I hope that Mr. Edwards can somehow sense my gratitude for the loan of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I finished this afternoon on the subway. Crackling with life, engrossing (in each of the six nested narratives, no less), and a more than reasonable choice for last-man-standing by many of the judges in the Morning News's Tourney o' Books a while back (though yours truly still believes that The Plot Against America is in fact the greater work, I reluctantly concede that such comparisons must be made "for entertainment value only" as they say).

I could nitpick about various things that nabbed my attention hither and thither throughout, but on the whole this post comes solely as a recommendation: a blast of a book, a bravura performance that calls attention to itself with such panache that one admires it all the more for being a touch show-offy.

While I'm on the subject of recommendations, now that it's out, let me also note that I enjoyed Saturday quite a bit, despite the fact that Atonement had quite naturally raised my expectations a bit. And I found, for what it's worth, Zoe Heller's cold-eyed appraisal to be an underappreciation of all that McEwan offers the reader.

This, it would seem, is the difficulty presented by ''Saturday'': finely wrought and shimmering with intelligence though it is, it never quite fully submerges its thesis. Its concept is so high and prominent as to disallow the reader the distinctive novelistic pleasure of feeling, rather than coolly registering, the author's intention.

Believe me when I tell you that the shimmer and the finework are more than enough for some of us. It's not a perfect novel, but its easily spotted clockwork and its discursive tendencies aren't, in my view, the enemies of feeling. The anxiety with which this book rather beautifully vibrates, from start to finish, was both thought-provoking and touching. I'll be astonished if I read three books this good published in 2005.