Michiko Kakutani wrote in "The New York Times" that McEwan uses “his marvelous control and sympathy as a writer [...] to make Stephen's state of mind so palpable that we are made to share all his shifting emotions”. But the critic also described Kate's disappearance as a "heavy-handed metaphor for his own inability to retrieve his youth" and complained that a number of the book's motifs "feel like afterthoughts grafted onto Stephen and Kate's story and not fully assimilated into the text”. Kakutani found the novel "discursive and uneven". Gabriele Annan wrote in "The New York Review of Books" that too much of the book is "corn".