Why not just stab us?

Before we picked it up, Atonement fit all our don’t-read-this-suck-ass-thing criteria:

a) it is a Big Important Book

b) it is a bestseller and

c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.

Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — have humor or soul–they’re pretentious prigs, prosy show-offs, and, worse, unbelievable.

Then, after leading us to that abyss into which we’ve thrown a billion crappy books, Ian McEwan pulls us back with a terrifying plot twist: a good, innocent young man with a bright future is falsely accused of rape by a young girl with an overripe imagination. Part 2, the reason we read the book, takes place in France during the British retreat to Dunkirk, and in a London hospital receiving the wounded and dead. It fed the ending, but it wasn’t, as someone said, “the most realistic depiction of war ever.”

It is the final and shortest part of the book, deceptively called “London, 1999″ that sucker-punched us hard. In this blithely, even warmly told denouement, we discover that the book’s elderly author is the young girl who made the false accusations. And what she tells us in her casual-to-the-point-of-cruelty way is too much to bear. It is an indictment not only of the woman telling the tale, but, weirdly, of all writers.