Saturday by Ian McEwan

I thoroughly enjoyed rereading this novel. Rather than synopsize it, a few of my favorite passages:

“At times this biography made him comfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England; at others he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages—bottled, like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friends, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish.”

“It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you in which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in the two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook.”

“Who else could love him so knowingly, with such warmth and teasing humour, or accumulate so rich a past with him? …By some accident of character, it’s familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. …This fidelity might look like virtue or doggedness, but it’s neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition.”