Consider what has just happened to the celebrated British novelist Ian McEwan. Last week, during a speech at the Royal Institution in London, McEwan took a genteel swipe at the politics of identity.

Doubleday, 448 pages, $26.00 ncountering Ian McEwan's prose is rather like meeting ... just down from Cambridge, and a young man named Robbie Turner, a servant's son and a protégé of Tallis ...