Book Review: Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Enduring Love

by Ian McEwan

Anchor Books Doubleday (1998)

Pp 262

Enduring Love falls as flat as the hot-air balloon that kills the heroic family doctor John Logan in a freak accident. Logan’s death triggers a maddeningly artificial construct that masquerades as a plausible story. But because the story is told within the highbrow medium of “Literary Fiction,” anything is possible. 

The characters are indeed highbrow, too educated to rouse suspicion that they are regular folks, trying to get by in the big city, albeit the academic world. The primary characters reek of a snarky intellectual superiority—the very qualities echoed in the elitism that drove the working classes to seek relief among the most loathsome Trumpers of the Twenty-first century. 

Few writers write as well as Ian McEwan. His command over language, coupled with manic precision of his characters’ thoughts, feelings and inane actions, work closely in tandem to elevate the story to the height of great literature. Yet, I abandoned this book three times. At one point I discarded the book, still mostly unread, into a box marked as donations for the library’s annual fund-raising sale. But I could not turn away. The craft of McEwan’s writing is remarkably compelling. I pulled the book from among the castoffs and soldiered on.  

If Enduring Love is undoubtedly fine writing, then what’s wrong with the story? Joe Rose is a frightfully self-absorbed husk of a youngish, middle-aged man. His wife Clarissa Mellon aches with pre-menopausal surges of lust, undefined despair, and ho-hum boredom. Comes now the lunatic Jed Parry, who is not an ordinary schizophrenic but is suffering from the little known disorder de Clerambault’s Syndrome.

Jed Parry professes passionate love for Joe Rose, and stalks him everywhere, wreaking havoc in his life. Joe Rose diagnoses Jed Parry as having de Clerambault’s Syndrome. For Joe Rose to diagnose Jed Parry with de Clerambault’s Syndrome without any consultation with medical experts is strange. Joe Rose’s entire career as a science writer has been built on the backs of experts. The appendix at the end of the book describing de Clerambault’s Syndrome in ad nauseum detail was pedantic, unnecessary, and condescending to those who do suffer from mental illness.

The plot, driven by absurd twists and turns, is not scary. Even when Joe Rose is rebuffed by law enforcement and his beloved wife, he does not seem imperiled by Jed Parry’s wacky rambling. Joe Rose is not an innocent victim of the deranged Jed Parry. Joe Rose is really a victim of himself. 

Tiny subplots cast little dramatic relief. The family doctor who died in the hot-air balloon accident leaves behind an embittered wife who thought her husband was having an affair. The tweedy, old professor engaged in an illicit affair with his much younger student flops as forbidden love. The aging hipster Johnny B. Well, who supplies Joe Rose with a gun, makes his appearance like a minor superhero in a comic strip. The way Joe Rose views Johnny and his druggie friends is pompous and unkind. At this juncture, the story turns on its ear and never recovers. Enduring Love audaciously aspires to be a great work of art but fails to achieve greatness because the story itself is simply ridiculous.  

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