Reading group: The Men's Club by Leonard Michaels

I was waiting for a train on Dalkey station when I opened this 1981 novel now reissued by Daunt Books, and was so bowled over by the prose that then and there I was fired to start a new publishing company in order to publish such prose myself. (Next day I saw the folly of such a thought: last time I was a publisher I ended up having no time or headspace to write, so I won't quickly be making that mistake again.)

However, the book struck fewer sparks for our reading group back in England.

In a spare, ironic prose, the unnamed narrator, a Berkeley academic, recounts an evening meeting in the late 1970s to which he was invited and reluctantly attended, a male answer to the proliferating women's consciousness-raising groups of the time.

But I was thinking about good company. Some of my married colleagues had love affairs, usually with students. You could call it a regular social possibility. It included emotional chaos. Gonorrhoea. Even guilt. They would have been better off in a men's club.

Present at the meeting are his academic colleague and ex-basketball player Cavanaugh, a psychotherapist, a doctor, a real-estate executive, a lawyer and a businessman. Nervous at first of each other and the situation, and of the apparent requirement to discuss their lives, the men eventually loosen up over marijuana and a whole case of Zinfandel and more, and in a Canterbury-Tales type scenario (one of the men is significantly called Canterbury) they unwittingly reveal their own lack of emotional intelligence by telling tales of their encounters with women, several of them adulterous. Finally, in a desecration of the women's ritual they are aping, they raid the fridge of the huge spread prepared by the host's wife for her meeting the following evening, wreck the room, engage in occasional and vaguely homoerotic bouts of aggression towards each other, throw knives at a door and end up as one band beating their chests and howling like wolves.

Although everyone in our group agreed, I think, that the prose was stunning, there were some criticisms from, interestingly, the men among us, and also some differences in the ways they had read the book. John was perturbed by the fact that the book, dealing with such a serious subject - the lack of maturity and responsibility of apparently professional men - failed to engage him emotionally, a point with which everyone agreed: the ironic prose and objective stance of the narrator leaves one feeling distanced. For Doug this was not a problem, as he had read the whole thing as a broad comedy which had made him laugh out loud: it was the only way he could read it, he said, because otherwise it would have been just too horrific. Mark hadn't read it like that at all. He too found it horrific but, from the perspective of the present day, unbelievable: any group of professional men beginning to behave like that in this day and age would have immediately been shown the door, and would never do so in the first place, and he took John to task for choosing what he considered an old-fashioned and irrelevant book. He did think that the stories the men told had worked very well, but he had no time for the overall narrative context in which they were placed. I felt a little baffled by this last, as the meanings of the stories are opaque to their narrators and they are often unfinished: the whole point therefore is the context of the stories, and what they reveal about their narrators. Ann went so far as to wonder if Michaels had had a series of stories up his sleeve that were all too similar - there are similarities: all of the men are similarly dense about and baffled by women - and simply found this way of stringing them together.

There is indeed perhaps a difficulty in knowing how this book should be read. Because of the distanced and ironic stance of the narrator, it is hard to see much separation between narrator and author, yet at the end the narrator joins in wholeheartedly with the behaviour of the other men. (John said that the other book of Michaels' that he had read, Sylvia, had the same effect: he wasn't sure that the author of Sylvia didn't identify with the self-centred and sexist protagonist). Consequently it's possible to interpret The Men's Club not as a criticism of the primitive and immature character of men, but, for instance, as Kirkus Reviews decided, as a sly sendup of 'women's lib' novels.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here