McEwan recounts his missteps
It would be hard to find a more witty, urbane, and insightful literary guest at Harvard than British writer Ian McEwan, whose novel “Amsterdam” (1998) won the Man Booker Prize, and whose “Atonement” (2001) was made into an Oscar-winning film. McEwan held an audience in thrall at Paine Hall Tuesday during an exploration of realism and its pitfalls in the creative process. McEwan has avoided magical realism in his work, saying, “All my writing life, I have refused to give my characters wings.” But hewing to realism can sometimes trip up a writer who delves, without true expertise perhaps, into the arcana of medicine, astronomy, and even auto mechanics. His lecture, “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World,” was the inaugural event in a new series funded by the Rita E. Hauser Forum at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. The lever, McEwan explained, is one of the six “simple machines” revered...