By Nick Casey

British author Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “Saturday” (Doubleday, 2005), is a curious experiment in understatement.

There is nothing special about the protagonist Henry Perowne other than the fact that he is a neurosurgeon and nothing special about his Saturday other than the fact that McEwan has written 300 pages about it.

Perowne slowly stirs in his bed in the early morning. He admires the curve of his wife’s body under the sheets. He thinks about his life, which has not been too hard. Then, a moment of suspense: Perowne believes he is witnessing a terrorist attack on a London-bound jet flying through the sky.

But alas, no.

Around page 75, the protagonist decides to drive to a squash game.

Long gone are the Venetian evils of “The Comfort of Strangers” or the breakneck tragicomedy of “Amsterdam.” In their place is something new, curious and highly unstable: a celebration of mediocrity, an extravaganza of the ordinary with the measured care of a well-edited episode of reality TV.

The experiment of “Saturday” forces the reader to ask why in recent years have television programs, documentaries and now novels become so influenced by - one might even say captives of - our perverse attraction to the unexceptional, to ordinary people, regular things. Perowne’s only car accident leaves his new vehicle virtually unharmed. Three thugs go after him and then lose interest. Twenty pages are given to a squash match between two tired, middle-aged men.

It probably wouldn’t be too unfair to say that the acclaimed McEwan, satisfied with the sheen of his own prose, wanted to find out whether his writing could keep its luster when its subject was the dull life of a dull man.

McEwan’s stark novel avoids the sensational at every corner, but in the end, the novelist simply can’t keep his restraint. With a sudden flourish of danger and odd convergences, McEwan flounders by trying to attach a thrilling finish to what had been one of the most clever meditations on the daily routine. He gives in.

And so the project of documenting an ordinary man’s ordinary Saturday - for what it is worth - remains incomplete. Perhaps a sequel will finish it. “Sunday”?