Group Therapy

By ADAM WILSON

THE MEN’S CLUB
By Leonard Michaels
192 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $13.00

Leonard Michaels’ novel, The Men’s Club, originally published in 1981, and recently re-issued by FSG Classics, begins with the sentence, “Women wanted to talk about anger, identity, politics, etc.” During my childhood, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Michaels’ generalization still held true, at least if you replaced the word “Women” with “My mother’s friends.” My mother—an abstract painter with mixed feelings about her prodigal return to the suburban Jewish enclave in which she had grown up—was a member of many women’s groups that would invade and conquer our home on a monthly basis, setting up shop in my mother’s studio which occupied the top floor of our home, and—like a red robin atop a towering oak—its own untarnished corner of suburbia.

My father—he denies this—did not like my mother’s groups (or her friends). There was something unbridled about these women en masse, a scary empowerment that, I imagine, threatened castration with every tooth-sharpening tongue-click. Often, perhaps as form of silent insurgence, when the women were around, my father allowed my brother and me to watch movies that had been previously banned by my mother—my first viewing of the lost classic Robocop would not have been possible without the yang of my mother’s women’s group, and my father’s fears about the further estrogen-ization (we were already drinking soy milk) of my brother’s and my childhood.

My father also had a group, though like the characters in The Men’s Club, its members preferred to use the word "club." It was a poker club, comprised of men from our neighborhood, Jewish men with loosened ties and occasional facial hair who were lawyers, shrinks, and venture capitalists. These were not the characters from which literary fiction is made; they drank but rarely got drunk, gambled but no more than 20 bucks, didn’t even smoke cigars. They did, however, discuss blow jobs and tell dirty jokes, one of which, I recall, had a punchline involving the unbeatable trifecta of Racquel Welch, a desert island, and a sheep. I listened cautiously and attentively. These men held a certain allure for me. Maybe it was simply the way they smelled—like beer and new cars—and the contrast of this odor with the floral presence my mother had instituted in our home. The men were different from my father; he is a writer, and has an artist’s disposition and sensitivity. But though the men in his poker club spoke crudely and often idiotically, he seemed to take comfort in their presence. Our suburb was a matriarchal society filled with women like my mother’s friend (and group member) Y., who was hoping to ban competitive sports and openly criticized my father for only writing short stories about large-breasted women.

The men in The Men’s Club are like my father and his poker buddies in the sense that they too are marking territory in a world of women—Berkeley, California late 1970s—that seems to be conspiring against them. Upon its initial release The Men’s Club, Michaels’ eagerly anticipated first novel, was received with mixed reviews, many of which accused the novel of pushing a misogynist agenda. Michaels’ defenders, on the other hand, stressed the satiric nature of the novel, the fact that Michaels’ is actually skewering his misogynistic (mostly Jewish) male characters, and the culture from which they’ve been born. This debate—bigotry vs. satire—seems especially relevant at the present moment in light of the recent and controversial New Yorker cover featuring Barack Obama as a costumed Muslim.

On reading the novel now, in a somewhat different cultural climate—we prefer our therapeutic activities to be one-on-one and expensive (shrinks, life coaches, personal trainers; talk is still important, listening isn’t)—I believe that both of these initial assessments of Michaels’ novel (which is at times brilliant, and at times lacking the linguistic fire of his short stories) are ultimately incorrect. In an interview with the Paris Review from 1986, but only recently published, Michaels defends this position: “some people read the book as allegory or misogyny or propaganda. I intended only to describe what is true among some men. That’s all. The publisher should have attached a warning to the cover: This book is not to be read by morons or lunatics.”

Part of the difficulty critics have had in deciphering Michaels’ moral stance lies in the form The Men’s Club takes. Most of the telling comes not from the unnamed first-person narrator, a Michaels’ stand-in, but from the novel’s other characters, who take turns recounting their “life stories”—tales of awkward infidelity and thwarted romance with unresolved endings that leave the other group members sometimes laughing, sometimes silent, and often baffled. In situations such as this, readers rely on the first-person narrator to explain the novelist’s interpretation of these events, to tell us how we are supposed to feel. Michaels’ tales offers no such comfort. His narrator is mostly an observer, letting the others speak, and only occasionally providing insight or alarm. He is set off from the other men—he alone is faithful to his wife—but withholds judgment. Early in the novel, the narrator expresses reservation about the club, “Besides, wasn’t this club idea corny? Like trying to recapture high school days. Locker room fun. Wet naked boys snapping towels at each other’s genitals.”  He wonders if the purpose of the club is to “[m]ake women cry.” As the night devolves, however, he too becomes a complicit in the mixture of camaraderie and violence—as adults, they only figuratively snap towels at each other’s genitals, but they literally wrestle, and yell, and throw knives at a door—that takes hold of the men. By the novel’s end, they are howling like wolves into the California night, and our narrator joins with relish.

It is true that the men in the novel may not be the most enlightened of their species. There are moments when their inabilities to empathize with the women in their lives comes across as almost autistic, as when Cavanaugh, a former pro basketball player, cannot understand why his tugged-from-slumber wife won’t have sex with him in the middle of the night simply because he’s awake. “I said she was a conventional bitch not wanting to fuck me at 5 a.m.” And though at times we yearn for our narrator to point out the hysterical blindness of the men who surround him, Michaels saves his narrator from the annoying trait of moral righteousness, and instead allows him to be a sort of anthropologist, intent only on understanding these complex, baffling creatures who are his comrades in genitalia. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog’s fine documentary about a man living with bears who is eventually eaten by one, Herzog chastises his hero, Timothy Treadwell, for getting upset that the bears eat their own children for survival when the salmon aren’t running. Herzog warns the audience of the danger of imposing a human ethical code on animals. Michaels’ men are a bit like Herzog’s bears—in a violent and territorial display they cheer while devouring salmon and other dishes set aside for a meeting of their host’s wife’s women’s group. Which is not to say that these men, by nature, exist outside of a moral code and shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. In fact, Michaels doesn’t let them off easily. At the novel’s finale, in a fine moment of comeuppance, and a wonderfully surprising gender-role reversal, the host’s wife returns to see her home looking like the second coming of Gomorrah, and smashes her husband on the head with an iron pot. Bleeding from his head, he says, “I feel you’re feeling anger.”

What this ending underscores is that, aggressive and unenlightened as they may be, these men are ultimately lost souls in a culture that has become dedicated to talk. There is, in fact, something noble about their attempt to form this group, a concession to the cultural trend, and a willingness to talk things out. They fail miserably. Each story of screwed-up marriage and unsatisfying adultery ends with the listeners unsure how to react—they are not empathetic to other men either—and the teller frustrated at his inability to articulate the issues that trouble him. “This often happens to me,” our narrator remarks, “I start to talk, thinking there is a point, and then it never arrives.”

Grace Paley once said that a great writer doesn’t write about subjects he or she understands, but rather about, “What you want to know.” This remains a refreshing idea in an era dominated by Jonathan Franzen and his quest to re-instate the social novel. We live in a culture that wants art to state its purposes and its politics; everything must have a message. Think of the discussion surrounding the recent film Juno: was the film about female empowerment? Or was it part of the right-wing anti-abortion crusade? In a country so infatuated with polemics there is little room for complexity or ambiguity.

Exciting art does not preach truths, but circles them, forever closing in. Michaels, and, by proxy, his characters in The Men’s Club, tell their stories, not to illustrate points, but, in futility, to drive at the heart of mystery.