A little austere

I’m currently devouring Ian McEwan’s Atonement as though the act of finishing it will be some saving grace for me.

It feels incongruous, wrong, and perhaps that is part of the deliciousness of the novel. The title implies a world, or a life, overtaken by sin, hijacked. I suppose we all dread doing something unfixable, something dreadful and permanent. Something that we cannot come back from. But what may be irredeemable about the story is contradicted completely by the way it is told; I’m still stunned, hours and days later, by small details in McEwan’s prose that cause me to reexamine my own experience: the smell of cow dung is leathery. I find myself pausing and inhaling deeply, trying to remember the farm fields I regularly drive through with the windows down in a town adjacent to my home. I can’t ever remember having made the same association, but I feel renewed, somehow, by it all the same. There is no doubt that next summer I’ll be searching the air for that clean, functional scent among the cows.

And then there is the love scene, the love, the lovers. I remember being struck during the film at how artful it was: the colors, the shapes of bodies against the dark leather of bound books, splayed like giant spiders conquering a wall. And I’m left wondering if that’s not how we all want to be loved, really: for that mole, that scar, to be not a blemish, but an adornment. Something specific and extraordinary, to be kissed and adored simply because it doesn’t exist on any other person in quite that spot in quite that shape or hue. To be familiar and strange all at the same time – to be able to be remade by the beloved. I’m slightly (very) fanciful, but I like to think that we all want that. That kind of intimacy is a very human need. I think we’d all like to be examined, not for what’s right with us, but for what’s there. Acceptance pre-guaranteed, affection secured. And then we lay ourselves bare. It’s so safe – McEwan paints it – or types it, rather, exactly. And without saying so in the crude way I have.

And the smell of perspiration like cut grass. How often I’ve felt awkward to be comforted by the smell of a loved one’s sweat. How fresh and human it feels to breathe it in. How natural. I’m a bit of a hippie in disguise, but I’ve always felt that this urge we’re all encouraged to have (and spend fountains of money on) to smother every innate scent, to smooth every line, to pluck and dye and starve ourselves into severe, gaunt, unanimous perfection is bizarre. One of my favorite scents in the world is that of my sister’s bedsheets. Hers always smelled different than those draping the other beds in the house, and it was between them that I crept after every nightmare, during every insecure midnight of my childhood. Nothing can replace that for me, and it smells like person. And I like it that way. It’s proper. Someone shouldn’t only smell like Chanel, or Polo. We should smell like people. It’s so meaty and personal. Why should we want to stuff it away, ashamed of our failure to be a flower? Roses smell like roses. Let them. I’ll take in the tang of my father’s musty neck, the mildness of my mother’s hair, and be satisfied.

I know I’m focusing on scents here. But I’m so haunted. I can’t help it. This whole novel wound around an obsession with repentance is the most luscious thing I’ve ever held between my two hands. It’s ludicrous. And perfect in its irony. And the feel of reading it is so bracing and wonderful that everything is fresh, every word tormentingly flawless, and I never want it to end.

…On a more personal note (if possible): I’m afraid that I’ll never write anything so beautiful. But that failure wouldn’t be so bad. I could write something that falls far short of McEwan’s mark and still exceed my own hopes. It would be pathetic not to try, but I often feel crushed under so much beauty that has come before. To dream of joining the ranks of the published (and read admiringly, fingers clutched, breath held) seems so presumptuous. But we all have our purpose, and I can’t imagine dreaming of anything else anymore.