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A review by trench
All That Man Is by David Szalay
2.0
I was really quite excited by the first chapter. I felt an attachment to the characters; I wanted to read more about them. The use of language was beautiful (and was throughout, perhaps my only positive talking point, sadly), taking me places I wasn't expecting to go. So I was slightly disappointed to get to the second chapter to find a new set of characters, and so on and so forth. Eventually, I caught on to the style and was a bit more forgiving. But then the other problems started to take the spotlight...
Yes, it's mostly my own fault for having an aversion to book jacket descriptions--for being tricked into thinking this was a novel, not a collection of short stories chartering the life of the everyman. However, therein lies my other problem, the problem that appeared once I had grown accustomed to the flow: the author's definition of the everyman is so milquetoast that I'm surprised this was written in 2016 and not 1995. We are presented with stories of cishet, European men in situations that could be boiled down to plot lines on "Home Improvement" reruns. A failed vacation turned positive in an unlikely way. Losing your cool over a woman you love. A pregnancy scare. We find men in situations of crisis, but we are never left to linger on these crises or empathize with them before we are flung into a new story. I'm all for genre disruption, but this one wasn't for me.
As a gay man, I also felt increasingly jaded, wanting a book acknowledged by the Man Booker Prize committee that tried a bit better to flesh out the moments that define a man's life more holistically than the things we were given. True, I think the more important message is that we're only offered this one chance to make as much meaning from life as we can before it's over, but the in-betweens were killer, sometimes painful, to read.
The final reason I couldn't get into this book was because I felt bad for the author's attempt (or lack thereof?) to develop the female characters who acted as foils to these everymen. I felt particularly depressed by the lack of taste earlier on, most of all in the story of the Cyprus vacationer. Whether to prove a point or not is moot when you are presented with composite, highly objectified women--at least from this reader's perspective. They felt like a vacuous (or sometimes nonexistent) modus operandi: specks in the narrator's eye, hookers with a heart of gold, syllables repeated until devoid of meaning, obese creatures to disrobe.
All that man is...is that? I sure hope not.
Yes, it's mostly my own fault for having an aversion to book jacket descriptions--for being tricked into thinking this was a novel, not a collection of short stories chartering the life of the everyman. However, therein lies my other problem, the problem that appeared once I had grown accustomed to the flow: the author's definition of the everyman is so milquetoast that I'm surprised this was written in 2016 and not 1995. We are presented with stories of cishet, European men in situations that could be boiled down to plot lines on "Home Improvement" reruns. A failed vacation turned positive in an unlikely way. Losing your cool over a woman you love. A pregnancy scare. We find men in situations of crisis, but we are never left to linger on these crises or empathize with them before we are flung into a new story. I'm all for genre disruption, but this one wasn't for me.
As a gay man, I also felt increasingly jaded, wanting a book acknowledged by the Man Booker Prize committee that tried a bit better to flesh out the moments that define a man's life more holistically than the things we were given. True, I think the more important message is that we're only offered this one chance to make as much meaning from life as we can before it's over, but the in-betweens were killer, sometimes painful, to read.
The final reason I couldn't get into this book was because I felt bad for the author's attempt (or lack thereof?) to develop the female characters who acted as foils to these everymen. I felt particularly depressed by the lack of taste earlier on, most of all in the story of the Cyprus vacationer. Whether to prove a point or not is moot when you are presented with composite, highly objectified women--at least from this reader's perspective. They felt like a vacuous (or sometimes nonexistent) modus operandi: specks in the narrator's eye, hookers with a heart of gold, syllables repeated until devoid of meaning, obese creatures to disrobe.
All that man is...is that? I sure hope not.