First Love, Last Rites: Stories

The stories in "First Love, Last Rites" are very uneven. The best of the lot - "Homemade" and "Disguises" - are dazzling in their detail and careful construction of character. Both are...perverted? twisted?...tales of misplaced sexuality. In "Homemade," a boy rapes his prepubescent sister in order to experience sex for the first time; in "Disguises," a boy is dressed in eccentric and sexually ambiguous costumes by his aunt, a former star of the stage. McEwan builds marvelous tension; each of these stories feels dangerous and vital.

The other stories vary from decent ("First Love, Last Rites") to downright terrible ("Cocker at the Theater"). In fact, "Cocker..." was so bad I laughed out loud when I finished it. The piece contains the usual public naked hijinks penned by literary-minded frat boys and submitted to undergraduate poetry mags and is just as poorly written. The rest of the stories are technically proficient but lack any sort of moral, human, or artistic depth. They are concept pieces combing self-loathing and sex. Perhaps utterly necessary to write, but equally difficult to read.

Still, I might recommend the collection - especially a used or borrowed copy - for the stories bookending the drivel in the middle.

I would begin my review by saying that if you are going to begin a journey into the wonderful world of McEwan, don't begin here. Then I would say that he is one of my favorite writers, EVER. He is incredibly good, but I am afraid that none of these eight stories really resonated with me. I would say that they don't represent how well he can write. If you began here, you might assume that McEwan is somewhat fixated with sexual rites of passage themes, when really he isn't.
From a pickled penis, in the first story; to childhood incestuous rape, in the second; to a third story (perhaps the best of all) with the least amount of sexual innuendo; to the fourth, depicting uncontrollable on-stage public sexual intercourse; to the fifth, sexually motivated murder; to the sixth, about a masturbatory recluse; to the seventh, the "art" of which, eluded me almost entirely; to the eighth, involving what I consider child abuse brought on by a self-obsessed, cross-dressing caregiver.
Are the stories written well? Hell yes.
McEwan is exquisite (present tense) and this book (1975) proves that "exquisiteness" is not just a recent development with him. It is the subject matter that I find objectionable. And not so much in an "immoral" sense as much as in an "unappealing" sense. In these stories he is dealing with such grotesque imagery, that I find it difficult to find these particular stories applicable. For the most part, they are about the kind of stuff that even the newspapers omit from their most disturbing back pages.
Maybe I don't want to look that close. Perhaps I don't want to read about how some guy "tosses himself off" in the closet of some attic somewhere, or how in a shadowy tunnel along a river, a young girl is sexually victimized and then slid into the river, like a fish that no one wanted, because it was too small for a good meal.
They are fairly brutal stories, I'm not kidding.
But McEwan is SUCH a great writer. If I have caught you in time, read him elsewhere, and then come back here when you are in love with him. And trust him.

Like other reviewers, I marvel at the genius (a term I rarely use) of Mr. McEwan, in works such as "Atonement," "Amsterdam," and "Saturday." I believe that he is the finest writer of fiction living today. However "First Love, Last Rites," written albeit very early in his career, while offering us snippets of dark humor and polished prose, are for the most part one-dimensional tales of sexual rites of passage. And bizarre rites they are! One is exposed to incest, child abuse and other peculiar tales from a writer who was obviously groping his way onto the literary landscape. Concentrate on his later works and forget this compilation. He is so much better than these stories.

"First Love, Last Rites (FLLR)" is Ian McEwan's first short story collection and while I love virtually every novel he has written so far - "Enduring Love", "Black Dogs" and "Atonement" are truly modern classics - FLLR is very early McEwan, showing promise but lacking the assured confidence of his later works. In this Somerset Maugham Award winning book, McEwan displays all the qualities that have come to characterise his style. Unafraid to break taboos or upset social conventions, he forces the boundaries of acceptability and occasionally goes for the jugular when he employs shock tactics to awaken our natural instinct for the dark and the macabre that lies dormant beneath our consciousness.

The opening vignette "Solid Geometry" is fascinating sci-fi-cum-horror fare. I couldn't help stifling a chuckle at the inventive way in which the protagonist finally "got rid" of his wife. "Homemade" about the awakening of a boy's sexuality via the only means available to him is another winner, both terrifying and funny. "Butterflies" and "Conversations With A Cupboard Man" are more conventional stories about loners and the devastating effect of repression. "Last Day Of Summer" is a gentle reminder that "still waters run deep" with grotesques. I don't think I got the essence of "Cocker At The Theatre" though it seems to be about sexuality and control and how they don't mix. The last two stories are to me the weakest in the collection. The title story seems tame and listless, ie, it goes nowhere, while the closing vignette "Disguises" is too befuddling to make any sense of. Is the aunt just mad or is she a closet cross dresser and a dominatrix in her little mad house ? Too much of a mindbender for me.

"First Love, Last Rites" is a qualified success. The highs are truly excellent but be prepared for a couple of disappointments.

I have no idea what people see in this book. I had such high hopes, only to have them dashed by a collection of surreal 'huh?' stories -- turned me off Ian McEwan completely.