LIT FOR LIVING: Amateur Barbarians

 

In a world where chick lit has not only invaded but has practically taken over the country of contemporary fiction, it’s refreshing to come across Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians, the kind of novel that writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Richard Yates, and their ilk built careers upon—namely, the domestic life of the modern, usually married, American male. Whereas fictional women, then and now, are often portrayed (this by women writers, mind you) as seeking the staid, middle-class life of marriage and all it entails—a husband, a house, children, the Volvos—men have always been characterized as either avoiding such commitments or, once entrenched, considering escape from what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe.” It’s the old Huck Finn impulse to light out for the territory.

 

Amateur Barbarians doesn’t stray from the formula, but it does play around with it. Here it’s Gail, the wife of protagonist Teddy Hastings, who has an eye on the door and on another man—the younger, even more of a mess, Oren Pierce, an entitled drifter who has somehow washed up at this small Northeastern college town (modeled, one presumes, after Middlebury, Vermont, where Cohen lives and teaches, though it could easily be Williamstown, Massachusetts, or a dozen other remote New England enclaves).

 

The other difference is that Hastings is in his early fifties as opposed to the usual mid-to-late-thirties or early forties guy who once populated these male-angst novels, perhaps making the argument once again that fifty is the new forty. Cohen writes without much optimism about what seems to lie ahead for Teddy Hastings:

 

And was this how the years would now go? Dry crusts swathed in marmalade and butter. The soft mesh of routine. Everything mild and regular as the tick of a watch. And all the while waiting for the crisis that would shatter the glass, and arrest time for good. You spend half your life erecting a canopy over yourself, and the other half anticipating the brilliant jagged flash that splits it open, and lets the elements come raining in.

The novel, in fact, opens with Hastings running on a treadmill, going nowhere not so fast. “If there was one thing he was good at, it was running in place.” Though not for long: soon enough, we and Hastings will get to experience his quiet, small-town life start to unravel. A sudden interest in photography leads to his taking a photography class, which will then lead to him taking what is considered an inappropriate photograph of his teenage daughter (she is napping on the family hammock when caught through the viewfinder only partially clad), which will lead to his undoing when the photograph in question is brought to light by a bitter film-developing drugstore clerk up to no good.

 

Hastings is then suspended from his longstanding job as the town’s middle school principal. Coupled with this is a sudden health scare that, while in the end proves to be nothing, leaves Hastings with a sense that he’s only postponed the inevitable.

… a certain letdown, he supposed, was only to be expected. After all, what was there to celebrate? A victory by default? The opponent had simply failed to appear. It was a forfeit, a nonevent, an apprehension of something large that’s passed you by, like not getting hit by a truck.

Chapters alternate between chronicling Hastings’s midlife malaise and Pierce’s somewhat premature one. While Hastings is on “hiatus,” Pierce—whom Hastings hired to be the assistant middle school principal—takes over Hastings’s job responsibilities and, as it turns out, some of his domestic ones as well. This after Hastings decides to get out of Dodge, using the excuse of having to retrieve his college-aged daughter, who seems reluctant to return from Africa; he goes quite happily, in the same spirit of Ishmael taking off for the sea to rid himself of the dark November in his soul. Now, with Hastings truly out of sight and out of mind, Pierce moves in, if not quite for the kill, then perhaps for the caress.

 

Along with getting a front-row seat for these twin comic and coinciding male misadventures, we get Cohen’s spot-on, very funny observations about small-town New England life, mostly from Pierce’s outsider’s point of view.

The trouble with Carthage, he thought, was that it resembled not so much an actual town as a movie location, a movie about a small, boring, unreal town like Carthage.… In town, the people continued to nod at him tolerantly as he slouched past, delivering unto him their stoic, good-fences-make-good-neighbors expressions, and he liked that. He liked these dispensations of casual goodwill, liked the way no one ever stopped to ask him what he did or had he seen that review in the Times.

While the novel as a whole may be a bit messy, just like the lives of the people in it (Cohen’s story loses a little steam and focus when Hastings and his daughter are wandering all over Africa), one hardly cares with writing as true and recognizable as this. Like the greats of the previous generation, Cohen has created a hero, though flawed, that we truly care about, someone who is trying to figure it all out at last before the long march toward the real unknown, while still managing to maintain a sense of humor.

 

In the end, it’s Hastings’s trip to Africa and his taking care of his daughter that allows him to find a bit of peace, albeit, and quite appropriately, a somewhat uneasy one, more truce than victory. Without spoiling a thing, the novel ends with,

He’d been floundering in nets all his life; he didn’t even want to get out from under them any longer. Only to go deeper in, and deeper still, until the borders of the net were no longer visible, no longer borders.
Even out here, it seemed, at the farthest reaches, you still carried your house on your back. And the hell of it was, there was no other shelter.

Barbarians for a while, maybe, but these fictional men, like their predecessors, seem to prefer being tamed, after all, coming home with their tales between their legs. [OCTOBER 2009]

Chris Newbound is the managing editor of  Berkshire Living. For more book reviews or to check out his blog, go to www.berkshireliving.com.

 

THE GOODS

Amateur Barbarians
by Robert Cohen
Scribner
www.simonandschuster.com