Turgid tale of a roly-poly Romeo

By Ian McEwan

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

304 pp. $26.95

A roly-poly Romeo with five failed marriages - they failed because of Beard's infidelities - Michael is the sort of narcissist who ranks his wives like steaks he might have ordered and consumed, even though he's in such bad shape that he hasn't been able to touch his toes in eight years.

Patrice, he remembers, was "the only beautiful wife he had ever had. The other four had missed beauty by millimeters - a nose too narrow, a mouth too wide, a minimally defective or recessive chin or forehead - and they had appealed, these lesser wives, only from a particular perspective, or by an effort of will or imagination."

It is one of the peculiar (and not believable) conceits of Solar that its female characters, whether university-educated or waiting tables in the New Mexico desert, keep hurling themselves like Frisbees at this corpulent Casanova. McEwan establishes Beard as an anti-stud on page one: "He belonged to that class of men . . . who were unaccountably attracted to certain beautiful women. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue."

These days, many men writing novels and films (e.g., Judd Apatow) try their damnedest to sell the burned-out blob or male jalopy as a sex/love object. Jeff Bridges just won an Oscar for his work in Crazy Heart, in which he played a grizzled, guitar-playing wreck whom gorgeous Maggie Gyllenhaal chose over all other men.

The difference is that Bridges' country-western crooner had a heart. Michael Beard has none. In the first third of the novel, we realize he is amoral and cowardly. He can sleep at night for decades even though he has willingly let an innocent man go to jail for a murder he didn't commit. We expect his comeuppance to be mighty, final, blistering.

You will have to set your snooze alarm waiting for it, though.