There’s something good in here, I just never really found it, and I never really felt compelled to do so after the first few chapters of Lessons. I picked up this novel with high hopes that it would get me out of a bit of a reading slump and it ended up doing the opposite. I took over a month to get through this five-hundred-page novel. It wasn’t because it was particularly heavy or slow reading, but more so that I never felt motivated to pick it up and power through the next 30-40 page chapter. Ian McEwan’s premise of tracing a man’s life through decades of trials and tribulations set against the backdrop of the 20th century’s major historical events was very appealing, but it ultimately meant very little of particular depth. Instead, I found every single character in this novel, including Roland, his wife Alissa, and the piano teacher all to be incredibly annoying and immature people. Not respectable. Not quite hateable. Just boring and irritating. And the major events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic were so forced into the narrative that it was more distracting than grounding.
All that said, there are some things to like here. The entire piano teacher storyline is interesting, and there are some genuinely touching moments Roland shares later on with his son and his granddaughter, but there is just so much bloat that the good parts end up feeling fleeting. Maybe I just was not in the right headspace for this book, but it definitely didn’t do much to put me there.
The Once and Future Lit 