Ian McEwan on Saturday, happiness, Iraq

Salon ran a nice interview with Ian McEwan (make sure to get the day pass first), promoting his new novel Saturday, an at-times pedantic account of one day in the life of a happy man in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war. McEwan notes the difficulty in writing about happiness:

There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery. I thought, if I'm going to write about an anxious world, it would be more interesting to put a very happy man into it.