SOURCE: Taylor, Jonathan. Review of Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan. Artforum 36, no. 7 (March 1998): S20.

In the following review, Taylor offers an unfavorable assessment of Enduring Love, asserting that McEwan's style and structure in the novel is overbearing and repetitive.

“The pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience,” goes the neatly summarizing thesis of Enduring Love (quoted, apparently, from an actual British Journal of Psychiatry article), a statement that evokes the irritatingly schematic quality Ian McEwan's books sometimes have. It's fair to say that he intends, as the cover of First Love, Last Rites nicely synopsized, to “compel us to confront our secret kinship with the horrifying.” Yet in execution this mission has often seemed overdetermined, making the rounds of the taboo: incest (The Cement Garden), sexual murder and sadism (“Pornography,” The Comfort of Strangers).

Enduring Love replaces the specter of taboo sexual...