Living at the End of Time: On Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

  

The enigmatic title of Ian McEwan’s latest novel might more accurately be phrased as a question: What can we know? How are we to understand the world we inhabit, except by extrapolating the venality and compromises of the present? And what better medium for such an inquiry than fiction?

 

While reading What We Can Know, I could not shake the memory of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.  Each work is an intellectual high-wire act, in which one generation of scholars attempts to reconstruct the lives of an earlier one from fragmentary evidence—documents, marginalia, artifacts that have outlived their creators. Where Stoppard’s characters look back two centuries, McEwan’s scholars inhabit the early twenty-second century and look back at us. Both works are haunted by the same ghostly reciprocity: one generation watching another, unknowingly observed in return.

 

McEwan’s novel is not science fiction in any sensational sense. It feels instead like a plausible extension of the world we already know—a future shaped by environmental neglect and geopolitical recklessness, their consequences long deferred and then catastrophically realized. Europe has splintered into archipelagos; America has devolved into a feudal landscape ruled by warlords; and what remains of human knowledge is preserved in remote libraries and through the aptly named “Nigerian Internet Network.” The novel operates as a layered cautionary tale, not least in its treatment of privacy. We, clinging to the illusion that encryption and passwords protect us, are gently mocked by a future narrator who knows better:

 

“I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, just whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard on the screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”

 

By the mid-2030s, the term “the Derangement” comes into common usage, a litany of climate catastrophe—its effects so often rehearsed that they weary activists and skeptics alike. The phrase carries an added implication: a collective cognitive failure, our bias toward short-term comfort over long-term survival. Humanity itself is deranged. More quietly still, belief in progress collapses, along with belief in a future.

 

By the mid-twenty-first century, the world confronts what the novel chillingly calls “the fatal concept of limited nuclear war.” A poorly engineered Russian missile, aimed at the southern United States, detonates prematurely in the mid-Atlantic, triggering tsunamis that devastate Europe, West Africa, and the eastern seaboard of North America. Suspicion that the blast may have been deliberate pushes the world to the brink of retaliation before a fragile peace is hastily imposed.

 

If this sounds fantastical, it does not read that way. McEwan writes with such assurance and precision that the imagined future feels less like prophecy than consequence. He is very much at the height of his powers, able to compress centuries into a sentence, as when he observes that “the mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind, and rain on limestone cliffs.”

 

Yet all of this is prologue. The heart of the novel lies with two future scholars, Professors Thomas Metcalfe and Rose Church, among the dwindling number of literary historians in a world that now overwhelmingly favors the sciences over the humanities. Their shared obsession is a legendary 2014 poem by Francis Blundy, one of the great poets of the early twenty-first century: Corona for Vivian, written for his wife, Vivian. Blundy is likened to T. S. Eliot—“both poets had a Vivian in their lives…and a comfortable kind of English existence that masked turmoil and carelessness with the lives of others.” Only one copy of the poem is known to exist, handwritten on parchment for Vivian’s birthday.

 

The lives of Thomas and Rose in the twenty-second century are subtly braided with those of Francis and Vivian a century earlier. Thomas becomes so absorbed in Vivian’s story that he might be said to fall in love with her. Reflecting on his research into what came to be known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” where the poem was first read in 2014, echoing the famous 1817 gathering attended by Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, Thomas observes:

 

“If I look up from my papers… I can’t believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages of my hands… I could’ve been there. I am there. I know all that they do—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful… Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love.”

 

The emotional and sexual vitality of Francis and Vivian’s world stands in stark contrast to the diminished lives of Thomas and Rose. If McEwan is passing judgment, it may be here: seize the day. The novel is at once a mystery as well as of murder, infidelity, and secrecy, and a meditation on love in its many forms. It is a work of suspense, but also of tenderness, beautifully composed and deeply felt.

 

The twenty-first-century sections teem with characters and subplots; the twenty-second is spare, almost austere, survival having displaced social abundance. Yet even amid catastrophe, life continues, if with reduced expectations. Outrage follows outrage; democracy erodes; and still people cook, teach, love, and endure. McEwan’s structure reinforces this vision: a first part that moves restlessly across time, followed by a second composed almost entirely of Vivian’s journal.

 

Until then, Vivian has existed largely in outline—as Francis’s devoted wife. Her journal transforms her into something richer and more autonomous. She recounts her intellectual formation, her first marriage to Percy, and her long-standing love affair with Francis’s brother-in-law, Harry—also Francis’s publisher. The journal is exquisitely written and becomes, through Thomas’s dogged persistence, recovered from a time capsule.

 

It also gives McEwan license to write some of his most piercing passages. After Vivian and Francis’s relationship becomes public, Francis publishes Feasting, a poetry collection that includes a love cycle devoted to her. Against all expectations, it becomes a bestseller and is later adapted into a film. Vivian finds herself transformed—first exposed, then abstracted, finally erased into symbol. McEwan captures this with surgical precision:

 

“I felt sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog….I did not complain, and later, I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all.  What remained was not even a woman, but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination.“

 

To avoid spoilers, I will end this impression (“review” feels too exhaustive) abruptly. Whether that time capsule also contains the full text of Corona for Vivian is best left to the reader. For me, the novel’s deepest truth lies in Thomas’s reflection near the end:

 

“Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this is what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending—or, Vivian, Rose, and I—teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk [a literary superstar of the 2030s], and the rest…. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less…. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”

 

To give Vivian’s journal, The Confessions of Vivian Blundy, its final measure of verisimilitude, McEwan appends a brief note as the end of the novel, one I reproduce below. It is not a spoiler. It simply closes Confessions the way history so often does: with a record, not an explanation.

 

Five Years After the Day That Changed Everything

 

 

Out of necessity—primarily my own mental health—I just can’t write much more about that day that will live in infamy: five years ago, Jan. 6.

 

We all saw it with our own eyes, and no matter how it is spun by the nihilism of the right, it was not only an impeachable offense but the beginning of a lawlessness in this country that now, on a daily basis, reaches new lows—while trampling international law as well.

 

Mike Luckovich, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you for an explanation of what, exactly, is going on.

 

In the wake of Jan. 6, I wrote this entry, but Heather Cox Richardson today provides a thorough explanation with five years of hindsight and her command of history. 

There was once a time I would be writing our representatives. But Congress, as well as SCOTUS, has made it pretty clear that we are on our own. That leaves the midterm elections this year as our only hope. And that assumes the very kind of election interference Trump et al. have gaslighted accusations about is not turned on by them in this crucial election.

 

Between gerrymandering and Republican control of both the narrative and the election rules themselves, we should be concerned. And will the Democrats have the good sense to run moderate candidates—ones Republicans fed up with Trump can at least hold their noses and come out to vote for?

 

I can go on. To what end?

 

Totally changing the subject, as I need to turn to something hopeful: our community has a local art show, and I entered two photographic pieces. Here is the proud “artist” with his contributions.

 

The top photograph was taken at the J.P. Morgan Library’s Jane Austen exhibit this past summer. I titled the photograph “Deliberations.” It captures a museumgoer admiring Amy Sherald’s oil painting, A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune (2019). The title, of course, comes from Pride and Prejudice. Sherald composes striking, dignified portraits of people of color.

 

The second photograph I titled “Waiting in Casablanca,” taken quietly with a telephoto lens so as not to disturb the subject, who sat alone in his chair for some time.  

 

To me, candid portraits and composition are what make photographs interesting and potential works of art.

 

 

A Late Encounter with a Young Novelist, Ross Barkan

 

For some time now, I’ve been in a fiction-reading funk. Part of this has to do with the brave new digital world and getting wrapped up in the hyperventilating coverage of our American carnage. But perhaps leaning into that feeling is also the passing—or gradual silencing—of my literary heroes.

 

I particularly related to John Updike’s fiction. He was about ten years older than I am. His five Rabbit novels, chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, were published between 1960 and 2001—years that coincided with the most formative period of my adult life. I read all of his fiction and was struck by how far afield he sometimes went from the Rabbit books: the epic The Beauty of the Lilies; the visionary Toward the End of Time (a remarkable 1997 novel set in the then-future year of 2020, with society on the verge of collapse even as the outward normalcy of life continues); and Terrorist (2007), the last major novel of his lifetime, where he took on the problem of modern extremism.

 

Even if Updike had only been a short-story writer, his 200-plus stories would have placed him on a plane with John Cheever. Add to that his essays and poems, many written for The New Yorker, the publication with which he is most closely associated. There is no writer who can match his productivity and level of art. He was the Babe Ruth of American letters.

 

Philip Roth is a close second in my mind: a great novelist expressing other aspects of American—and Jewish—angst. Between Updike and Roth I felt I had a miner’s safety hat and beacon with which to plumb the depths of the contemporary American soul.

They were writing the great American novels of my time—the golden ring earlier chased by Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway.

 

There are many other contemporary American writers I continue to try to read—Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, et al. But others, Richard Yates, Paul Auster, and James Salter have passed away, and Richard Ford and Louis Begley have succumbed to aging. Ford’s five Frank Bascombe novels are reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit quintet, with Be Mine (2023 bringing closure to the character and making it unlikely that others will follow. His 2017 memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, helped spur the idea of writing my own.

 

Nonetheless, I continued my quest to seek a new novelist who writes in the vein I so admired when younger—a writer who simply speaks to me and my era, passé though I may be in my references and sentimentalism.

 

The times hang heavily—and by times I mean both the temper of the era and my remaining time. The combination is a toxic mix for reading fiction, though not necessarily for consuming the political disaster du jour, which The New York Times and a number of Substack essayists report on repeatedly. The New Yorker recently reported that “in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon,” a trend I found myself embodying.

 

 

It was probably through Substack, a year or two ago, that I came across Ross Barkan. Two attributes hooked me: he is a New York City boy (I can call him that as he’s less than half my age), and if you set him loose on a topic—frequently NYC politics, something I’m far removed from now—he can write up a storm.

 

He wears another writing hat as a cofounder and Editor in Chief of The Metropolitan Review.  It harks back to the traditions of the Parisian literary salon and is reminiscent to the “Little Magazines” of the 20’s and 30’s devoted to literature, culture and intellectual thought.  It’s quite an undertaking, and seemingly effortless on his part.   

When I first “met” him on Substack, he was hawking a book he was writing, Glass Century, even having the chutzpah to imply it might be the next great American novel (I don’t recall him saying that exactly, but the implication was there). He had published a few things before, but nothing on that scale. I said to myself: fine—publish the book, I’ll read the reviews, and then I’ll consider it.

 

He easily got blurbs and some notices, but not even The New York Times reviewed the book when it was published in early May of this year. (Unfortunately, the major publishers all passed on the book, which was finally published by Tough Poets Press. It’s difficult for small presses to get exposure in the major review media. Those major publishers may regret their decision one day.) So I still hung back, occupied with finishing my own memoir, Explaining It: A Life Between the Lines, getting through the summer, and then recovering from an illness that further delayed my return to possibly reading fiction.

 

Unread novels are now stacked in my study. I occasionally pick one up, read a few pages, lose interest, and guiltily put it back on my “to be read” shelf—only to repeat the process weeks later. Nothing seemed to hold my attention long enough. There was a time when I lived for the next novel by my favorite writers.

 

So it was a kind of stalemate. Yet Barkan’s Substack essays kept arriving, each one meaningful. I learned he had even run for office, with a young Zohran Mamdani as his campaign manager. He didn’t win (seen in retrospect, a victory for both of them in terms of life paths).

 

Eventually though I ordered Glass Century for my ever-expanding “to be read” shelves. When it arrived, I looked it over carefully and read about the contents. The cover unsettled me: the Twin Towers are pictured, and that wound still runs deep in my psyche.

Did I really want to read fiction about the agony of that day? It was clear that some characters would be victims and others left to grieve. If I became emotionally invested, I too would be impacted. Did I want to relive 9/11 yet again?

 

For weeks, the book sat untouched.

 

Eventually, curiosity—or perhaps the need to break the silence of my study—won out.  I finally picked it up, perhaps hoping the NYC focus would help me snap out of the reading funk.

 

It begins with a most improbable event: an ersatz wedding between the two main characters, Saul Plotz and Mona Glass, in 1973. The wedding is staged for Mona’s conventional Jewish parents, who want her to settle down and produce grandchildren. She’s in her early twenties, but those were still the times. She and Saul have been carrying on an affair; she was his student at City College. Saul is already married, with two children, and ten years older.

 

Hold the presses! How unlikely is this plot device? Even if only a few know the truth at this pretend wedding, how could it not eventually be discovered by the parents? I found the premise nearly preposterous. But I read on, perhaps because Mona was described as an up-and-coming tennis star and, as tennis is the one sport I still play, I thought: show me what you’ve got in your imagination, Barkan, when it comes to tennis.

 

Well, a few dozen pages into the book, he did.

 

I set the stage. The protagonist, Mona Glass, is playing tennis as a 24-year-old on New York City courts around the time Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs (oh, how I remember the hoopla over that event). Mona is a naturally gifted player who didn’t have the advantages of private lessons enjoyed by many of the women she plays, including her best friend, Liv, whom she now routinely beats.

 

On this particular day, Mona is playing—no, destroying—Liv on a court adjacent to two men pounding the ball. A couple of times, Mona’s ball rolls onto their court, interfering with their play. The third time it happens, one of the men, Alec, snaps: “Ladies, if you can’t keep your ball on your own court, you shouldn’t be out here.”

 

Mona goes ballistic. She is intense on the tennis court, her skill and moxie making up for a shortage of lessons. She challenges him to a one-on-one match, best of three. He is goaded into accepting, and that’s where the following six pages pick up. The first sentence of the first page is not complete, so add: “She had hardly noticed how he played. He was a man,” and then the text continues below.

 

 

To me, this writing captures the raw truth of the sport in the way a piece of program music captures a feeling. By then, I was not only hooked on the novel but, coincidentally, at about the same time, Barkan published a remarkable essay on Substack, “On the Beach: Glass Century, and the relationships that make up a life.”

 

Having just published my memoir, I was particularly drawn to this observation: “The act of writing creates a counter, an immediate parallel universe. Even memoir is a form of fabrication, memories leaky unless they’re eidetic, and you’re left to plumb what is essentially a form of darkness—not evil, but the absence of immediacy.”

 

His novel is indeed a window into his life. I had been asking myself how Barkan could have dreamed up this material—the development of two parallel families sharing the same father. Reading his essay clarified that question. It made clear how what I had initially dismissed as preposterous plot devices made perfect sense within the context of his life and became natural in the novel.

 

The frankness and transparency of the essay reveal the novelist’s mind at work. And at long last, here was a novel in the form I love: an epic spanning roughly fifty years—from the era of my second marriage through the Covid years—set in the city I still love, even from a distance.

 

Barkan’s father was a distinctly Philip Roth–like character. In my opinion, Roth’s finest novel is American Pastoral. Writing about Jewish fathers and sons, Roth observes: “[The fathers] were men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.” The heart of Glass Century is the father/son relationship and Barkan’s love for his own father—while the mother who raised Barkan becomes the foundation for the central character of Mona Glass.

 

My own memoir includes a few short stories, not because I consider myself an accomplished creative writer—far from it, having no such formal education—but because they indirectly reflect my life in some way. While those stories are not memoir, they carry the redolence of lived experience. They inhabit an imagined world of what might have been, not necessarily what was. There is always some form of memoir in fiction and fiction in memoir. Barkan, I think, would agree with this.

 

His essay “On the Beach” explicitly ties events and characters to aspects of the novel. Barkan describes himself as an “unrepentant beach obsessive,” sharing his father’s interests in baseball and politics, describing him as “an inveterate yenta on politics and sports and the city.” Details such as his father living a double life; seeing Richard Nixon in an elevator and talking Mets; attending high school with the man who later became right-wing radio star Michael Savage; the Chinese buffet Barkan and his father frequented; and the fact that his father had a doctor’s appointment on 9/11 drawing him away from a Twin Tower office, all make oblique appearances in the novel.

 

Here are some of Barkan’s key observations on how the novel came into being:

 

“My parents’ drive for secrecy had convinced me it was best to swat away inconvenience. I could imagine, rather, nothing was wrong. And isn’t that what writers do anyway? Imagine? … [T]here remained an unexplained psychic barrier to such probing, one that held my tongue in place. In these lacunae, at least, I could devise my own fictions… The novel, as antediluvian as it might seem in this tech-addled age, was my totem, and I considered it the highest art form—or the art form, at least, where I could channel my skill into an object that would achieve permanence.”

 

The self-revelatory nature of the essay is evident:

 

“Fiction, fiction! I love it so. My father would have liked to have read all of this, and I lament that I never showed him a draft of the novel before he died. If he was secretive, he appreciated a good show, and as a deep admirer of Roth, he could never begrudge the writers who raided their own lives. A meditative memoir and essay like this one would conventionally conclude, in some form, with the old father-son heart-to-heart, all secrets revealed, all threads tied, closure obtained. That’s not how it works with flawed people.”

 

I will leave the rest of the novel’s machinery for the reader to discover. Even without the roadmap of Barkan's essays, I would still have found Glass Century a satisfying journey, though some elements of the resolution strain credulity. I needn’t go into those here; as a first effort, this is a meaningful page-turner. I’m grateful simply to be back in the swing of reading fiction, and I have Ross Barkan to thank for that.

 

Reading Barkan reminded me of a conviction I shared in a 2012 essay, “The Novel as Social History,” where I made the case that few historians can capture the zeitgeist of an era better than some of our novelists. In my time, Updike and Philip Roth were on the cutting edge, and before them John Dos Passos, among others. I think of Glass Century as belonging to that tradition of social commentary and lived history.

 

Barkan is dreaming big. He has a forthcoming novel, Colossus, and another (yet to be titled) that he is presently completing. As if he hasn’t already thoroughly examined the writing process in his “On the Beach” Substack essay, he goes further in “The Alchemy of the Novel,” a recent piece published in Arcade Publishing’s newsletter (Arcade being the publisher of Colossus, scheduled for April 2026, roughly a year after Glass Century).

 

There he writes:

 

“Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor [Teddy Starr] in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure from my last novel, Glass Century, and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the 2020s. The untitled third novel in this set, which is nearly done, will share a certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus.”

 

“The Alchemy of the Novel,” along with “On the Beach,” is an important examination of the urgency to write and publish relevant fiction for our times. As Barkan says, “Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction that peaked sometime in the 2010s or early 2020s, and they want literature, I believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human condition.” Indeed!

 

I was accustomed to waiting years—sometimes decades—for a new Rabbit novel by John Updike or a new Frank Bascombe novel by Richard Ford. Not one a year, but spaced out over a lifetime. Now, suddenly, that old sense of anticipation has come rushing back.