Customer Reviews

THE MEN'S CLUB

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Seven men, some acquainted and some strangers, meet one night to begin a club. This won't be a working man's club named for a large four-legged mammal or a toney businessman's city athletics and dinner club; instead it's a club dreamt up by a psychotherapist, modeled on the women's consciousness raising groups of the 1970s. Without an agenda, the men immediately focus on one subject -- women. They tell stories of bafflement, need, love, abuse, and marriage. They listen and they argue. They eat and drink and smoke and fight and break things. Their stories are outrageous and they sound true. Most of all, these men pay serious attention to one another. Michaels's masterful prose brings each man to life with gestures and dialogue and unforgettable stories. This is a small novel, but it brings important news from the gender wars. Women should read it, because it is both amusing and horrifying. These are characters you can hate and love just as if you knew them. In fact, you do know them. They are your brother, father, son, husband, lover, or friend.

Originally published in 1981, the Men's Club is set in the Bay Area during the late 70s. A psychologist named Kramer gathers a small group of men in their mid-to-late thirties together to discuss guy stuff. The club starts out, writes Michaels, "trying to recapture high-school days. Locker-room fun. Wet naked boys snapping towels at each other's genitals." There's some drinking and pot smoking before the men migrate into more dangerous territory-a refrigerator stocked full of food for tomorrow's luncheon - a woman's group hosted by Kramer's wife.

Mixed in with the bacchanalia are men talking about themselves. These aren't men talking about sports or power tools, but strange, sometimes sad, stories about their relationships with women - sometimes their wives -- who they've connected with, but are still trying to process. Michaels does a satisfying job tying up the story with a cohesive ending and the writing is terse and engaging.

Also, it's not an especially dated book, because men haven't evolved much in the last 20 years.

If you loved that Cassavettes movie Husbands, you may like this book though. In fact, I bet Michaels was a big fan of Cassavettes and that movie in particular. I thought that there was some good writing in this book, but it was too self-indulgent and kind of childish in attitude. I much preferred his earlier novel Sylvia. But I can see how The Men's Club was a huge influence on lots of macho writers who came later.

Recently I heard a New Yorker fiction podcast of Leonard Michael's short story, "Cryptology" and it made me want to read more of his work. I picked up "The Men's Club" at a used bookstore and found it bracingly dated. It captured the baby boomers in their first flush of adulthood and full of the seventies psychobabble.

Six men come to Kramer's house for the first meeting of the "Men's Club." The entire novel takes place over the span of an evening and the early morning. The men vent about women troubles as they become increasingly stoned, drunk or more accurately, primal. The novel is about stripping away civilization's veneer to get at the base core of men. The irony is that here they are celebrating an advancement in human development - the therapy group - they end up figuratively sitting around a cave fire competing for the alpha male position.

I say bracingly dated because the language while no longer pure, resonates with us today in its ridiculous avoidance of real life in favor of self absorption. My only quibble is that the novel feels like a stunt and the characters don't completely come alive outside their context of their usefulness as mouthpieces. Still the language, energy and satire keeps the work alive even as the characters in the book are now in their retirement years.