Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
A
Single Man
by Christopher Isherwood, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001
Reviewed by Ulf Goebel
With thorough pleasure and an uncanny sense
of recognition I read this novel, perhaps Isherwood's finest, for
the first time at a friend's mention of the remarkable passage on
which it ends, a mystic "wordflight" through a supposed heart
attack in sleep. "For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the
tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the
lights go out." It's 1962. George, the protagonist, is teaching at
a small college on the outskirts of Los Angeles, living alone in a
dark and secretive old house "shaggy with ivy," the last of a
colony of escapists who could "paint a bit, write a bit, and drink
lots." Portrayed in wry, playful, mischievous prose, we see the
America of the day through the eyes of an outsider whose partner,
Jim, recently dead in a car crash, had once gone off with Doris,
herself now dying, but come back to George. The Strunks across the
street with their litter of tots had arrived with the vets and
their just-married wives, the "occupying army of Coke-drinking
television watchers," whose suburban "homes" replaced the old
"cottages which used to reek of bathtub gin and reverberate with
the poetry of Hart Crane." The Girls might find "understanding" for
George, but their husbands knew differently. Many of us then came
to feel like him. The lights were going out all over America. We
joined SDS and marched against the Pentagon. Isherwood's lightly
mocking tone quite matches what I felt.
Reviewed by Ulf Goebel, Adjunct Instructor, College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Ulf Goebel is a German instructor at Butler University.