Reading once guided me towards the man I wanted to be: a self-reliant, gubslinging, smart-talking, historically notable badass that women lusted after. I would slay a dragon one week, fly-fish a trout stream the next; command a World War II battalion before setting off on my horse or motorcycle to brave the rolling prarie or the open road.
Like so many other young men, the shelves of my mind were crowded with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, McMurtry, King and Krakauer. But the older I get, the more I read to upset and challenge the man I’ve actually become. Readng is now less aspirational and more instructional.
I cracked open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at exactly the right time: the year my son almost died. His windpipe was underdeveloped, and every time he got sick, his breathing would labour into a wheeze and his skin would turn blue and we were in and out of the ICU three times.
The Road may take place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but ultimately it’s a story about fathers and sons, about the terror of keeping your children safe from harm and teaching them to protect themselves in a world that sometimes seems bent on ruining them. The book helped me better understand and manage my own fears and sense of responsibility.
Several of my friends have divorced lately and I’ve been trying to fathom athe devastation that comes with a broken marriage. How you can invest years in a relationship and admit you were wrong. You give up on your vows, your friends, your kids, the dream you once had of growing old together. And then I read Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, and it crystallised the two-sidedness of every relationship and the secrets and the resentments we stifle to carry on.
Hemmingway is dead. Our world has changed. Our men have changed. So have the plurality of books that we need.
I watched people camp out as part of Occupy Wall Street and I watched people block traffic as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and as much as I might support their causes, I’m too cynical and restrained to every chant a slogan. But then I picked up The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, in an effort to make sense the recession.
After that, I read Your Heart is A Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa, which is as electric a novel as I have ever read, with its swirling account of the demostrators, cops, and delegates who made up the 1999 WTO meeting and protests. And I felt genuinely pissed off. I could finally comprehend what it meant to be part of an uprising.
You look back on your life and the books you’ve read and you know you’re better off for having a large and varied and sometimes uncomfortable appetite for experiencem for having lived widely, strnnuously. Getting upset, leaving behind what’s familiar: that’s the point. The most interesting guy at the party isn’t the one who only surrounds himself with friends.
He’s the guy who works a crappy job (Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris). Who risks everything to spill his damning secrets (A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley). Who lowers his head when a judge declares him guilty (The 25th Hour, by Hanya Yanagihara). Who feels like putting his fist through a window (American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell). Who keeps putting off buying a ring (The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro). Who claims he’s not a misogynist byt won’t call himself a feminist (The Handiman’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood). Who drinks himself to sleep every night (Darkness Visible, by William Styron). Who hesitates when asked about ethnicity (Loving Day, by Mat Johnson). Who wonders if he can make any real difference in the world (The Once and Future King, by T.H. White)
Hemmingway is dead. Our world has changed. Our men have changed. So have the plurality of books that we need.
