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Saturday
A Novel
by Ian McEwan


7.0

based on 36 reviews
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The Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement returns with a novel set during a single Saturday in February 2003, as a car accident sets up a confrontation between a London neurosurgeon and a troubled man on the eve of the Iraq War.

Nan A. Talese, 304 pages
03/22/2005
$26.00

ISBN: 0385511809

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Atlantic Monthly Christopher Hitchens

With this novel the soft and the hard McEwan come into an exquisite balance.

Chicago Sun-Times Randy Michael Signor

This is a stunning novel, its subtle depth surprisingly affecting, its voice both warm and troubled

Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse

In his new novel, "Saturday," the marvelously gifted Ian McEwan turns a single day into nearly 24 hours emblematic of an entire era.

Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones

[Saturday] offers a detailed portrait of an age, of how we live now, and... it offers more, something transcendent, impossible to dissect.

Kirkus Reviews

A sort of middle-class humanist manifesto: when you find yourself fortunate beyond all measure in a random universe, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are a decent response.

Los Angeles Times Michael Gorra

McEwan's prose is without flamboyance, and yet every other sentence seems to offer an arresting phrase.

Publishers Weekly

[A] wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now.

Salon Allen Barra

Saturday showcases McEwan's almost effortless gift for weaving contrapuntal themes into a narrative: the relationship between rationality and creativity, the survival of happiness in the wake of incalculable violence, the necessity for fiction in a world of fact. All shadow the story without intrusion.

Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Knox

By limiting himself to the goings-on in the mind of a man who is both solitary and deeply connected with his world, McEwan has taken on a brave challenge. Can he rely on his tools alone, without an ambitious narrative to distract and delight the reader and allow forgiveness if McEwan falls short? Are his gifts as a stylist and psychologist good enough? Saturday says yes, and not just good enough, but something far greater.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Michael Helm

The true wonder of Saturday is not what it's about, but what it is. [19 Feb. 2005, D6]

The Independent James Urquhart

McEwan's superb novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage.

The Independent Marek Kohn

Saturday lives up to its own standards throughout. Its author's scrupulous application of his talent merits real gratitude from its readers. Saturday is distinguished by an intense literary imagination that is fundamentally scientific in its vision and its criteria.

The Nation Lee Siegel

This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics.

The Spectator Anita Brookner

Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan's best.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

The novel is most provocative as a philosophical inquiry into happiness--though even in this capacity, it tends toward a defeated conservatism.

Wall Street Journal George Sim Johnston

[McEwan's] novel "Saturday" is characteristically somber but at the same time oddly buoyant. It puts you through the ringer, but you profit from the experience.

The New Republic James Wood

Reading McEwan, there are times when one feels that the extreme narrative order--his clean joins and hinges--have been purchased at too high a cost to credibility, and sometimes even to animation and free life... But one will forgive much when prose is as good as this.

The Onion A.V. Club Nan A. Talese

Even if the choices made in 2003 prove catastrophic in the years to come, Saturday has been designed as a comforting reminder of how we once lived.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

Though "Saturday" is too indebted to "Mrs. Dalloway" to resonate with the fierce originality of the author's last book, "Atonement," it's clear that with this volume, Mr. McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we - a privileged few of us, anyway - live today.

The Guardian Mark Lawson

One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world.

San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand

An unfortunate few times, the book reads as medical text. At others, McEwan's writing is sublime and poetic, even if we have to look up some of the words.

Slate Stephen Metcalf

For all its economy and topicality--9/11 and the Iraq war lurk behind every page--Saturday is a deeply English novel, a beautiful book presided over... by a longing for the old village virtues of peace and continuity.

PopMatters Jeff Gomez

In Saturday McEwan gives us in a few hundred pages -- not a life -- but a day, and he does it brilliantly.

Library Journal Barbara Hoffert

McEwan has done his job: the tension is palpable, the narrative tightly knit, and each character beautifully drawn.

London Review Of Books Christopher Tayler

The customarily firm forward march of the narrative works surprisingly well with the more spaced-out requirements of a day-in-the-life story, and at its best the combination of precision and lyricism is very effective.

Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore

This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful.

Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp

McEwan's novel ends with the hard-won virtues of forgiveness, familial love, and decency. It's not the grace found at the end of "Atonement," but there's something moving in the fact that Henry always can be counted on to do the decent thing.

Booklist Donna Seaman

McEwan is as provocative, transporting, and brilliant as ever as he considers both our vulnerability and our strength, particularly our ability to create sanctuary in a violent world. [15 Feb. 2005, p. 1036]

Boston Globe Anita Shreve

Few literary events are today met with as much enthusiasm as the publication of a McEwan novel. ''Saturday," a brilliant and graceful hymn to the contented contemporary man, will be greeted with cheers.

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

[McEwan's] least frightening book yet. [8 April 2005, p. 68]

LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard

Saturday has many shrewd things to say about love, work, marriage, medicine, poetry, and how children do and do not turn out to resemble their parents... But too often the novel reads like a series of leisurely, gently fictionalized essays.

The Economist

"Saturday" is not a McEwan masterpiece: it is just a little too safe. But it is still hugely enjoyable for all that.

The New York Times Book Review Zoe Heller

Finely wrought and shimmering with intelligence though it is, it never quite fully submerges its thesis.

Washington Post Michael Dirda

Despite all its virtues, and these include some astonishing pages of description... Saturday still feels a little too artful, just a smidgen over-contrived.

USA Today Deirdre Donahue

There is no question that McEwan has a gift for writing. But compared with Atonement, Amsterdam and Enduring Love, among others, Saturday is a chore to read, bogged down by McEwan's political musings and obvious medical research.

New York Review Of Books John Banville

Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.--are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.

The average user rating for this book is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 21 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Karen P gave it a6:
Far too smug to be a great book. The story kept me interested and the writing as ever was fluid but the middle class perfection irrated far more than I can attribute to the characters alone. Felt a bit bludgeoned by a McEwan Tory party pamphlet made of 100lb lead. Maybe that says more about me than it does him

federica C gave it an8:
it's a little bit slowly in the narration of facts and to precise in lexicon above alll for a non native reader,but I think it's a realistic portrait of our thinking and way of living.sometimes it make me anxious reading it...

TheKate M gave it a3:
This book was so sterile and processed that I couldn't wait to put it down and get my hands dirty with something else. Very rarely do I find myself so detached from a novel and its characters that I can spend my time disliking the author and wondering what he did to inspire such neglect from his editors and loved ones... not at all what I expected from Mr. McEwan.

Lucy gave it a5:
Too self-consciously intellectual. Feel author's hand in things at every page....trying too hard.

Michael K gave it a10:
This is an exemplary current-events novel which embodies everything Philip Roth had in mind when he wrote his influential 1961 essay, "Writing American Fiction." I love this book so much I've read it a few times. Not often mentioned are the allusions to Darwinism, which are somewhat reminiscent of John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and play against the gorgeous Matthew Arnold poem quoted in the story. Part Hitchcockian thriller, I find this novel thrilling in every respect.

stephen h gave it a10:
That fiction should finally accept the realities of studies of the brain is a wonder. A citation from Charles Darwin, a stret diagnosis of a heritable genetic disorder and a surgeon who dismisses most fiction as a waste of time are all commendable features of this book. Combing all that with fine characterisation and realistic events make this novel a full step above others. And it was passed over for the Booker??!!

Suzanne S gave it a5:
Saturday is a tour de force redoing Mrs. Dalloway as a male neurosurgeon. Perhaps the made-for-tv-movie aspects--such as the Cosby Show family (including Famous Poet But Alcoholic father-in-law, Brilliant, Beautiful Attorney wife, Just-Ripe Poetess daughter, and So-Cool, Handsome Guitarist son) and the climax--are meant to be ironic (and certainly that is achieved in a reader's recipe, suitable for a glossy lifestyle magazine, for the fictional fish stew) , but they come across as simply shallow and enervated. Even with its flourishes, the novel is too clever by half: The research pages about neurology and music audibly turn. I hope that Ian McEwan can find a better way to use his facility.

Saturday A Novel by Ian McEwan

Saturday
A Novel
by Ian McEwan