Robert Cohen's Amateur Barbarians is such a genuine and amusing midlife crisis novel that it manages to sell the unsellable and make aging look appealing. Each of Cohen's fallible characters asks if we acquire cumulative wisdom as the body, income and marital status change over the years. With its humour, accurate social barometer and attentive characterization, this lively novel wonders whether we mature emotionally or simply age physically.
Amateur Barbarians, by Robert Cohen, Scribner, 401 pages, $34.99
Two amateur barbarians propel this story of linked but unravelling lives. Fifty-three-year-old Teddy Hastings is a big fish in a small pond, a middle-school principal and municipal politician in New Carthage, a small New England town. In a classroom or a meeting or hurtling his bulk around a basketball court, Teddy likes to take charge. He thinks small towns are great to raise kids and pretends not to notice how keen his daughters are to flee.
In contrast, thirty-something Oren Pierce has been adrift on his own seas for years, flitting from one half-finished postgraduate degree and half-satisfying romance to another. Normally an inveterate urbanite, Oren follows an ambivalent lover to New Carthage and surprises himself by applying for a job at Teddy's school. When a half-unexpected crisis finds Teddy on indefinite leave, Oren's temporary job becomes more long-term than anyone had planned.
In many ways, the men are polar opposites. The brash boozer and the quiet toker. The proud homeowner and the contented house sitter. Teddy has a nightstand crowded with non-fiction about explorers. Oren has read widely in philosophy, the social sciences and fiction, though most of his library has been in scattered boxes for years. Despite these differences, each man comes to realize that, as Cohen puts it, the word “life” has “if” for a middle.
For all their differences, Cohen's men both flee introspection but then find it in their flights
Cohen writes with the memorable accuracy of a poet and the humour, indictments and generosity of a large-hearted satirist. The household of a family has its rituals: “The coffee, the newspaper, the fruit shakes, the fights, the dog, the blame, the toast.” In his resentment of cats, Teddy thinks, “for silent self-sufficiency and languid indifference he had his daughters, he had his wife.” Middle-aged bodies begin to wear. A woman's stretch marks are “faded calligraphy.” A third discovery of blood in the stool makes “the drill rigs of denial go quiet, the wells of repression run dry.” Waiting for a biopsy verdict creates a dread both existential and confused in which benign and malignant are “fraternal twins,” easily mistaken for one another.
Each of Cohen's protagonists recognizes that “books and marriages are well suited to each other. ... Both were middle-class adventures: They conspired to keep you at home, sitting still, being good.” Teddy and his wife, Gail, “wander into yet another anteroom in the big house of marriage, a room with faded rugs and unpolished furniture and low-wattage lights. In the middle of sex they'd long for sleep, in the middle of sleep they'd long for sex.” Oren tries to rekindle an old flame only to realize that “they were ex-ex-lovers: a double negative.” Love itself is a “non-renewable fossil fuel.”
Beyond the humour and dozens of small accuracies, Cohen's investigation of domestic ennui is bolstered by probing honesty and lasting wisdom. A welcome but problematic kiss is “all very complicated and inscrutable, very mixed-bag, very adult.” This emotional ambivalence is the composite portrait of Cohen's vibrant diptych.
For all their differences, Cohen's men both flee introspection but then find it in their flights. However briefly, Oren learns that maturity is often simply a question of saying yes and no at the right time and with the right consistency. Lurching from one self-inflicted disaster to another, Teddy tries not to confuse “appetites for inspiration.” All the characters are forced to debate whether marriage or adultery is truly the “coward's adventure.” Cohen's depictions of parenting and teaching (from both sides of the desk) are also superb.
Nearly a century ago, Broadway producer and director Arthur Hopkins wrote How's Your Second Act?, a book on theatre with a title still relevant to all storytellers, Cohen included. Despite its varied strengths, Amateur Barbarians sags a little in the middle. The book is a victim of its own success and suffers (just mildly) from its memorable and accurate characterization.
Midway through, the novel continues to tell us who Oren and Teddy are, summing them up in yet another witty comparison or generalization when by then we need to feel their character in action, not have it concluded in description. A final, merciless edit could have accelerated these characters through their early and delightful sketches into the fully animated drama Cohen eventually provides.
With some unexpected helpers, each of these men learns to heal his wounds, both the self-inflicted and the accidental.
Darryl Whetter's most recent book is the bicycle odyssey The Push & the Pull. He teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University .
