Customer Reviews

Amateur Barbarians: A Novel

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No other contemporary author (or at least the ones I read and know of anyway) writes the way Robert Cohen does. He crafts the most beautiful, thought-provoking sentences I have ever seen. He can string out metaphor upon metaphor without ever overdoing it. To read his prose is to constantly marvel at the fertility of his imagination and the masterfulness of his artistry. His intricate sentences are never obtuse and always endowed with a light touch that keeps you chuckling as you digest the steady diet of brilliant insights.

In this novel, he explores the inner lives of two men -- Teddy Hastings, a 50-year-old disgraced principal of a middle school in northern New England, and Oren Pierce, a feckless 30-year-old who replaces him during Teddy's temporary forced "sabbatical." On the surface it's the tale of one man suffering a major mid-life crisis, while the younger man tries to gain a foothold on adulthood after years of living without direction and enduring numerous false starts. The novel is told from their alternating perspectives, although one chapter deviates from that as we go inside the head of Teddy's daughter Mimi on a night she's out partying with her high school friends. After so many pages of deep insight into the male psyche, it's a marvel to witness how effectively Cohen gets inside the head of a teenaged girl as she drinks with her friends and grows tired of an overly solicitous boyfriend, whose solicitudes are no more than selfish demands for attention and praise.

The novel has some intriguing twists along the way. Without giving too much away, there is a wonderful exploration halfway in of why Teddy got into trouble and had to spend several nights in a jail. Let's just say he "suffered for his art" in the midst of becoming obsessed over his homework for an adult-ed photography class. Teddy's wife Gail also plays a key role in the novel -- both in Teddy's life and Oren's, but I won't say more to avoid revealing some of the plot turns in the book.

The path of Teddy's mid-life crisis takes him to Africa, originally in pursuit of his oldest daughter, who took a junior year abroad and then decided not to come back while hopping her way across Asia and East Africa. One of the media reviews suggested the novel is squarely in "Updike country" but in my knowledge of Updike (admittedly limited to the first two Rabbit books) he never left American suburbia to explore East Africa. The passages as Teddy accompanies a doctor on his rounds through various towns and into a desert are breathtaking -- particularly the descriptions of a visit to the walled city of Harar, Ethiopia, and a local shaman who tames wild hyena with raw meat dangling from his mouth.

Like most literary novels, it's a character-charged, not plot-driven, story. The greatest joy in turning these pages is having your eyes awakened to the beautiful ways the author describes and paints everyday life. He captures prosaic moments with such poetically wrought prose. Witness the words he can put behind the simple joys of opening a new purchase (in this case a camera): "Just opening the cardboard gave him pleasure. The cheerful snap of the bubbled plastic. The squeal of goods being extracted from their Styrofoam harnesses."

As I mentioned above, there's plenty of humor -- some of the funniest scenes occur in classrooms, as Oren tries to lead a discussion of a Hawthorne short story with his uninterested middle school students, and Teddy's witheringly funny observations about the obvious inexperience and incompetence of a teacher trying to lead his photography class. ("The stuttering, overemphatic gestures, the extraneous digression about this guy Rimbaud, the way she kept looking down at her note cards like a game-show host, shuffling them in search of an answer -- he'd seen all these signs and symptoms before: the novice pedagogue in over her head.") This scene reminded me of a hysterically humorous piece in his story collection, The Varieties of Romantic Experience: Stories, when an on-the-verge-of-losing-it professor gives his students a blow-by-blow account, via a classroom lecture, of his failed affair with a graduate assistant. (The seeds of this novel were also planted in another story from that collection about a man who gets himself into trouble after enrolling in an adult ed. photography class.) The thoughts here about how Teddy could create interesting photos from ordinary items around his house - like empty hangers in the bottom of a closet -- made me want to break out my own camera and start chronicling the ephemera of my family's daily life.

As is clear by now, I'm a huge fan of Robert Cohen's. If you love elegant, mind-expanding fiction delivered with gentle humor, he's your man. If you enjoy this novel, I can strongly recommend his story collection and three previous novels, The Organ Builder, The HERE AND NOW, and Inspired Sleep: A Novel.

In a sidebar note, I hope The New York Times Sunday Book Review write-up will bring the novel some well-deserved attention. While the reviewer praised much of the novel, he seemed more interested in laying out his expectations of what novels on male mid-life crises should be and wondering why Teddy didn't suffer some sort of major consequence for stumbling through his confusion about who he is and the path his life has taken. I think novels that leave you feeling bleak and hopeless because of some catastrophic consequence - death, murder, abandonment, maybe? - of your self-absorbed actions are very different types of books. If you're looking for less sensationalism and just more insight into the everyday aftermath of disappointing your loved ones and failing to maintain deep, enduring connections (and how hard it is to avoid either), then this is the novel to read.

If you'd like to watch a video of the author talking about this book, search his name and the novel's title on YouTube -- there's a five minute video of an interview he did with a New York radio station. An audio recording of the full 15- minute interview is available on www.wnyc.org in transcripts of the Leonard Lopate show.

I loved this novel. Packed with unvarnished temptation, bumbling foibles and sometimes depressing authenticity, this novel seems to be about nothing less than what is to be a man in Americana the end of the last century. With his lapidary precision, Cohen provokes laughter as much as rue. From a scene early in the book when Oren teaches Hawthorne's Wakefield to a class of checked out (and completely believable) middle school students to the erotic adventures later on, the characters' bonds, their midlife examinations and reconciliations strike us as once new and familiar. Many reviewers have talked about this novel in terms of male mid-life crisis, comparing it to Percy's MovieGoer and works by Roth and Bellow. But unlike most of his predecessors, one of Cohen's signature strengths as a writer is his uncanny ability to depict credible, female midlife heroines who, despite their exhaustion and mild cynicism, strike us as superior to their male cohorts in almost every way.

I chose this book from my library's "new fiction" section, and the opening sentences drew me in. (In fact, budding writers should take note of how skillfully Cohen leads into his story and its themes.) I will be seeking out more of the author's work.

It took me a little longer to read this then usual and I enjoyed it. But all the way through it and even in the end it didn't seem to go anywhere. It's like I walked into and left in the middle of a conversation and never really figured out the ending. It wasn't bad, it was just there. You might get more out of it then I did. It was basically life, it's ups and downs and how we are always overthinking or underthinking things. At least I guess that's what I got out of it. You read it and figure it out for yourself. No matter what you get out of it it's not bad reading so you won't be disapointed too bad either way.

Middle school principal Teddy Hastings is in the midst of a midlife crisis. His brother recently died, he's battling his own health issues, his older daughter has escaped to Asia and he may be having a minor emotional meltdown. And there's this little issue of being in prison.

Oren Pierce has always been a drifter, moving from major to major in college, from relationship to relationship, place to place. Suddenly he's found himself as co-acting principal and on the verge of a challenging relationship, and he can't figure out if he wants either one.

Teddy and Oren's stories, along with the ripples they make in the lives of their family and friends, are the backbone of Richard Cohen's Amateur Barbarians. Many of us have found ourselves sharing at least one trait with either Teddy or Oren (hopefully not the jail thing), so I think their stories are fairly easy to digest and understand.

Cohen was at his best when writing about Teddy. I don't know if it was his blustery nature or the situations he found himself in, but I found myself caring much more about him than Oren (and Teddy was the one in more trouble). Oren's lack of ambition and backbone frustrated me after a while. I thought this was a good book, but not a great one.

Unlike the other reviewers, I'm struggling to finish the book. Too much is expressed in overcomplicated sentences that the author must have had a thesaurus handy to come up with them. The synopsis of the book makes it sound more interesting than it actually is.