The Books of my Manhood I read three novels this week after a rough month where I took a Phillip Roth like pledge to quit reading fiction and to only read non-fiction because I’m “too old for fantasy” or I’ve learned all the tricks or some other nonsense. I get the New Yorker every week and I normally read it from stem to stern except the fiction selection. “It’s not relevant to my life!” I decried. But now the sweet temptress of fiction has called to me after I added a hundred nonfiction books on the new urbanism, information science, productivity, and the entire works of Richard Florida to my Amazon Wishlist. Perhaps it became overkill. I started by picking up The Train by Georges Simenon which Melville House sent me after I preordered it from them in the spring with the promise that they would donate all the profits to the Japanese relief efforts. Simenon is an author whose books I always look for at the used shops and I have a stack of almost a dozen, read and unread. He’s a French writer known for his Maigret mystery novels and his more serious works which he called “romans durs” or hard novels. You feel the hardness the most in his sex scenes which sometimes start and end within two sentences, most of the action taking place inbetween the two. It was Simenon who told the Paris Review, “I know that there are many men who have more or less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer—if the answer can possibly be found.”  The other two books were Falconer by John Cheever and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. All three are very manly novels. Men are the main characters and narrators, the language is coarse, social niceties are often ignored, and they’re attention-deficit-disorder defeatingly short (each under 150 pages). The characters are all prisoners. Farragut in Falconer is literally in prison for killing his brother, the characters in Jesus’ Son are all driven by their addictions, no longer free to go after whatever they dreamed about before the opiates took hold, and Marcel Feron in The Train is the prisoner of the circumstances of being a refugee during World War II. Is prisoner the basic condition of the 20th century male? I can think of dozens of works of literature from Kafka to Camus to Fight Club where men are limited by one thing or another. Holden Caulfield speaks to us from the bed of a psych ward. Even Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s movie Nixon decries that he, the American President, has no power, that he is just acting as a cog in the machine. In April I joined 23 and me, a genetic typing business started by the wife of one of the Google founders. You send them a vial of your saliva and they send you back information about you discerned from your genome. Some of it is traits: hair color, eye color, body type. Some is still slightly theoretical. Based on one German study it thinks my genome says that I am better at learning from my mistakes than others. And some is about heritable diseases and how likely a person is going to come down with something like Parkinson’s. These last results are the ones that people don’t often want to know and to see the results 23 and Me  makes you click several buttons each labeled with warnings that say, “Are you sure you want to know if you’re going to die of spleen cancer or not?” You click it and it says, of course, that you’re not going to die of spleen cancer because it’s still relatively rare. And then you repeat for the next disease.  Are our genes not a prison in and of themselves? I’ll admit a small bit of frustration since reading over the results—what is it, I wonder, that I can say that I did, that I was responsible for? Am I anything but the sum of my genes? Am I really fated to die of such and such? Etcetera. And then throw on top of this the demands of work, family, society, economic realities…  If we are prisoners then, can there be freedom? Yes. At least in Falconer and The Train. In Jesus’ Son it is harder to say. Everyone in that book seems crushed like the cigarette butts in an ashtray. Do I fear that in real life the answer is ‘No, there is no freedom’ and that the only place where the answer is ‘Yes’ is in fiction? That is what I am most afraid of. 

The Books of my Manhood

I read three novels this week after a rough month where I took a Phillip Roth like pledge to quit reading fiction and to only read non-fiction because I’m “too old for fantasy” or I’ve learned all the tricks or some other nonsense. I get the New Yorker every week and I normally read it from stem to stern except the fiction selection. “It’s not relevant to my life!” I decried. But now the sweet temptress of fiction has called to me after I added a hundred nonfiction books on the new urbanism, information science, productivity, and the entire works of Richard Florida to my Amazon Wishlist. Perhaps it became overkill.

I started by picking up The Train by Georges Simenon which Melville House sent me after I preordered it from them in the spring with the promise that they would donate all the profits to the Japanese relief efforts. Simenon is an author whose books I always look for at the used shops and I have a stack of almost a dozen, read and unread. He’s a French writer known for his Maigret mystery novels and his more serious works which he called “romans durs” or hard novels. You feel the hardness the most in his sex scenes which sometimes start and end within two sentences, most of the action taking place inbetween the two.

It was Simenon who told the Paris Review, “I know that there are many men who have more or less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer—if the answer can possibly be found.” 

The other two books were Falconer by John Cheever and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. All three are very manly novels. Men are the main characters and narrators, the language is coarse, social niceties are often ignored, and they’re attention-deficit-disorder defeatingly short (each under 150 pages).

The characters are all prisoners. Farragut in Falconer is literally in prison for killing his brother, the characters in Jesus’ Son are all driven by their addictions, no longer free to go after whatever they dreamed about before the opiates took hold, and Marcel Feron in The Train is the prisoner of the circumstances of being a refugee during World War II. Is prisoner the basic condition of the 20th century male? I can think of dozens of works of literature from Kafka to Camus to Fight Club where men are limited by one thing or another. Holden Caulfield speaks to us from the bed of a psych ward. Even Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s movie Nixon decries that he, the American President, has no power, that he is just acting as a cog in the machine.

In April I joined 23 and me, a genetic typing business started by the wife of one of the Google founders. You send them a vial of your saliva and they send you back information about you discerned from your genome. Some of it is traits: hair color, eye color, body type. Some is still slightly theoretical. Based on one German study it thinks my genome says that I am better at learning from my mistakes than others. And some is about heritable diseases and how likely a person is going to come down with something like Parkinson’s. These last results are the ones that people don’t often want to know and to see the results 23 and Me  makes you click several buttons each labeled with warnings that say, “Are you sure you want to know if you’re going to die of spleen cancer or not?” You click it and it says, of course, that you’re not going to die of spleen cancer because it’s still relatively rare. And then you repeat for the next disease. 

Are our genes not a prison in and of themselves? I’ll admit a small bit of frustration since reading over the results—what is it, I wonder, that I can say that I did, that I was responsible for? Am I anything but the sum of my genes? Am I really fated to die of such and such? Etcetera. And then throw on top of this the demands of work, family, society, economic realities… 

If we are prisoners then, can there be freedom? Yes. At least in Falconer and The Train. In Jesus’ Son it is harder to say. Everyone in that book seems crushed like the cigarette butts in an ashtray. Do I fear that in real life the answer is ‘No, there is no freedom’ and that the only place where the answer is ‘Yes’ is in fiction? That is what I am most afraid of. 

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