THE CATASTROPHIST, BY LAWRENCE DOUGLAS

Ak gave this to me for my birthday because of the hilarious cover. The author is an Amherst professor, and the book is about an almost adulterous professor at a small Massachusetts liberal arts college. Why do people take “Write what you know” so literally? It just makes the book seem pseudo-autobiographical. More later.

Done

I’m not sure I would call this book “riotously funny” or “thought-provoking” as the dust jacket would have you believe. A professor of art makes it big, has a mid-life crisis, gradually loses the connection to his wife, constantly ends up betraying her with other women while never actually consummating the affairs, and ends in catastrophe. The apparent madness white men experience when realizing they are half dead is a well-trodden trail, as is the unbearable weight of Western monogamy that fiction would have us believe leads all men and most women to temptation. I have found these things interesting in the past. I loved Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. This book’s approach to these topics didn’t seem as appealing.

Here’s one difference: The Ice Storm depicted the social and sexual strains in what seemed like general terms. It presented a number of characters suffering and fracturing in different directions. It cast infidelity and sexual frustration among modern, American adults as a phenomenon, something affecting everyone, occurring in real time. The Catastrophist takes a different tack, recollecting events from the first person, a person who seems increasingly annoying, ineffectual, and occasionally despicable as the book progresses. Infidelity becomes a character flaw, then, the result of neuroses. I never felt the need to admit my part in this problem, because it didn’t feel like my own, which left me feeling uninvolved. The fact that he was an academic and not a suburbanite played into this as well.

I guess the proper context in which to place my impression of this novel is alongside my feelings about the novels I’ve read recently. I read this one right after David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, which I absolutely loved. Mitchell also has a tendency towards first person, internal prose, but Number9Dream was more a direct (if stylized) tap into the protagonist’s mind,. The Catastrophist’s protagonist is literally telling us his story, and I constantly felt the need to judge him as a storyteller. Why is he telling us about this affair? Is he looking for pity? Disdain? Validation of his self-pity through our disdain? Number9Dream achieves a more objective first person point of view by streaming thought directly to me. I wasn’t being told a tale, but living it alongside the “narrator.” I like that immersion. Or maybe I just liked that character more.

Which, of course, leads me to what is probably the real reason I didn’t quite care for this book: although I didn’t feel particularly involved with the main character’s problems, I found his cowardly approach to resolving or avoiding them uncomfortably familiar. When he wasn’t behaving in ways that I might, he was doing so in ways that I might some day, which is frankly pretty boring. I don’t need to read about myself. Even smarter, more accomplished versions of myself who seem irresistible to women.

Oh, that was the other thing: this book is so ridiculously, painfully male. Like some horny intellectual neurotic’s fantasy land. Cooky and attractive profs who proposition you with casual sex? Horny former students? Leggy German painters? Every woman in the book was some kind of pinup for the nice-guy dish-washing-I-love-you-for-your-mind-and-your-boobs set. Oh! She’s quirky! Unique! Intelligent! Funny! Did I mention she’s surprisingly beautiful when she takes off her glasses? Please. Like a person is a feature set. Just because you add Sense of Humor and Good Taste in Books to Nice Rack and Great Ass doesn’t make the methodology of assessment any different. I don’t know why this bothers me. Isn’t this how everyone describes the reasons they like people? As a list of features? I know I do. The whole book just seemed so grossly . . . gendered, which again, was boring. I know the neurotic male point of view, ok? Let’s try something different.

Maybe I should just stop reading fiction.