Amateur Barbarians

A wonderful look into male mid-life crisis

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.

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. 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.")

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