Lessons: Ian McEwan’s novelized history of boomer anxiety 

Roland then begins what he calls his “lost decade,” playing in a jazz band, working odd jobs, entering numerous short-term relationships with women, and traveling around the world, including to East Germany. There he befriends a couple, one of whom is arrested for publishing an article in an unsanctioned magazine and the other for not reporting him. He becomes disillusioned with the Labor Party’s commitment to socialism and turns in his membership card. Later, Roland, an on-and-off journalist and poet, pitches a leftist publication an essay arguing that a Margaret Thatcher premiership would advance the feminist cause, which it rejects. Unsurprisingly, he becomes a Blairite in the ’90s.

After a stream of girlfriends, Roland marries Alissa Eberhardt, the daughter of Heinrich, a German lawyer who had been a minor figure in the White Rose resistance group during the Nazi regime, and Jane, a British mother who, as a young aspiring writer, met him in the aftermath of the war determined to write a book about the White Rose. She never published it. Alissa, herself an aspiring novelist, blamed Heinrich and the confines of motherhood for this. After reading her mother’s brilliantly written journals, Alissa is determined that Jane’s unfulfilled dreams will not be her inheritance. She is successful in this regard. In 1986, she disappears to Europe, leaving Roland to raise their infant son Lawrence as a single father. By the end of the book, which ends in the present day, she is considered one of Europe’s greatest living authors. When Alissa leaves him, he “likes to think” he is a poet.

By the end of the book, Roland’s child Lawrence, now married with a child, is living abroad in Germany. Roland is broke and unemployed, having been laid off from his job as a lounge pianist during the most recent coronavirus lockdown. He attempts to write an uninspired article about Thatcher for some nondescript online publication in America for a pittance and burns several decades’ worth of journals in the yard, convinced that they are useless.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is its structure. I found it impossible to decide whether the narrative was linear or not. It felt linear. The book begins with Roland taking piano lessons from his future lover/statutory rapist and ends in his old age, during the pandemic. But, for example, the beginning scene with the piano teacher ends with Roland’s first orgasm, which in turn leads to a vision of a “sea of writhing creatures, smaller than tadpoles, millions on millions, packed to the curved horizon.” Poetically, this vision is actually a dream of Roland’s, interrupted by the crying of baby Lawrence in the weeks after Alissa abandoned them. The time-hopping is not limited to Roland’s life. There are pages upon pages dedicated to the White Rose movement, for example. The book becomes more linear over time, but this happens so gradually that it seems impossible to pinpoint exactly when the story has “caught up.” A lesser writer would have created an unreadable mess with this structure, but McEwan is a master of his craft. By the last page, I felt I’d been given nothing less than a full and orderly account of Roland’s entire life.

But the book is more than just a fictional biography. The book has much to say about the past, the present, politics, boomers, family, and, perhaps most prominently, the sexual revolution and its afterlives. Roland Baines is a Forrest Gump of sorts, appearing in the midst of nearly every significant 20th century event. But unlike Gump bumbling through the center of these events at precisely the right time, Baines is usually standing by in the margins. In Gump & Co, Forrest is chased across the Berlin Wall, causing its collapse. In Lessons, Roland just happens to be in Berlin to witness it, having tagged along with a friend on a business trip. By the book’s end, the second-wave feminism that inspired Alissa to leave her family to pursue her writing career also inspires her to quip on an American talk show that “a surgeon might sculpt a ‘kind of man’ out of a woman, but there was never enough good stuff to carve a woman out of a man,” leading to accusations of transphobia and, in turn, a decline in U.S. and U.K. book sales, NGO condemnations, internet notoriety, a withdrawn honorary degree from an Ivy League school, and a collapsed book tour.

Similarly, the sexual revolution catches up with Miriam, who upon taking Roland’s virginity remarked that “she might be the first woman on the Shotley peninsula to be on the pill.” At some unclear time close to the present, Roland is visited by the police. Newly committed to pursuing past sex crimes, they have discovered his relationship with an older woman during his teenage years through a filed-away cache of Roland’s personal writings that were collected after Alissa left him — she had left only a short letter, and when Roland reported her disappearance to the police, they briefly suspected him of murdering her and forging the note. A police officer visits Roland, encouraging him to press charges against his abuser, whose identity is unknown to law enforcement. Roland says he will consider it and recruits Lawrence to track Miriam down under the premise of reconnecting with his old piano teacher. Roland confronts Miriam in her home and demands to hear the story from her perspective. She refuses to discuss the matter at first but does so after he threatens to press charges. When she says, “If only you hadn’t come that day,” concerning their first night together during the Cuban missile crisis, he becomes angry, pointing out that he had come on an invitation she gave to him three years earlier, at age 11, after touching his genitals during a piano lesson at school. Miriam apologizes forcefully and explicitly, “I know it was my responsibility, not yours, that I sank to this. You’re right. I shouldn’t have said if only you hadn’t come. What I did caused you to come. I understand that.”

The desperation in her voice bothers Roland. Later in the conversation, he becomes troubled by the complexity of their encounter, calling it “corrupt, distorted by a withheld history — his own. He was the cocky little sprat who came looking for instant sexual initiation for fear that the world was about to end. In his tiny boys-only sphere, she was the only available one he knew. Attractive, single, erotically inclined. He came itching with purpose and was pleased and proud when he got what he wanted. Now, 40 years later, he had come to accuse this dignified lady, to demand under threat a session of self-criticism. Like a young guardian of the Cultural Revolution, one of a self-righteous mob, tormenting an elderly Chinese professor.” He then begins arguing with himself. “His life had been altered. Some would say ruined. But was it really? She had given him joy. He was the stooge of current orthodoxies. No, it wasn’t that either!”

This scene is an obvious examination of the #MeToo movement, barely concealed but refreshing given the reversed gender roles in a movement that often descended into callous misandry and bold in its examination of victim complicity, the usefulness of reopening old wounds, and even the very nature of victimhood itself. Does Roland actually feel victimized by Miriam, or does he just think he should be? The author lets this question go unanswered, as it often does in real life. But by posing it in reference to a relationship that would have been condemned as immoral and illegal well before terms like “power dynamic” entered the public discourse, McEwan says much about the excesses of the #MeToo movement without mentioning them at all.

Lessons, given its massive, seven-decade scope, dedicates much time to documenting change and, surprisingly, the lack of it. In an early scene, Roland, as a newly single father, along with everybody else, is driven to paranoia by the Chernobyl meltdown. After finding that every pharmacy is sold out of potassium iodide, he settles for putting aluminum foil on his windows, feeling rather pessimistic about the usefulness of it but compelled to do it anyway. One does not have to know that the book ends in a coronavirus lockdown to see the parallels to the early days of the pandemic when masks were impossible to find and the anxious middle classes sprayed disinfectant on their Instacart-delivered groceries before bringing them inside.

Lessons is a masterpiece — and not one a young man could have written. Only someone who lived through the entire second half of the 20th century could recount its history with such vivid precision. Only a boomer could encapsulate the psychology of that generation throughout time, the radicalism of the ’70s, the ambition of the ’80s, and the optimism of the ’90s, never losing sight of the fact that they were children raised on Cold War paranoia and the bomb. Only the voice of a generation coming to its end could look back and see that anxiety was its defining feature, the thread that stitched together their lives and the things they did with them or didn’t. In the final paragraph, with his granddaughter on his knee, Roland is thinking about climate change, about passing her on to a damaged world. He cannot cut the thread.

River Page is a writer and essayist. Find his Substack, Chain Smoking to Babylon.