%0 Journal Article
%T Authorial Atonement in Ian McEwan¡¯s Atonement and Sweet Tooth
%A Charles Cornelius Pastoor
%J Christianity & Literature
%@ 2056-5666
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0148333118794017
%X Ian¡¯s McEwan¡¯s 2001 novel Atonement ends with a question: ¡°how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?¡± (350). And it concludes, in response to this question, that there ¡°There is ¡­ No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists¡± (350¨C51). I consider in the first part of this article what leads Briony Tallis, the novel¡¯s fictive author, to this bleak conclusion. In the second part I consider how McEwan takes up the question again in his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth and how he arrives at a more hopeful answer
%K Ian McEwan
%K new atheism
%K reader response
%K metafiction
%K Sweet Tooth
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0148333118794017