I’m so conflicted about Lessons. I wanted to love it like I did Atonement, which is brilliant. But Lessons is complicated, deep, and meaningful while also managing to be boring, confusing, and frustrating. I just don’t like Roland, the protagonist. I can’t muster sympathy for him and I feel like we should. He is seriously shafted in life via terrible parents, a horrible wife (being a genius writer does not excuse one from basic human duty), and a lack of professional belonging and success. Rather than learn from these “lessons”, he wallows in his misfortune, rarely able to put on his big boy pants and, to borrow the current vernacular, adult. I confess to skipping sections where McEwan rambles on and on about historical events. I detest time-hopping without justification, so the author’s jumbled time frame frustrated me. Then there were moments of brilliance, of excellent, masterful writing that made me forgive the novel’s weaknesses. I didn’t enjoy Lessons, but I’m better for having read it.