In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"He stirred his coffee and watched the waitress who leaned against a counter in a trance, and who now drew a long silver thread from her nose. The thread snapped and settled on the end of her forefinger, a colorless pearl."

It is perhaps not surprising that having finished reading Ian McEwan's near-masterpiece On Chesil Beach just a week ago, I have found his collection of short stories In Between the Sheets a bit of a disappointment. It is one of the author's early works (1978) and the pieces read almost as if the author wrote them to practice his literary skills.

There is no common motif or theme in this collection of seven stories. The only commonality seems to be the author's curiosity as to how far can he go with narrative creativity. The first piece, Pornography seems to be the most "normal" of the seven. It is a cautionary tale for men about the dangers of double timing: cheating may be punished. The conclusion is totally hilarious and very painful to read, especially for men, I would imagine.

The second story, Reflections of a Kept Ape is one of my two favorites. Written from the point of view of a non-human, it is offbeat, fresh, and viciously funny as in the sentence (note the usage of the second verb)

"Our first 'time' [...] was a little dogged by misunderstanding largely due to my assumption that we were to proceed a posteriori"

I actively dislike the next piece, Two Fragments: March 199-, a story about a father and his daughter in post-apocalyptic London: not only am I bored with dystopian visions, but this one contains gratuitous "juicy bits" about pigeons' vaginas, dog's member, and chimpanzee excrement.

I find the fourth story, Dead as They Come the best. The narrator details the dynamics of his love affair: everything would be quite typical and probably boring save for one detail - the object of his affection is not animate. The next piece, after which the whole collection is titled is endearingly strange and quite disturbing. I would like it a lot if not for the author's adolescent obsession with effluvia: we read about wet dreams, vomiting, consumption of feces, anal boil, nocturnal emissions, double stream of urine, saliva glinting on a point of tooth, fecal core, and snot. Mr. McEwan was 30 at the time of writing this: this is the stuff of 17-year-old "men."

The penultimate story, To and Fro reads as a sort of chant, a monotonous drone. It is interesting but it is hard to say what it is about. Finally, Psychopolis, which coolly begins with a woman asking the narrator to chain her to the bed, quickly loses its grip on the reader and devolves into a parody of Southern California late 1970s parties. What the story does well is capture the psychotic character of Los Angeles. Using the voice of one of the characters the author utters a phrase that could be the motif of the entire collection:

"The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat."

Yes, the idea would be great, if it worked. Here, it works only some of the time.

Two-and-a-half stars.




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