In his aching memories of those months, we see Miss Cornell’s perverse desires only through a boy’s pride and excitement. What follows is an extraordinarily deft portrayal of the way a too-early sexual experience permanently stains Roland’s romantic expectations. Roland knows, on some level, that the two women – his ex-piano teacher and his errant wife – are not analogous, nor are their actions, but he can’t help blaming them both for warping his life at crucial junctures. When he was a 14-year-old student at an English boarding school, his piano teacher, Miss Miriam Cornell, groomed him, seduced him and kept him in her house as a sex slave. Her sudden disappearance, combined with the exhaustion of caring for a baby and the anxiety of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, pushes Roland’s mind back to an earlier betrayal. “Don’t try to find me,” she wrote on a note on his pillow. The police suspect foul play, but Roland has no reason to doubt his wife’s explanation. We meet him in 1986 soon after his wife, a fellow writer, has vanished, leaving him and their baby son behind. For many years he presumes to think of himself as a professional poet – or at least a prospective one. The man at the center of this story is Roland Baines. Here, finally, McEwan – who won the Booker Award in 1998 for “Amsterdam” – luxuriates in all the space he needs to record the mysterious interplay of will and chance, time and memory. And for an author famously devoted to brevity, “Lessons” is also his longest novel. Instead, it depicts an ordinary man, a failed writer, buffeted by intimate and international crises over the course of more than seven decades. While the story shares a few tantalizing similarities with the author’s life, it’s no roman à clef. McEwan’s new novel, “Lessons,” is a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill. And “The Cockroach” squished together Boris Johnson and Gregor Samsa. “Machines Like Me” told the tale of a man cuckolded by a sex robot. “Nutshell,” for instance, was an homage to “Hamlet” narrated by an imperiled fetus. His last three books have been minor, fantastical stories, wormy with weird wit. Readers drawn to Ian McEwan’s gorgeous novel “Atonement” 20 years ago may have drifted away from the writer’s bizarre recent work.

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