SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Twitching Curtains.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (25 January 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder finds major flaws in the uneven narrative energy and invented case study in Enduring Love.

It begins [in Enduring Love] with dazzling cinematic bravura. Joe and Clarissa, his live-in lover, are having a spring picnic in Britain's Chiltern Hills. About to uncork the wine, they hear a man shout.

“We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing I was running towards it,” Joe relates. Then for an instant, like a bright lure seized by a bottom fish and dragged under, the dazzle yields to leaden hindsight. “What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.”

Narrator's hindsight and reader's foreboding: Ian McEwan weights them on before surfacing back into the immediacy of...