In Between the Sheets

If I had only read "Two Fragments: March 199-" and "To and Fro" from this early collection of short stories when they were published in 1978 by one of my favorite writers, I would have read no more and would have missed out on his later wonderful novels. These two stories should be forgotten. Mr. McEwan turns up the heat in three of his stories, which I would label the bizarre. "Pornography" is the tale of O'Bryne who is having a sexual affair with two women simultaneously. When each woman finds out about the other, O'Bryne meets his Waterloo as the two women descend on him, tie him up and sterilize surgical instruments. "Reflections of a Kept Ape" is told from the viewpoint of an ape, a former lover of his mistress. The narrator in "Dead as They Come" is in love with a store mannequin, whom he purchases and takes home with him. The remaining two stories are beautiful and good indicators of what is to come in McEwan's later fiction. "In Between the Sheets" is a sexually charged account a father whose fourteen-year-old daughter and her midget girl friend visit him. The two girls are involved in something resembling a lesbian relationship or maybe it's just a "phase" teenage girls go through. There are also undertones of incest in this emotionally tense story. The title has multiple layers of meaning, something we have come to expect in McEwan's novels. He apparently has coined a phrase in "Psychopolis." The narrator is a Brit living briefly in California. While there he meets Mary, who works in a feminist bookstore in Venice and whom he chains to the foot of his bed for a weekend-- at her request. There is also George Malone who owns a shop under the narrator's apartment in Santa Monica,a shop specializing in items "for party givers" and equipment for sickrooms. Finally, there is Terence Latterly, someone the narrator had met "years ago in England when he was researching a still uncompleted thesis on George Orwell. . ." This story culminates when George throws a farewell party for the narrator who brings Mary and Terence with him to dinner. The evening gets out of hand when the conversation turns to religion, sexism, corporal punishment, sexual inadequacy and violence. (It's always fascinating to read foreign writers and get their views on the United States.)This last story is about as good as anything Mr. McEwan has written.

Ian McEwan has always been the doyen of the macabre. In this, his second collection of stories, his language can be both resonant ('I do not care for posturing women but she "struck" me') and profane ('I love the scent asparagus lends the urine'). Whether describing the 'love' of a tailor's dummy or bondage games in a metropolitan setting, McEwan's prose is masterly and his insights unsettling. Excellent but not as great as his earlier volume, 'First Love, Last Rites.'