Arts and Entertainment your connection to The Boston Globe  A
distant shore  A young couple struggle to know each other as
they embark on marriage and adulthood   On Chesil Beach By Ian
McEwan Doubleday, 203 pp., $22  Pop culture tends to lionize
writers for the powerhouse right they deliver -- take, for
instance, Oprah's celebration of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road "
or Hollywood's indelible visualization of Michael Ondaatje's
"The English Patient." In America, the British writer Ian McEwan
has suffered from a milder version of this myopia. Although
"Atonement" was his ninth novel, published here in 2002, his
story of an England between two world wars was of such
magisterial beauty that it overshadowed the McEwan who had gone
before. Then followed "Saturday," a novel that, in the aftermath
of 9/11, seemed a relatively sunny survival guide for the modern
world (the poultices were love and family). Long-time acolytes
knew better: McEwan was a writer who, long before the panorama
of "Atonement" and the careful, W