Like Chesil Beach, McEwan takes each wave as it comes

0 Comments | USA TODAY, June, 2007 | by Bob Minzesheimer

NEW YORK -- Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach, out today in the USA, dissects the disastrous wedding night of a sexually innocent couple who lived "in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible," way back in 1962.

But it wasn't the sex -- or lack of it -- that caused a stir in McEwan's native Britain when the novel was published there in March to rave reviews.

It was a handful of stones, taken from Chesil Beach in Dorset, that again propelled McEwan, one of the Britain's most celebrated novelists, onto the front page.

In New York to promote the book, McEwan is bemused as he recounts what he dryly titles "The Pebble Scandal." It began when he told the BBC that the pebbles on his mantel in London came from Chesil...