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Summary
Summary
New from the bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home--a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse--but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world's master storytellers.
Author Notes
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell.
He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McEwan's latest novel is short, smart, and narrated by an unborn baby. The narrator describes himself upside down in his mother's womb, arms crossed, doing slow motion somersaults, almost full-term, wondering about the future. His mother listens to the radio, audiobooks, and podcasts, so just from listening he has acquired knowledge of current events, music, literature, and history. From experience, he's formed opinions about wine and human behavior. What he's learned of the world has him using his umbilical cord as worry beads, but his greatest concern comes from overhearing his mother and her lover plotting to kill his father. The mother, Trudy, is separated from John, the father. John is overweight, suffers from psoriasis, and, perhaps most annoying for Trudy, loves to recite poetry. Trudy's lover, Claude, is a libidinous real estate developer who covets both John's wife and their highly marketable London home. Claude also happens to be John's brother. Echoes of Hamlet resound in the plans for fratricide, a ghost, and the baby's contemplation of shuffling off his mortal coil. The murder plot structures the novel as a crime caper, McEwan-style-that is, laced with linguistic legerdemain, cultural references, and insights into human ingenuity and pettiness. Packed with humor and tinged with suspense, this gem resembles a sonnet the narrator recalls hearing his father recite: brief, dense, bitter, suggestive of unrequited and unmanageable longing, surprising, and surprisingly affecting. 150,000-copy announced first printing. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Until the exciting (but, sadly, unlikely) day when McEwan (The Children Act, 2014) is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, his numerous and ardent fans enjoy the regular appearance of his highly intelligent and compellingly provocative novels. McEwan can be counted on to make the implausible plausible and the outrageous reasonable, and his talent in that regard is put to its consummate test in his latest novel. Startling at first but quickly acceptable and even embraced, this mesmerizing tale is narrated by an unborn, male fetus. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required; after all, the fetus is not only capable of hearing everything being said around his mother but also comprehending adult conversation and speaking to us in a mature voice, with mature experiences and reasoning behind it. Soon we are caught up in a situation greatly consequential not only for the fetus but also for his family. The unborn baby boy is determined to interfere with how the situation plays out. But how? For all intents and purposes, he is trapped. Nevertheless, he takes matters into his tiny little hands, which brings this ingenious tour de force to its stunning conclusion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Any new novel by this Booker-winning novelist will spark interest among literary-fiction readers.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WE MIGHT BEGIN with Hamlet, of course, but we may also begin with Abhimanyu. Locked inside his mother's womb - as one version of the Mahabharata story runs - Abhimanyu overhears his father, Arjuna, discussing a well-known battle strategy with his wife. It involves a military formation called the "disk": A murderous rank of enemy soldiers forms around a warrior in a perfect spiral, and seven steps, carried out in precise sequence, can penetrate that deadly labyrinth, permitting escape. Abhimanyu listens intently - at times, the thrumming drone of his mother's aorta next to his tiny ear is near-deafening - but as Arjuna speaks, his mother dozes off to sleep. The conversation stops. The final route of escape - the seventh step - is left unmentioned. Ian McEwan's compact, captivating new novel, "Nutshell," is also about murderous spirals and lost messages between fathers and unborn sons, although it's the father's fate that hangs in the balance here. I promise not to give away the formidable genius of the plot - but the premise, loosely, is this: Trudy, jittery and fragile, lives in a London townhouse as dilapidated as it is valuable, where she spends hot afternoons coldly plotting the murder of her husband, John. She is heavily pregnant with John's son. They have separated, their love spent; he inspires nothing more in her than a "retinal crust of boredom." He has moved to Shoreditch (or "sewer-ditch," as it used to be known), where he scrapes out a living as a poet and publisher. John may or may not be in love with an aspiring poet named Elodie, who writes about owls, and whose name rhymes with "threnody" - a lamentation to the dead. The accomplice to this murder - "clever and dark and calculating" but also "dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention ... a man who whistles continually, not songs but TV jingles, ringtones ... whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble" - is Claude, a real estate developer. Claude - Hamlet's Claudius - needs no literary disguise: He is John's brother, a prosperous brute of a man with whom Trudy (Gertrude) is having an affair. And the narrator of this saga? Listen carefully now: He is Trudy's son, still in her womb, who hears his mother and uncle plan and connive over lukewarm coffee in their Hamilton Terrace kitchen, and who must countenance the life-threatening ignominy of his uncle's lovemaking every night. "I grit my gums, I brace myself against the uterine walls," the fetus tells us grimly. "On every piston stroke, I dread that he'll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality. Then, brain-damaged, I'll think and speak like him. I'll be the son of Claude." Is there another writer alive who can pull off a narrative line of this sort? McEwan has experimented with the unreliable narrator - Briony Tallis, from "Atonement," comes immediately to mind. But in "Nutshell" we are confronted with an over-reliable narrator. The unborn son, squirming uncomfortably inside the amnion, knows every detail of his father's murder-to-be - the glycol-spiked smoothie from a shop on Judd Street that will stifle John with its glutinous poison; the spider-infested glove used to explain the lack of fingerprints on the bottle; the ubiquitous CCTVs, sprawled all over London, that will capture the scheme in progress. To be fair, even our unblinking witness does not always have his wits intact. He is so frequently sloshed - Trudy, in her third trimester, makes it a point to drink for two - that he can, by the tender age of 30-odd weeks, distinguish the grassy, acrid high of a New Zealand sauvignon from the tobacco-and-leather lull of the Pomerol coursing through the placental veins. But when sober, he learns to put the world together through its attenuated sights and syncopated sounds; he invents his own fuzzy, amniotic CCTV The flavorful rise in his mother's hormones - the quickening of her pulse, the drip of adrenaline in her synapses - tells him a poisonous story to which he, alone, is privy. The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous. "So here I am, upside down in a woman," the novel begins. "Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I'm in, what I'm in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults.... I'm immersed in abstractions, and only the proliferating relations between them create the illusion of a known world. When I hear 'blue,' which I've never seen, I imagine some kind of mental event that's fairly close to 'green' - which I've never seen.... I count myself an innocent, but it seems I'm party to a plot. My mother, bless her unceasing, loudly squelching heart, seems to be involved." The literary acrobatics required to bring such a narrator-in-the-womb to life would be reason enough to admire this novel. But McEwan, aside from being one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose, also happens to be a deeply provocative writer about science. His musings are often oblique and tangential - yet he manages to penetrate the spirals of some of the most engaging quandaries in contemporary science. In "Enduring Love," the novel spins out of a rare, obsessive psychiatric syndrome - erotomania - in which one character is captivated by the delusion that another is secretly in love with him. But the real story of "Enduring Love" concerns the neuropsychiatric perception of love. What kind of "love" exists when only one person imagines it? What happens when that imagination endures a little too much? "Nutshell," too, has strange scientific questions lurking at its core - about genetics, kinship and the self. Consider the problem: The child a mother carries in her womb is not a "reproduction," as the writer Andrew Solomon has reminded us, but a production - a genetic amalgam of father and mother. The fetus shares only half its mother's genes; it is, inevitably, part self, part resident alien. "It's in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self," McEwan's narrator informs us. In "Nutshell," the genetic mingling turns more sour than sweet. As Claude and Trudy carry out their hideous scheme, the fetus hatches his own counterfoil to save his father - "my genome's other half," as he puts it. But how do we know the allegiances of our genomes? What if the two genomes within an organism are at war? Cognizant readers might recognize in "Nutshell" the influences of Richard Dawkins (about whose work McEwan has written thoughtfully) or Daniel Dennett - and a good dose of Agatha Christie - but it hardly matters: The pleasures of this tautly plotted book require no required reading. And what of Abhimanyu? Sixteen years later, as a young warrior, he is caught in the spiral labyrinth. He battles his way through the six prescribed steps that he recalls from his moment in the womb - but he falters at the final one, and is slaughtered by a circular shower of arrows. I'm not going to divulge the bone-chilling climax of "Nutshell" except to reveal this: Our narrator, recalling the final break, knows his route of escape. 'Nutshell' raises provocative questions about genetics, kinship and the self. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE'S latest book is "The Gene." He won a 2011 Pulitzer for "The Emperor of All Maladies."