Customer Reviews

Man School: lessons on love, power, honor and purpose

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Make no mistake about it: the editor of Manschool, Kristin Hackler, is a brilliant stylist with a bright future. Five years of describing Charleston in intimate, charming detail with Lucky Dog Press has left her readership scurrying about for both the whereabouts of guerilla cuisine and the opportunity to pick ripe vegetables for the poor.

Her Benjaminesque arcades consist of the nooks and crannies of the anti-Starbuck coffeehouse, the scent of smoked barbeque, the modernist gallery near the beach. She has made Charleston into her own private Paris, and graciously shared it with us, her readership.

But what's holding her back is an ethic that cannot accept shades of grey. In her fictive side, there's absolutely nothing to stand between her too-clearly held mental pictures of black and white--those absolutes of good and evil, as it were.

We saw this first in her debutante novel, "Christmas Weather", in which a dog intuits goodness and badness among children by means of sniffing. Now what's obviously missing is the canine biology that directly links olfactory sensation with friend-or- foe recognition and then, ultimately, an internal fight- or- flight mechanism.

In other words, is the reality of doggy-world perception an adequate predictor as to how, say, little Kippy might be inclined to share the pilfered cookies baked by Mommasue with sissy Ashleigh? Most people who have actually raised children--including myself--would be somewhat disinclined to permit the resident hound to have the last word in what, parentally speaking, clearly seems to be a Gordian Knot of mixed motives.

In any case, a far more melancholic point would be that many parents indeed wish that love bestowed on family pets might somehow reverberate its way back into sibling affection.

Then, on the website that serves as this book's template, Ms. Hackler wrote a short story entitled, "The boy and the spider". As always, her imagery is absolutely adorable; yet regrettably, she again stumbles over an extremist either-or metaphysic in which no one who's been offered a gift can put it to a higher good.

Having been given wishes by a grateful spider, the boy and his family viciously exploit the arachnid for all its worth to create personal, material wealth. Of course, all of this vanishes when the spider dies, ostensibly supporting the double platitude that wealth is an illusion and nothing has any worth that isn't gained by labor.

In the ethical world of Manschool, it's easy to understand the absence of luck, and how a great part of life responds to good and bad fortune. Herein, everything is `deserved', and becoming a real man is participle to this understanding.

The 'real men' with whom Ms Hackler associates possess a southernoid identity crisis that can only be satisfied by a personal Pickett's charge into the rush-hour traffic of modern urbanized life.

For example, because women and gays are constantly fleeing into cities to escape from the brutality of countryside macho, I can't imagine what sort of woman would appreciate the Manschool type. Perhaps those totally lacking in self-esteem?

As a small example, i'll cite the divorce issue as mentioned in the editorial review. Divorces indeed skyrocket in situations which permit females to escape from bad marriages.

Manskool would be far more amusing if there were not so many battered women seeking shelter away from those whose only goal in life is to keep their tools sharp and their thoughts simple. Perhaps, then, Ms Hackler might care to visit a shelter, and to actually listen to a real story?

Manskool is the last reflux of a rural southern ethos that seeks to enforce white male dominance by The Code. It's the Old Testament carry-down in which judgment is harsh and unequivocal: as God divided the world into absolute'good' and 'evil', our only choice is, really, to be on his side.

It would therefore seem as if Ms Hackler contradicts her own beliefs: How can someone who writes so well be so self-possessed at thirty with such a childish sense of right and wrong? Is this what an over-developed religion does for young children, that a bloated self-righteousness cannot ever be effaced?

The ant's a centaur in his dragon-world, Kristin. Pull down thy vanity.

BH