The 21st-Century Condition

Here's a devastatingly perceptive passage from Ian McEwen's SATURDAY, quoted in a review by James Wood:

He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel -- that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability -- isn't only a disclaimer of responsibility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.

It's like looking in the mirror.

Comments

[Ally]

Ian McEwan is my literary hero of the moment. I'm halfway through "Saturday." It's the first consciously post-9/11 novel I've read. As you might expect he handles it with brilliance and great insight.

"Atonement" is the best book I've read in the past several years, hands-down. It's everything a novel should be. It may have a flaw, but I haven't found it.