An old friend came to visit Los Angeles a few months ago. We had a quick coffee on La Brea, and before he left, I brought him up to see my little studio apartment. My friend admired the view, and the brick walls. He looked around.
“But where are all your books?”
I have one bookshelf. Perhaps fifteen hardcovers and five paperbacks sit on it.
I am always quick when it’s time for self-deprecation: “I have given up trying to signal that I am anything other than vacuous and incurious,” I reply.
I get the obvious eye roll in response. I explain that Pasadena City College put the contents of my office in a dumpster after I resigned. I explain that years of homelessness and couch-surfing meant that I’d needed to travel lightly, and I’d given thousands of volumes away. I paraphrase Elizabeth Bishop about the art of losing things, and I declare myself a master.
My friend replies that he thinks I’m a very good writer but would be a much better one if I did more reading. I shrug and promise him I do read novels on Kindle. We change the subject.
The problem is that I am not sure I’ve been reading the right sort of novels lately. It is hardly a surprise that many of us are drawn to books that tell stories about people like us. In my case, given the particular arc of my life, I am very interested in reading books about college professors and teachers who have affairs with their students. It is something of a literary trope and leaving aside the soft-core pornographic representations of the subject (invariably neither erotic nor insightful), there are plenty of novels about this common feature of campus life.
I also like books that feature middle-aged people navigating the vicissitudes of marriage and parenting. Again, an exceedingly common topic, and one with which I am generally easily satisfied. (If you are over 45, you will remember Bridges of Madison County – the book, not the Clint Eastwood/Meryl Streep movie. It was a publishing phenomenon in the early 1990s, and the critics could not say enough bad things about it. It was no doubt awful from a literary standpoint, but I sobbed reading it. I am not ashamed of my middle-brow tastes. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that.)
So here’s the problem. In the past year, I’ve made my way through three acclaimed bestsellers. Each is written by a woman (two by first-time novelists.) Each features a man in middle age who crosses a boundary of some sort. In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, a fifteen-year-old has an affair with her high school teacher. In Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year, a senior at a New England college begins a passionate fling with her professor. And in the most recent of these books, Roxana Robinson’s Leaving, a fellow in late middle age embarks on an extramarital romance with an old girlfriend.
That information is on the dust jacket of each book – if you read further, below the photos, there will be spoilers.
At the end of each of these three celebrated novels, the man kills himself. They are all melodramatic acts of self-destruction. Jacob Strain, the high school teacher, jumps off a bridge into a river. The English professor, R.H. Connolly, drives his car into a pond. And Warren, the unfaithful husband, leaps off a cliff to his death. In each instance, the author suggests that the means were chosen to leave behind the possibility that death was accidental rather than intentional – a sort of small kindness to survivors.
As a man who endured a very public disgrace after a series of extramarital affairs with his students, I read novels like this in part to assess the harm I did – and to see what possibilities of redemption remain. As you can imagine, reading all three of these back-to-back was rather disturbing. There were no cautions on any of the dust jackets that each of the male protagonists would take his own life. I’m an aging Gen Xer who doesn’t believe in trigger warnings, but given my own life arc, I will say I was shaken.
Each of these three books deals with a slightly different kind of betrayal. We can stipulate that a 21-year-old college senior can give meaningful consent in a way that a 15-year-old cannot. We can agree that an extramarital affair with an old flame is a different sort of sin than sleeping with one’s student. The fact that each of these three men chooses an identical fate, however, does tend to suggest to me that these moral gradations are distinctions without any real difference. Each decides he cannot go on as a result of what he’s done. Whether what he did was criminal or merely unethical is beside the point – the old boy is dead regardless.
It's a good thing that we are reading these sorts of stories told from a woman’s perspective. In the age of #MeToo, it is vital that we have narratives that explore the ways in which men in positions of authority have abused that power, and to what cost. It is also important to recognize, as both Russell and Florin do in their novels about student-teacher romance, that even very young women have some agency. I appreciate that none of these men are one-dimensional. They are not caricatures -- leering predators focused only on their own urges. I appreciate that these books explore themes of consent, and even of the possibility of “true love.” Secrecy, boundary violations, and betrayal are real, but they can coexist in the same space with devotion, tenderness, and loyalty. Each of these three books, in different ways, acknowledges that complexity.
I have thought quite a bit about why Florin, Russell, and Robinson choose such similar endings for their men. The obvious answer is that suicide is both a gripping literary device and an easy way to wrap up a case. When a hunted criminal takes his own life before being arrested, we may say he took the coward’s way out – or we may say that he spared everyone the agony of a trial. Killing off adulterous and lecherous men provides a kind of justice, I suppose, but more importantly, it forecloses any chance of ongoing reckoning. Our female heroines don’t have to pursue closure. Closure is provided.
I should very much like to read a novel about a professor who crosses the proverbial line and loses his job. I should very much like to have that be towards the beginning of the damn book, so that we can see him work through his redemptive arc. I should very much like to see him contemplate suicide and choose otherwise. He stands at the cliff’s edge… and backs away. He accelerates towards the pond… and hits the brakes. He finds a way to live with disgrace, to make amends, to rebuild, to transform.
I taught women’s studies for a long time. I already know the riposte: it’s not a woman writer’s job to narrate a complicated man’s journey. The woman is the center of these stories, and rightly so. She’s the one on the hero’s journey, and the teacher or mentor who offs himself after the affair is over is only there to provide an inciting event. He wounds her -- but she’s the one who heals, while he dies from the shame or the guilt. Joseph Campbell, call your office.
I can already anticipate the reviews if I scribbled out a novel based in part on my own life. If I was too hard on myself, they’d call it tedious and self-abasing. If I absolved myself, I’d be accused of a complete lack of responsibility and introspection. And I’d be told over and over again that we already have too many stories about aging white men on heroic journeys. It is time for us dirty old men to fall silent, to live out whatever redemption arc we can manage in a way that doesn’t take attention away from the folks whose voices matter more. The world may not want me to kill myself, but it isn’t keen to hear my story, either.
My friends – perhaps the same ones who think I don’t have enough books in my apartment – think I shouldn’t read these sorts of novels. Stop looking for clues about how to live by reading stories about the kind of man you no longer are, they say. Perhaps they are right. (I’ve just started A Gentleman in Moscow, the Amor Towles bestseller. A friend I like very much said that the lead character reminded her of me, in a good way, and I find that comforting. If there’s one thing I’m even more obsessed with than the details of my past, it’s the question of how a gentleman ought to conduct himself in the face of disappointment. Manners are everything, and a good book about how manners and education sustain us is just the thing.)
Here's the thing: I do believe my story has value to others. I have lost a great deal because of choices I made. I have caused great harm to those I love. I have known shame. I still lose out on clients who are put off by my past. I still have literal as well as figurative debts I cannot pay. And yet I have rebuilt a life, and I have found a way to live and to father and to befriend and to serve. In literature, men like me jump off cliffs, or go to the bottom of the river. I have considered those endings and rejected them as unacceptable. I am already living a different story. I would like to find a way to tell it.
Your posts give me heart. Sometimes they make me cry. I would love to read the story of your life whether autobiographical or fictionalized. FWIW my immediate reaction *as a woman* to these authors choosing to kill off their male protagonists: they're mad and on some level it's wish fulfillment. Suicide (not just despair or suicidal thoughts) is NOT a natural response to a failed love affair (OK, to the extent you can call a sexual relationship with a teenager a love affair). I think it's more of a female response than a male response, when it is chosen as a solution (I don't have research to back up this opinion - it's just my intuition). Haven't read any of these books and don't plan to. Bet you a nickel - if there were a way to learn more about these ladies, we'd see they've drawn a conclusion they prefer to unhappy/humilitating past experiences...writing the tale they wish they'd lived.
It seems you have been drafting this novel for many years in confessional open letters, in contemplations of your affairs like little crumbs woven into a good number of your writings, it is the scratch on the record of your life, the hiccup, the carbuncle you perhaps need to exercise to catharsis in a novel. In a novel the lived experience is so focused and shaped like a diamond for the telling that the work exhausts the topic to the point where you are yourself sick of thinking about it n can finally move on. Write that shit!!