First Love, Last Rites

In his early stories, the author demonstrates a wide range of stylistic experiments. “For me, it was something like a laboratory,” he said in an interview, “to try out different registers, to find myself as a writer.” In McEwan’s laboratory, a great-great-grandson of a prominent nineteenth-century amateur mathematician repeats his ancestor’s experiments in stereometry of human bodies. Teenagers stage a men’s triathlon of “smoking—drinking—women,” and a victim of a difficult childhood gives an interview without ever getting out of the wardrobe. Three stories from this collection were adapted for film. The title story, “Stereometry,” and “Butterflies”—twice.