The fact that, as critics have frequently remarked, both novels have to resort to quite contrived and implausible denouements is indicative of a certain strain in the task of standing up for liberal humanist values. In fact, both McEwan and Updike—like Amis—manifest a marked postimperial melancholia of the kind identified by Paul Gilroy. In Britain the loss of empire and in the United States the loss of a particular white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus have led to compensatory fantasies about the reassertion of white male power in the face of competing claims by others. In keeping with the two novels’ domestication of cultural struggles, the decline of white male power is figured as a failure of parental (and especially paternal) protection. This failure then calls for a reassertion of masculinities of a particularly assertive kind, corresponding to ideals of a national “best self” that has been lost and must be retrieved.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 84