Sunday, December 11

I wake up and look outside. The snow has not gone away but no more has arrived. The scene looks completely monochrome, except for the children’s slide and the wheelbarrow that you can just see among the trees.

Even the sky has faded to a gray that looks pretty similar to the snow-covered ground.

We will pass the day doing wintry things. I will iron after I have mended the ironing board, or at least refixed the covering.

I will think about the Ian McEwan novel that I finally finished (again) last night and decide that it remains too overly schematic to the end to feel like a triumph. It also finishes with a version of the zoom-in ending that I usually dislike, unless I can find a reason to make and exception which in this case I couldn’t.

The zoom-in ending, by the way, constitutes my term for what occurs when a book or film deals with a large scale plot or a set of Big Issues (War of the Worlds, or Machines Like Us, for example) but resolves the narrative by suddenly focusing in on a small-scale subplot. War rages all around. A father finally finds his two missing children. They run towards each other and hug. The movie ends. What about the worldwide destruction and the societies that need rebuilding? Don’t think about it: the family have found each other, the film has finished, and the credits have started rolling.