Howard Akler
There is a passage in Howard Akler's Men of Action where the author lightly chastises himself for how long it takes him to write a book. "My first novel [The City Man], a slender 160 pages, took eight years," he tells us, suggesting not only a failing in his efficiency, but in the heft of his final product.
It's an understandable personal lament for an author to make. Literary culture tends to have a fetish for books that make good doorstops, crowning them bestsellers and award-winners, while slimmer reads are written off as far less relevant. This tendency is a shame, given that Men of Action – more a lyrical essay than a meaty memoir – might actually be the best book I've read all year.
Men of Action is about Akler's experience of watching his father Saul deteriorate over a period of time. It's about patrimony and the connection between fathers and sons. It's about never being able to truly know a person you love. It's about death and loss and the instability that follows. Yet none of these familiar (and clichéd) statements succeed in revealing what this book is about at all. From the opening scene, where a removed Akler meticulously shaves the face of his unconscious father, we understand that the insight offered here will be far more complex and substantial than what we've seen before. In fact, the words we usually ascribe to this kind of writing – meditation, contemplation, investigation – all fail in getting to the root of what is being accomplished.
Composed of a series of disjointed thoughts compiled after the brain surgery that left Saul in a coma, Men of Action brings us into the commonplace experience of watching a parent die, yet lacks the platitudes and inspirational mantras the grief genre is accustomed to. Akler not only parallels his father's brain tumour with his own struggles with seizures and depression, but uses these betrayals of the mind to look more deeply into our perilous relationship with language, communication and understanding.
The book is indeed spare but never lacking, highlighting Akler's unique ability to move his reader by means of a few incisive, well-chosen words. Some pages contain only a handful of sentences, with most chapters no more than a few pages. "I appreciate understatement in prose," Akler explains. "Acknowledge that emotion stuffed deep enough into a sentence can create furious equipoise, a telling tension between what is said and what is unsaid. I like generous white space, a tidy page."
These tidy pages – just more than 100 of them – are also written with a stylistic distance that reads more as manifesto than confessional. We're provided with visceral flashes of the hopeless, near-boring monotony of watching long failing health, never spared the ugly truth of sores, phlegm and fluids. It's the sparseness that engrosses us, allows us to look at the difficult narrative head on, but also gives us the much-needed room to pause on the weight of each reflection. Akler is definitely thorough in his examination of loss, but with a welcome light touch and near impossible nuance.
Moving beyond memoir, Akler weaves personal history with literature, philosophy and scientific study, with mentions of Dickinson, Descartes and Wilder Penfield. The end product is a holistic look into the very nature of consciousness while witnessing someone's fade away. If this sounds like a lofty, high-minded premise, it shouldn't be a deterrent. All of this is rooted in contemporary markers, such as the weather reports and Blue Jays scores that appear on the television screen in the waiting room, a woman asking about muffins at the front of the line at the hospital's Second Cup, and the sudden news of a shooting on Scarborough's Danzig Street interrupting his father's lengthy surgery. Life goes on despite your personal suffering, it suggests.
"Time shook loose from the clock, freed itself from the artificial imposition of seconds," Akler writes. "A single moment endured beyond all physical law, and then repeated itself." This is tragedy depicted authentically, exactly as we experience it – a scattered frenzy in the midst of the mundane solidity of real life. It leads us to a unique understanding of, in the wake of debilitating grief, what we remember, what we forget and why.
Probably the most admirable quality of Akler's telling is his own admission of the fallibility inherent in doing so. He unpacks the failures of the very words he uses, showcasing his obsessive anxieties around writing's disappointments and taking us through the meticulous process of documenting the inexplicable. Akler has an awareness that his words – or anyone's words – can never properly serve the weight of what has been experienced, but he has done an admirable job using them nonetheless.
What makes someone who they are? What details and actions explain their inner thoughts? What moments matter in the telling of a life? These are futile questions, but what matters is that Akler is asking them in a way we haven't previously seen. Men of Action not only gracefully succeeds in depicting the nature of human tragedy, but the inherent failures of language to capture it. The book's brevity is its strength – a genuine testament to the writer's talent that he is able to take us so far with so little.