THE MEN, and a few other books of late
Sandra Newman's latest novel ... and a few other recent reads
Books I discuss in this post: THE MEN, by Sandra Newman, Grove Press, June 2022; BLACK CAKE, by Charmaine Wilkerson, Ballantine Books, February 2022; DANCER FROM THE DANCE, by Andrew Holleran, Morrow, 1978; THE SECOND HOME, by Christina Clancy, St. Martin’s, 2020
I do a lot of watching houses and pets for friends when they go on vacation. I no longer live a life in which vacations or travel are a feature, and the apartment in which I live does not allow pets, so, I both appreciate the change of scenery, and the opportunity to snuggle with dogs and be looked down on by cats. Summer (and holidays) tend to be the times I am most in demand and so I am regularly toting to a new location my always packed suitcase, some food, my Grey Gardens souvenir carry-all of writing and correspondence supplies, and, most important to me: a bag of books.
I have hundreds of books in TBR piles, and those piles are prioritized by the distance they are from my bed. Some books start on a shelf on my nightstand, then move a few feet away to the tables beside my loveseat, and then, some of those move to stacks in my closet where there is a lower and an upper shelf, and part of those are easily accessible and part require moving other things out of the way. Too, I’ve always got books coming in from the library, where my hold list is date controlled (by me) and currently has over 30 books on it. Some I will never take off hold, eventually removing from the list. And, I get sent books by people I know (and badger) and I buy books from my local indie, Curious Iguana (this is their link and you can order from them online), and also from various used-book sources on the web where buying four gets you one free, or your purchase benefits Goodwill; NEVER do I purchase from the giant corporation which mistreats its employees, authors, and attempts to kill brick and mortar book stores.
From these many stacks and locations, each time I travel, I curate a selection of books to take along with me. I always take far more than I can possibly read, but a person needs backup plans (or plots). The past few weeks have been full of reads, almost a book a day, mostly light and easy, formulaic, comfort reads — because the times call for comfort reads and food and friends and denial. But, there were exceptions and the most exceptional of all, was the first I’ll talk about.
THE MEN, by Sandra Newman, Grove Press, June 2022
I follow Sandra Newman on Twitter, and she follows me. We have never met in person nor had other than public exchanges on the app; that said, I love her. She is funny, she is perceptive, she is insightful, she thinks not just outside the box — rather, she thinks in a realm and at a level where a box is not just a box but instead she sees the forest where the trees from which the paper of which the box is made were grown; she sees the trees before they were trees; she hears the sound it makes when it falls in a wood and there is no one there to hear it. She doesn’t need to be there. She hears it, and she hears what silence is. She can write the presence of absence. And the absence of the present. She is the earth from which the tree from which the box is eventually made grows before it is harvested — the pain of which harvesting is part of the box she writes about, or which she writes outside of, or which she doesn’t write about at all but somehow you come away from her writing thinking and knowing about boxes and their grandparent trees.
All of which is to say, I fear I am not smart or perceptive enough to really understand all the levels of Sandra Newman’s brilliance. So, perhaps, what I got from THE MEN is not what you would get, or what Sandra meant for anyone to get. The apocalyptic premise of the novel is that one day all of the theys on earth with Y chromosomes disappear, leaving women and transmen.
After which, out of the grief and the loss and the initial partial collapse of what was, a new order is created. Part of the novel is narrated by Jane Pearson, whose husband and son disappear while the three of them are camping. Other sections are narrated by an omniscient third person voice. I’m the kind of reader who wants to know why one character rather than another is speaking, and why, in this novel, it’s only Jane who speaks directly to us.
Jane is infamous for having been used when she was a teen ballerina by the much older man, Alain, founder and director of the company in which she danced, to lure underage boys into having sex with her while he watched. When this was discovered, she was branded a sex criminal rather than a victim of Alain’s predation, the world and justice system piling another level of damage on her.
She is a pariah, and when she begins college she meets Evangelyne Moreau, who has also been made criminal by racism and the justice system, having shot two police officers when a groundless raid/assassination is perpetrated on the home where she lived with her family and a group of others whose community was targeted and mislabeled a terrorist cult by the racist whites who lived nearby.
Jane and Evangelyne bond at the intersection of their similar leperous outcast states. And after the disappearance of the Y-chromosomed, Evangelyne is leader of a rising political movement, The Commensalist Party, and she is likely to become president in this new reality. Jane finds her and there is a reunion of sorts.
Meanwhile, a video feed called THE MEN is being broadcast which seems to be of the disappeared Y-chromosomed being held captive or made meals of or something by strange, enormous creatures, and rocks rising from the sea.
Is the footage fake? Some assume so. Is it real? Is it possible to somehow rescue or restore the Y-chromosomed?
It is impossible to read any dystopian or utopian or apocalyptic novel now, today, without wondering how soon we’ll be in a similar situation. With the unfettered rise of fascism and the embrace of ignorance and illiteracy as a political movement, in an age where cruelty and dis-inclusion are the norm, where all the -isms coagulate into a clotted, oozing scab of violent attacks on anything “other”, a book like THE MEN gives you to wonder, “What if we did get rid of men? Make absent the poisonous culture of toxic masculinity?”
I don’t claim to be a literary expert. I have never read THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU — which is where I am assuming Evangelyne’s last name comes from — and my familiarity with feminist utopian fiction is severely lacking. But, all reading is personal. Every reader comes to every book having inhabited a world and reality unique to them, and so, my perspective on THE MEN has to do with resonances it holds for me; these resonances and triggers are relevant to my reading and discussion of the book.
Stick with me. (Or, don’t.)
When I was seventeen months old, the primary Y-chromosomed person in my life died. I grew up in a house far out in the country, no neighbors, with a mom, four sisters, and a brother who was either locked in the room we shared, or away from home. On weekends and summers I was in a nearby town with my aunt. There was a grandfather and there were a few uncles, but I had as little to do with them as I did with my brother. I lived in a female world and I identified with those females. On some level I must have known there were two genders, but it never occurred to me I would be expected to give up who I was and become like my brother, uncles, grandfather. I loved who I was. I loved the life I shared with my mom and sisters and aunts. And I didn’t like who and how my brother and uncles and grandfather and other men I came in contact with were. I did not want to be that They.
And then I went to school. Quickly I was disabused of my feelings that I belonged, and it was made clear to me I was a freak for identifying with females. I would spend a great many years of my life getting over the cruel brainwashing of those years, the re-education forced on me by cultural norms, a violent indoctrination the message of which was that everything I wanted, felt, and was, including how I walked, talked, thought, and loved was a mistake. I was an error.
As I got older, I often fantasized about a world in which I was not a mistake, and where everyone who thought I was a freak would have disappeared, or been magically transformed into people who accepted and embraced me.
Please note, so successful was the cultural inculcation of gender norms that even in my fantastical imaginings of a reality in which I would not have daily to live in terror of being bashed or name-called, never, not then, not once, did the story I was writing in my head cast me as an equal, as natural, but rather, as someone who still needed permission to be myself.
And in the same way, when all the Y-chromosomed in THE MEN disappear, misogyny and stereotypical cis-het-male misdeed energy does not completely, magically evaporate. And, too, the novel brings into question, what are the parameters of “stereotypical male” behavior?
And not everyone is thrilled the Y-s are gone. Culturally embedded “norms” and “patterns” are not easily dismissed. Often, they are not even recognized. For example, the attacks on Secretary Clinton when she ran for president in 2016 were largely driven by misogyny and sexism. And not just the attacks, even some of her supporters — in particular cis-het-white-male politicians — spoke of her with some condescension. But pointing this out to people who operate from misogynist bias is mostly a waste of breath.
And there are those people who embrace various bigotries as reasonable tenets. Supporters of the person elected in 2016 (Supposedly elected; there are still a great many questions about russian interference — and in any event, he lost the popular vote by many millions so he was hardly the choice of the majority in this so-called democracy in which we live.) celebrate his ignorance and bias even when the policies of his party disadvantage the very people espousing some of them.
Another example; in gay-male culture there are many men who profess to be and desire “masculine” men, many men who profess to be and desire “straight appearing” men. Therein the results of misogyny and internalized homophobia on display. The marginalized further marginalizing within the group. (And don’t get me started on body shaming and ageism and racism in gay male culture.)
Oppression, to be really effective, has to convince the oppressed that they are less than.
And who defines “less than”?
Jane and Evangelyne are both — prior to the disappearance — acid-etched by society with the scarlet letters of “less than”, imposed by a justice system which was designed to maintain the privilege and entitlement of moneyed cis-het-white-men.
How all of this plays out, how the characters became who they are, those histories, all intertwine in a tessellated narrative written in Sandra Newman’s always compelling and accomplished prose. And as I said, I am not certain I got all the historical, mythological, literary, and religious allusions, but while wandering through the forest of Sandra Newman’s brilliant mind, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of some of the trees — and I like to think I did see the forest as well.
BLACK CAKE, by Charmaine Wilkerson, Ballantine Books, February 2022
That this is a debut novel boggles the mind.
After their mother’s death, Benny and her estranged brother, Byron, are informed by their mother’s lawyer that she has left for them a tape they must listen to, together, informing them of secrets she was unable to share when she was alive. The action moves from the possible drowning of a runaway, perhaps murdering bride as she tries to swim away from an unnamed island on the day she is forced to wed a gangster she despises in 1965, to the reading of Benny and Byron’s mother’s will in 2018. There is much back and forthing, handled with great aplomb, and a tapestry of carefully plotted intertwining events, fascinating characters, and themes relevant to the world today, all in quick and concise chapters. I loved it and read it in two days.
DANCER FROM THE DANCE, by Andrew Holleran, Morrow, 1978
I re-read this because Garth Greenwell was doing an on-line seminar about it and Andrew Holleran (which I didn’t join, $$$) in concert with the release of Holleran’s first new book in sixteen years, THE KINGDOM OF SAND, which is third in my “right now” TBR pile. I read DANCER when it first came out, which was just about the same time I was actively coming out, working at being and living openly gay. Holleran’s DANCE and John Rechy’s NUMBERS and CITY OF THE NIGHT, and Edmund White’s A BOY’S OWN STORY, gave the the boy I was some template for trying to undo the damage of years of being beaten down and excoriated and targeted for being gay. In my small town of Frederick, Maryland, in those days, there were no resources for LGBTQIA+ people — a group of initials which did not even exist then. These books helped save my life by telling me there was a life out there, maybe not where I was, but out there. I found it. I’m grateful.
Does the book seem dated now? For me, yes. It was slow going. And one can’t read it now without wanting to shout out a warning to the characters about the plague they’re doomed to experience in a few years.
And, an aside, since all reading is personal; I’m horrified these books are being removed from libraries, that a minority of people in this country who operate from a platform of hate and fear and bigotry, are being allowed to undo the hard-won progress that has made it safer and easier for LGBTQIA+ youth to find templates and examples and others like themselves, to not have to feel alone and outside. We cannot go back. It is only dumb luck my suicide attempt in my teens didn’t take and I didn’t become a statistic; LGBTQIA+ youth are again being targeted and are almost 4 times as likely to attempt suicide as are cis-het youth. Not okay.
THE SECOND HOME, by Christina Clancy, St. Martin’s, 2020
Confession: I love the book racks in grocery stores. I cannot walk by them without reading the covers and backs of at least a few of the offerings. And so, when I flipped to the back cover of this and saw a blurb from Rebecca Makkai, whose THE GREAT BELIEVERS is a brilliant, truly moving and amazing book, and it said: “Clancy writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom about fantastically human characters.”, into the cart it went. In brief, Ann Gordon returns to her family’s beach house in Cape Cod, where, at seventeen, a horrifying event tore the family apart. Now, she must face and deal with her sister, Poppy, and their adopted brother, Michael, estranged from the family, while sorting out the will and wishes of her deceased parents. (I seem to have a thing for stories about estranged siblings. I have had brief experience with that. I don’t recommend it.) I read this in about 24 hours. Fantastic beach or anytime read. Quick, run to your nearest grocery store.
Too, I praised it on Twitter, and Christina Clancy thanked me. I love writers.
Thank you, dear ones, for reading. I will sign off here. I have other tunes I need to sing, and I’m sure you do as well. And so, for now, here we are, going.
My Twitter handle is MiracleCharlie, and it’s also my AOL name. Feel free to comment, write me, follow me, follow this blog, retweet and otherwise share this blog, or, none of the above. I do ask that you do NOT tag the writers about whom I speak. They don’t need to be hectored with the opinions of others; and while I don’t write about books and writers I don’t like, you never know what words you meant in a positive way will be heard otherwise. Writers are delicate and precious creatures. Don’t bug them.