Emotional Reserve Can Be Disastrous

Summary

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"Their courtship had been a... stately unfolding, bound by protocols never agreed or voiced, but generally observed," [Ian McEwan] writes of his would-be young lovers.

"The language and practice of therapy, the currency of feelings diligent shared, mutually analysed, were not yet in general circulation," McEwan writes.

The year in which On Chesil Beach is set, for example, could not be more appropriate to McEwan's themes. As several British reviewers have noted, he spins an entire novel from the poet Philip Larkin's famous lines:

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Extract

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Emotional Reserve Can Be Disastrous

On Chesil Beach

By Ian McEwan

Knopf, 166 pages, $27

Reviewed by Morley Walker

WE'RE in England in the summer of 1962, a few years before the Beatles...

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