Michiko Misinterprets Novelist Ian McEwan, and Says 'Greed' Causing Global Warming
Michiko Kakutani's review of Ian McEwan's new novel "Solar" graced the front of Tuesday's Arts section: "The Planet Be Damned. It's All About Me."
Kakutani, staying consistent to her liberalism, appeared to seriously misinterpret the point behind McEwan's main character, Michael Beard, a global-warming fighting do-gooder "helping" humanity while hating and taking advantage of the actual human beings around him:
In his latest novel, "Solar," Mr. McEwan's protagonist - a fat, middle-aged Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Michael Beard - joins this gallery of distasteful antiheroes. In the course of the book he will not only cheat on five wives and innumerable girlfriends and send an innocent man to jail, but he will also steal another scientist's plans for stopping global warming and try to turn them into a big, moneymaking machine. This self-deluding scientist will come to embody just about everything that has brought about the climate-change crisis in the first place: greed, heedlessness and a willful refusal to think about consequences or the future.
