The Choices of Men: a novel of male power and sexuality in a feminist age, by T. S. Tyrone. 1stBooks, USA., 2001, www.lstbooks.com. Trade paperback, 239 pages, ISBN: 0-75965-455-7. Review by David Shackleton. What a joy it was to read this book! Well-written, engaging, and strongly masculine in style and ideas. And, like the very best novels, it offers a moving and inspiring, positive vision of human hope and human maturity. The Choices of Men is the story of Guy Scheels, a forty-something man with whom many of us will be able to identify. After coming of age in the free-love seventies, he has tried to fill the relationship and security void in his life with a wife, a career as a corporate lawyer and an elegant home. Now he is finding that all these structures are coming apart at the seams. His career gives him no satisfaction, no joy, and he is seeing the writing on the wall that it never will. Likewise his marriage; founded on feminist principles of women's emancipation, it never addresses, or even acknowledges, his own deep needs or issues. He is becoming aware of the shallowness of feminist analysis, but without yet becoming free of its power. The Choices of Men is the story of how Guy comes to terms with these issues. In this, it is clearly a novel about Everyman (the archetype, not the magazine), about the awakening of male consciousness and male power, and what that might look like in practical terms.		Tyrone first paints the picture of Guy's unsatisfying life, a picture that will be familiar to most men thirty five or older. The author touches on most men's issues, but focuses in most strongly on the question of sex. Several passages are witheringly direct, exposing the one-sidedness of modem gender thinking with remarkable clarity. For example, Guy speaking to his friend Jackson on sex:   "You know me, Jacks. I'm half economist, half lawyer. I think in market terms. When I was single I was in a freemarket economy. Supply and demand were at work. So was consumer choice. If you liked the goods, you bought; if you didn't like them, you walked. There was an exchange of value. I gave you something you valued, you gave me something. If you didn't like my wampum, you traded elsewhere. "All that's been stood on its head. While the economic world is moving from state-controlled industries to free-market economies, in my marriage I've moved to a monopoly. There is only one supplier. She controls the production, distribution, price and availability and there is no one else allowed to compete. It's the perfect recipe for terrible service and that's exactly what I'm getting." A significant strength of the book is its recognition of traditional male values like friendship, providing, sex, and understanding of violence.   "Other members of the team were now running over to break up the fight in that remarkable collective male response to men who had picked the wrong target for their anger. If they had collectively and unspokenly perceived this to be a legitimate fight for honor or leadership or sport, they would have equally naturally formed a circle to confine the combatants in an instantly constructed arena and cheer them on." The author does not distort feminist thinking in order to show its shortcomings. Indeed, as a good novelist, he presents it also through Guy's wife Jill's eyes, with the sincere conviction that she feels for its rightness. I appreciated the integrity of the treatment of this topic, more frequently dismissed with outrage in the men's movement, as if it were unworthy of serious analysis.		After setting the scene in detail, the author uses an unusual device for a novel and speaks to us personally about his book and why he wrote it in an interlude chapter. "I don't expect you to sit back and read this book passively. . . .I invite you to metaphorically suit up, get onto the playing field and kick this ball around with me. See where it goes and where it might go." Tyrone then poses several key questions about the choices Guy has and how we would like to see deal with or resolve his situation. "Spend a while thinking about these choices and get clear which you would encourage him to make and why. Then see what applicability there may be to your own life. When the whistle blows, we'll resume the story." In the third section, the author brings his tale to a climax. What Guy does is creative and dramatic, and I won't spoil your suspense by describing it here. For this reader, the conclusion was satisfying in a dramatic sense: it tied together the story threads in a way that did justice to the complexity of the issues and the characters. However, as an educational message which, given his interlude the author dearly intends it to be, it has a weakness which I wish Tyrone had cautioned us about. What Guy does to resolve his life comes out of the agony of his soul-searching, as the author makes clear in his story. But his solution is so dramatic and engaging that I fear it might be "tried" by some readers as a script, a scenario, and fail because it lacks the authority that comes from the deep soul-searching that Guy did. Each of us must find our own, unique solution to the complex strands of our lives. Canned answers rarely achieve lasting results. With this one minor criticism, this is a truly excellent novel, and I strongly encourage you to buy it. It is entertaining, hopeful, dramatic and inspiring. Indeed, I hope to sell it through Everyman Books in the future. The Choices of Men is available at the website www.choicesofmen.com, which also features sample chapters at no charge. Reviewer David Shackleton is a thinker and writer on gender and spiritual growth, and Everyman editor and publisher Phone: (613) 832-2284, email: editor@everyman.org
Everyman: A Men's Journal, Issue 52, December 2001/January 2002

 

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