The Barnes & Noble Review
An incomplete list of unusual narrative points of view in fiction includes dog; wolf-dog; horse; dead girl; lizard; seagull; Death; monster; African elephant; cat; bowl; rabbit; mouse; guinea coin. To which we can now add fetus. Along with Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, thanks for thus enlarging the canon go to Ian McEwan, much-decorated author of sixteen previous works of fiction (Amsterdam, Atonement). But equal gratitude here is owed to Shakespeare, from whom McEwan has borrowed the plot in making literal Hamlet's lament, "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
While the choice of an incipient person as narrator might seem to offer a severely limited perspective on human concerns, due to his having had none yet, this is no ordinary fetus. He uses words like "philatelist," "non-chordate," "penumbra." He proves himself an astute critic of poetry with a taste for scansion. He knows both his Latin and his wine (owing to a fifteen-part podcast on the subject listened to by his sleepless mother, not to mention the vintages she and he, by extension, ingest in quantity). He also ponders how to derail the murder plot he has been made to overhear. All in all, a canny egg.
With Nutshell McEwan has accomplished a small miracle: a well-wound thriller inside something bigger, a variegated meditation on folly, on the insistent untenability of this world to which we have given birth even as it gives birth to us, on the ability of art to encapsulate its mysteries. This, in a small package of fewer than two hundred pages. And especially in a small package, for his manifest intention is to create one of those exquisite miniatures that through a narrow scope view expansive territory. An exemplary post-postmodernist, McEwan chooses a form that also characterizes a subject who goes on to remark on the qualities of the form. A bit complicated, true, but that is also the point — and much of the pleasure — of his marvelous construction. "Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces," McEwan's protagonist muses, going on to name the multitude of works that focus on a detail to imply an entirety: the eighteenth-century novel of manners, the portrait, the Dutch still life, the scientific study of a single organism or search for an atomic particle. "Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes." This speck knows how to take on mind- bendingly large concepts. All of a sudden I am put in mind of a possession I wondered at endlessly as a child: a little bean, capped with a tiny ivory elephant, that contained twelve even tinier replicas. Impossible, yet there it was.
The deepest pleasures of Nutshell are likewise extra- narrative, pleasant as that is: a tasty recipe cooked up of an affair based on hilariously depicted, if queasy, sex. (At one point the put- upon fetus remarks that the "turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing.") The perpetrator is moreover an idiot, "dull to the point of brilliance," but who has nonetheless "entranced my mother and banished my father."
The ego of any writer confident enough to link arms with the greatest poet of the English language is decidedly intact. At the very least, McEwan shows himself the true son of his literary forebear in a bent for wordplay. He deflates the hackneyed by simply making it issue from the mouth of a pre-babe: "I might live with my father, at least for a while," the narrator prognosticates — "Until I get on my feet." Late in the pregnancy, "my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged." A joke one minute, a stunning analysis of large truths the next; I can't imagine any shrewder account of how and why the demise of a marriage requires the whole-cloth remaking of personal history. Grander still are the pages that deftly collate all the ills afflicting the globe in the current moment: in a couple of disquisitions each no longer than this review, a child not yet born sums up the myriad causes and dismal prospects of a planet on the brink. There are concise op-eds on subjects from greed to self-deception, overconsumption to political malfeasance, art history to lust. The author who devises all this, and does it in prose so smoothly assured it goes down like a good Sancerre, "preferably from Chavignol," has pulled off one of the neatest tricks in recent literature.
If the diminutive narrator in these pages sounds suspiciously like someone who holds exactly the sort of vaunted CV as the author Ian McEwan, the fact is far less troubling than it is rewarding. Within the confines of Nutshell McEwan aspires to nothing less than compassing Shakespeare. So he works from dialectical plans: on the one hand, the most elevated of themes and execution, and on the other hand ("how I hate that phrase," rightly opines our young commentator) what amounts to cerebral slapstick.
When all that transpires in utero has had its run, the waters break, Nutshell at last makes a familiar adage uniquely true: the end is only the beginning.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training.
Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson
The New York Times Book Review - Siddhartha Mukherjee
…compact, captivating…The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous…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…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.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
…Ian McEwan has performed an incongruous magic trick, mashing up the premises of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Amy Heckerling's 1989 movie, Look Who's Talking, to create a smart, funny and utterly captivating novel…Nutshell is a small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan's narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can be perform. The restrictions created by the narrator's situation…seem to have stimulated a surge of inventiveness on Mr. McEwan's part, as he mischievously concocts a monologue…that plays on Hamlet, even as it explores some of his own favorite themes (the corruption of innocence, the vulnerability of children and the sudden skid of ordinary life into horror), familiar to readers from such earlier works as The Child in Time, The Children Act and…Atonement…It's preposterous, of course, that a fetus should be thinking such earthshaking thoughts, but Mr. McEwan writes here with such assurance and élan that the reader never for a moment questions his sleight of hand.
Publishers Weekly
★ 07/25/2016
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.)
From the Publisher
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oprah.com
“Smart, funny and utterly captivating.” —The New York Times
“More brilliant than it has any right to be.... Suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound.” —The Washington Post
“Fantastically entertaining and frequently hilarious.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Nutshell is a joy: unexpected, self-aware, and pleasantly dense with plays on Shakespeare.” —NPR
“Compact, captivating ... The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Gorgeous.... Offer[s] the reader a voice both distinctive and engaging.... Rife with wordplay, social commentary, hilarity, and suspense. . . . Hats off to Ian McEwan.” —The Boston Globe
“A comic tale.... It is a masterpiece.” —The Times (London)
“McEwan is a literary pointillist—in control of each keystroke, creating small, precise masterpieces that delight with their linguistic prowess.... [A] daring thriller.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Brilliant.... This novel is a thing of joy.” —The Economist
“Brims with literary allusions, social commentary and murderous intrigue ... Gorgeous ... studded with Joycean reflections on fathers, the wisdom of pop songs and reviews of placenta-filtered fine wine.” —Associated Press
“Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight of a book.... It is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.” —The Guardian (London)
“An enthralling read.” —Marie Claire
“Nutshell belongs to that dark tributary of McEwan novels which includes The Cement Garden, The Innocent and Booker-winner Amsterdam—black comedies aswirl with macabre thoughts and foul deeds. It sees McEwan at his most playful.... [Readers should] applaud it for its beauty, precision and inventiveness.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A book pulsing with hilarious and brainy brio.... He simultaneously spoofs crime fiction and finds a novel mouthpiece for a mordantly entertaining and exhilaratingly intelligent commentary on the modern world.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“[A] tour de force.... A slim, clever thriller with the grand good fortune of being written by the inimitable McEwan.” —Buffalo News
“Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.” —The Daily Mail
“A highly original, imaginative thriller that is as entertaining as it is suspenseful.” —Buzzfeed
“Nutshell may be a short book, but it is not hard to crack. And what lies within—the suspense of a murder plot, the matching game that’s played when a classic story is retold, and the unique perspective of an unborn narrator—is quite pleasurable to both pick through and savor.” —AV Club
“This dark, clever tale is among the best of McEwan’s newer novels.” —The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Fiercely intelligent.... At once playful and deadly serious.... One of McEwan’s hardest to categorize works, and all the more interesting for it.” —The Times (London)
“Hilarious and compelling.” —The Spectator
“A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly.... Witty and gently tragic, this short yet utterly bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.” —Mail on Sunday
Library Journal
★ 09/01/2016
In the 17th century, René Descartes contended that merely doubting one's own existence simultaneously proved that one existed: Cogito, ergo sum. In his newest and most provocative work to date, McEwan (Atonement; Amsterdam) stretches the philosopher's dictum to its limits with a novel narrated from inside the womb. Trudy is the surrogate of the unborn narrator, living in her estranged husband's house while carrying on an affair with his brother, Claude. Endlessly rotating around, constantly awash in wine and food, and privy to the most hushed conversations between Trudy and Claude, the narrator learns of the star-crossed lovers' plot to poison Trudy's husband. Encased in amniotic fluid, the narrator is left to squirm in silence and await his arrival into the world, a world in which his mother murdered his father. This sensation of entrapment and helplessness mirrors Trudy's conspiratorial relationship with Claude. As their plan quickly unravels, Trudy finds herself alone and ensnared in a web of lies. VERDICT McEwan joins Eric D. Goodman (Womb: A Novel in Utero) and Emma Donoghue (Room) in penning an expansive meditation on stability and identity from a confined perspective.—Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
