's Richard Locke have taken the bait...
...The pointlessness of the scene, as well as the distasteful method of inventing a fictional situation and then sticking a real person in it to make that real person look bad and foolish, testirin he doctors at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta called him "Patient Zero...
...But McEwan feels obliged to introduce a physicist to explain that time is relative, while Stephen has what turns out to be an accurate vision of his newly pregnant mother and panicked father discussing whether he should be aborted...
...T hat is, except for McEwan's pre- 1 tentious puffery...
...Thence he brought the virus to both San Francisco and New York, where he infected partners through anonymous bathhouse sex and pickups from gay bars...
...But that book would be getting a less rapturous press...
...Had he done so, he would have come out with a better novel...
...Commission on Civil Rights, where he specializes in AIDS issues...
...A few years after his daughter Kate was stolen from under his nose in a London supermarket, Stephen Lewis is living in a perplexed stupor...
...But in truth, McEwan's asides and subplots are awkward and inappropriate interTHE CHILD IN TIME Ian McEwan/Houghton Mifflin/$16.95 John Podhoretz THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 45 ludes that do not do justice to the rest of the book...
...It seems to the reader that the Lewis home was nothing less than perfect before the disaster, like the Lewises themselves...
...Stephen is not man as he is, but man as we would wish him to be...
...A stunningly handsome French-Canadian airline steward, Gaetan Dugas had over 2500 male sexual partners on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by the time he died at age 31...
...the Prime Minister has written the guidebook already, and it is full of pullyourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric that is unconvincing in its extremism...
...I've got gay cancer," he would say...
...No one will ever be certain whether Dugas was the one who began the AIDS epidemic in the United States, but it would be fitting if he was...
...I'm going to die, and so are you...
...When McEwan forgets these foolish and dilatory games, The Child in Time comes to life as a marvelous piece of popular sentimental fiction of the sort that British novelists used to excel at before they became, on the whole, scatological swine...
...The Prime Minister comes to his house, complete with nuclear hotline phone, in order to profess passion for his friend Charles Darke, once his publisher, a junior minister in her cabinet, and now a secretly raging madman who has decided to become a little boy again by living in a treehouse high atop a forest in Suffolk...
...Someone knew the color of her sweater...
...McEwan is so close to his characters that he never comes near what would be the real resentment on Julie's part: the fact it was on Stephen's watch that Kate was stolen...
...Stephen and Julie are heavily romanticized characters from whom McEwan has no distance and with whom he shares almost every emotion...
...At least forty of the first 248 homosexuals diagnosed with AIDS as of April 12, 1982 had had sex either with Dugas or with someone who had...
...In The Child in Time, McEwan reveals his mastery of the art of sprinkling pretentious sugar over essentially sentimental cereal and waiting for others to call it ambrosia...
...For no discernible reason, the book is set a few years in the future, and presents a Labour party view of a Britain under the continuing dominance of Margaret Thatcher...
...That preciousness extends to McEwan's portraiture...
...It was in France, the doctors think, that he picked up the AIDS virus...
...Stephen's panel meets to discuss appropriate measures of child-rearing, but it turns out that it is all a sham...
...This tour-deforce scene, and a few others like it, testify to McEwan's formidable powers of description and observation...
...But McEwan hits his nadir in a peculiar and unnecessary scene in which Stephen, encounters the Prime Minister (clearly Thatcher, though she goes unnamed and even unsexed...
...The opinions represented in this review are his own...
...they behave wonderfully, even in grief, intending no one else any harm, envying no one else their children, and only coming apart because they misunderstand the nature of each other's grief...
...He and his wife Julie, fiercely in love, nonetheless turn on each other emotionally: she considers Stephen's ceaseless quest a form of denial while he considers her mute and motionless grief a self-indulgent wallow...
...McEwan strains for metaphysical depth and achieves only preciousness...
...The commission meets once a week, to hear nonsensical proposals for new alphabets and the like, and during these meetings Stephen relives with fatalistic intensity the events of the past years...
...T his is all heartbreaking and con- 1 vincing, even though McEwan makes much more of the distortions of "time" that Stephen suffers than the book warrants...
...He continually re-creates every single detail, thought, emotion in those seemingly meaningless minutes before the child-snatching and afterwards: "Somehow, in no time at all, it was generally known that she was three, that she was last seen at the checkout, that she wore green dungarees and carried a toy donkey...
...fies to McEwan's incapacity to look at his own work critically and hack away at the nonsense...
...Several people had seen the little girl riding in the cart...
...Basically, most of The Child in Time is a collection of Stephen's remorseful flashbacks and current despair, and thus no more experimental in form than a Trollope narrative...
...Their responses to the ordeal feature not a moment of moral ambiguity...
...Their spiritual perfection—particularly Stephen's—roots the book firmly in the British literary tradition devoted to demonstrating the noble heroism of the "man of sentiment...
...In this brave new world, beggars are licensed by the state, and everywhere are the signs of a new form of welfare-state Social Darwinism...
...But dealing with such questions would make this a different novel, while on its own sentimental terms it really is quite good enough...
...These two make a marriage, face adversity, fall apart, and come finally to a resolution in a manner as pleasing and uplifting, and as cheap, as a really good TV movie...
...McEwan also excels at delineating the shifting character of Stephen's distress, from relentless activity in pursuit of the child he can never find and then his fixed, rootless despair...
...The faces of mothers were strained, alert...
...at times he seems like Dickens, weeping as he commits the abduction of Little Kate to paper...
...Long after his diagnosis, Dugas would sodomize willing partners in dimly lit cubicles, then turn up the lights and point to the purplish Kaposi's sarcoma lesions on his skin...
...Typhoid Mary" Mallon, by contrast, had fifty-three confirmed cases attributed to her, of whom three died...
...The anonymity of the city store turned out to be frail, a thin crust beneath which people observed, judged, remembered...
...This portrait (clearly an idealized self-portrait) is without blemish, while Julie is a wish-fulfillment of an earth-mother wife, as sexy as she is serious, as loving as she is talented...
...For the way he continued business as usual—or pleasure, as it were—even after his diagnosis is representative of the larger tale of miscreants and fools told in Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, a remarkable feat of investigative journalism that traces the AIDS epidemic from the death of Danish physician Margrethe Rask, a lesbian who contracted AIDS in Africa in 1976, up to mid-1985 and the death of Rock Michael Fumento is an attorney at the U.S...
...A successful author of children's books, he has ceased working, has separated from his wife, and now centers his life on a rather desultory official commission on child care...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
