This, McEwan writes, was “er cue to make warm promises, draw him back to her, apologize for being busy or tired or unavailable. “But you’d like someone younger,” she replies. This husband and wife in “The Children Act” are privileged (on the first page, we see their scene of marital unhappiness play out in an apartment with a Bokhara rug on wide polished floorboards, near a grand piano), they’re cultivated (he’s a classicist, she’s a judge, they both love opera, Keith Jarrett and traveling) and childless. Much of the reader’s pleasure derives from the expansion, dissection, analysis and revelation of what we thought we already knew - and more comes from overturning our expectations. ![]() And just as in the earlier book, he puts his characters in a circumstance about which we have a lifetime’s worth of assumptions. In “The Children Act,” McEwan takes on the midlife crisis. ![]() While there are numerous examples of tricked couplings and stolen virginities from Shakespeare and Cervantes on, and many detailed accounts of sex (starting with Ulysses and perhaps culminating in Harold Brodkey’s “Innocence”) I don’t think I’d ever, before “Chesil Beach,” read a prolonged scene of a wedding night between two virgins. McEwan, in his recent shorter novels (“On Chesil Beach” is 203 pages, “The Children Act” 221) reveals an uncanny genius for plucking a resonant subject from the pages of lifestyle journalism and teasing it out into full scenes and then pressing them hard for their larger, enduring meanings.
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