Enduring Love

After six weeks in the States, Joe arranged a picture-perfect day in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's homecoming. However, when they are engaged in a bizarre ballooning accident where a man is murdered but a kid is rescued, the wonderful day turns into a nightmare. The accident alone was going to alter the lives of the couple and the survivors, leaving them feeling a strange mixture of pleasure, guilt, and never-ending self-analysis. But Joe's destiny had even more nasty surprises in store. For example, meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry out to be a very terrible idea. That following evening, Jed makes the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London apartment because he becomes immediately enamored. He'll soon be publicly observing Joe and writing many emails to him. (The first line of one mad epistle reads, "Happiness flows through me like electricity. When I shut my eyes, I imagine you standing across the street from me in the rain from last night, our unspoken love for one another as strong as steel wire. The worst part is that Joe's emotions for Clarissa appear to be distorted by Jed's interpretation of love.

Joe, a scientific writer, is most irritated by conditionals, or contingencies, apart from the constant stalking. If only he and Clarissa had left the airport and gone directly home... If only there had been less wind... If only he could have preserved all 29 of Jed's texts in one day... Being a poet of the random nightmare for a long time, Ian McEwan's characters inevitably get sucked into other people's imaginations, slide into more violent situations, and—worst of all—end as strangers to the people who love them. His writing is a meticulous and skillful effort in de-familiarization even in its own right. But in addition to being masterful manipulations of our own expectations, Enduring Love and its underappreciated forerunner, Black Dogs, are also musings on knowledge and perception. You won't feel too comfortable staring a stranger in the eye at the conclusion of the book, but you will be remarkably apathetic about hot-air balloons. **Freeman Alex