McEwan's latest novel draws laughter, praise

"Dirty scenes" from Ian McEwan's latest book, "On Chesil Beach," drew gales of laughter and an eruption of applause at a reading in a packed McCosh 50 lecture hall last night.

McEwan calls his new work a "real-time" novel, by which he means that the 208-page volume chronicles three-and-a-half hours of shy restraint and droll awkwardness between two virgins on their wedding night and takes about the same amount of time to read.

McEwan won several fans last night with his wry humor and his understated treatment of what some students called his book's "dirty scenes."

"I have actually never read anything by him before," David Kwabi '10 said. "But his presentation was pretty good, and his humor was incredible. I'll probably pick up 'Saturday' now."

McEwan — who won the Man Booker Prize in 1998 for his novel "Amsterdam" — is most famous for his 2002 novel "Atonement," which has just been released as a film starring Keira Knightley.

McEwan's speech was part of the Chauncey Belknap Series, which has in the past brought such speakers as Meryl Streep, Arthur Miller and Maurice Sendak. The program, which was founded in the memory of Chauncey Belknap, Class of 1912, invites a distinguished person in the arts to campus each year.

"It is a fantastic thing to follow such an extraordinary line of writers," McEwan said before he began reading from his book, which has emerged as one of the frontrunners for this year's Booker Prize. The Booker is awarded every year to an author who is a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.

"On Chesil Beach" arose from McEwan's desire to create a story about "two well-meaning people who generate for themselves a type of prison," he said, a topic he also dealt with in "Atonement."

"I periodically heard stories from friends about people who were married but parted that very night. Something in their tone of voice prohibited further question, so I had to make up my own little situation," he said. The windswept cliffs of the Dorset coast in southern England — a place McEwan called "almost intimidatingly rich for metaphor" — provide the setting.

During the question-and-answer session that followed his reading, McEwan advised aspiring novelists to start small, with short stories, rather than "slid[ing] every cell of your body into an 800-page work that frankly might not be very good."

McEwan also told audience members to "treat writing as a laboratory" and to allow themselves "the luxury of failure." McEwan's own career saw him take up a job at the TV-listing magazine "The Radio Times" and then another as a reviewer before he became a writer.