-
My Favorite All-time Novel & My Crystal Ball Apr 14, 2003 (21 of 22 found this helpful)
First of all: Good concept. A day in the life. Isherwood's stream of consciousness is more readable than James Joyce's, whom I love for a different set of reasons. Second of all: A believable blend of the mundane and the transcendent. We catch the lead character George eating poached eggs for breakfast and masturbating in order to sleep at night. Before our eyes, he farts, fantasizes, converses with friends and co-workers, and generally just goes through his work day as an English professor at a state college in Los Angeles and his evening as a man seeking company.
If he's seeking company with special ardor, it's because he's lost his male companion, Jim, to an auto accident, something the dreary late autumn approach to Christmas makes even harder to bear. The ghost of Jim flits in and out of so many of the novel's passages. George makes connections throughout his day, but we see one by one how they fall short of the intimacy he shared with Jim. His best friend Charlotte "Charley" and he have the kind of witty, boozy conversation longtime pals might have, but Charley's efforts to turn things romantic crash into George's homosexuality. George has friends on his school's faculty who kibbitz with him over lunch about their shared left-leaning politics, but these are hardly deep bonds. Also, George has a sickening feeling that, despite his oratorial brilliance as a teacher, he's not really reaching his students.
George visits a dying woman, also involved in the Ohio car crash that killed Jim. Once upon a time, Doris was a rival for Jim's affection. George's ambivalent reaction to her sad condition, somewhere between grieving and vanquishing a foe, testifies to the unflinching honesty of this portrait.
George raves about the hour he spends at his health club, entering a lively sit-up competition with a 14-year-old he finds incipiently attractive. "How delightful it is to be here," Isherwood writes, "If only one could spend one's entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy."
George's only hope for a full communion with another person comes with a happenstance nighttime meeting with one of his students, Kenny, at a beachside bar. The 60-year-old man and the 19-year-old youth enjoy smart, witty, and flirtateous conversation, which culminates in a Pacific Ocean skinny-dip and a visit to George's place. The visit is sensual but not sexual, leaving George short of the Jim standard again--but not without hope.
A ordinary day of an ordinary (but for his intellect) man. Why then is this book so spectacular? The prose flows. Check out these stunning sentences: (Of Doris dying in a hospital room) "Here on the table...is a little paper book, gaudy and cute as a Chrstmas card: The Stations of the Cross. Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (Of George diving into the ocean nude with Kenny) "He washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes, again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less."
Isherwood's warts-and-all approach to his semi-autobiographical lead character is so refreshing! And the novel makes the most of its beautiful, decadent SoCal setting. Who would have thought that one of the greatest novels of the 20th century could be so simple and honest? I'll always love this book. It is my crystal ball, since I may be very much like George one day. Don't ask me in what ways!
-
Isherwood's Neglected Masterpiece Nov 28, 1999 (12 of 12 found this helpful)
"A Single Man" is one of the dozen or so genuine masterworks to appear in English since World War II. A quiet, unassuming story about a quiet, unassuming man (who bears a strong resemblance to the book's author), its painful and profound emotional undercurrents may escape the careless reader. This is writing so precise and clear that the characters -- George, Kenny, Charlotte -- come to exist in your mind almost as vividly as people in your own life. The book is partly modelled on "Ulysses," and so will be of extraordinary interest to students of Joyce, but I hasten to add that the novel is brief and easy-to-read. Indeed, I have read "A Single Man" countless times and will read it countless times more. Isherwood will always be best known for his "Berlin Stories" (and that largely because the musical and movie "Cabaret" was based on one of them), but this unforgettable short novel is his masterpiece.
-
Read this book! Oct 16, 2003 (14 of 15 found this helpful)
This short novel follows one day in the life of George, a 58-year-old English professor at San Tomas State College in Los Angeles, CA. From the moment he wakes up and shuffles to the bathroom, we are immediately thrust into his perception of life both as a gay man in the 1960s, and without his partner Jim who died in a car accident. His views are based upon both of these events, sometimes viewing the world as a big, happy joke, and other times as a very hostile place.
It's a great character study into something I think we don't read about too often: the life of a gay man in his fifties. Too often, gay books deal with men in their twenties and thirties, and if someone older than that appears, he's a caricature or stereotype of the dirty old man. George is very human and is presented in a very realistic manner.
Beautifully written. Definitely worth reading.
-
A Pefect Novel Sep 23, 2002 (14 of 15 found this helpful)
This was my fourth reading of this brilliantly perfect novel. I am deeply moved each time I reach this book; I cannot imagine how it would have affected me had I read it in 1964 when it was first published. This novel covers one day in the life of George, an English professor at a nondiscript college in California. The time is just before the Christmas season, that time in America dreaded by many of us who live alone. His lover Jim has recently died in a traffic accident. George is an outsider on many levels. He is British living in America, he is gay living in a heterosexual world, he is brillliant among mostly dull, uninteresting and uninterested college students, he is a man of good taste surrounded by tasteless neighbors.
Isherwood makes brillilant observations about people: that straight women friends often refuse to give up on making their gay male friends. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers." And George says what I have been saying for years, that all too often minorities hate all other minorites. Another observation is that middle-aged gay men look better than their straight counterparts: "What's wrong with them [straight men] is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because. . . he hasn't given up." Finally, Isherwood describes poignantly the unawareness of friends: "How many times, when Jim and I had been quarreling and came to visit you--sullking, avoiding each other's eyes, talking to each other only through you [haven't we all been in that awkward position]-- did you somehow bring us together again by the sheer power of your unawareness that anything was wrong?" There are countless gems like these through out this wonderful book.
A perfect novel about loss and loneliness, A SINGLE MAN constantly gets named near the top of "best gay" lists of books as well as one of the great novels of the 20th Century, both distinctions it richly deserves.
-
Once again, lovingly Nov 27, 2000 (8 of 9 found this helpful)
Time is a good judge of quality writing. Returning to Isherwood's little masterpiece "A Single Man" is like revisiting those events of our lives that we recall as special, memorable, unique, irreplaceable. One day in the life of a middle aged man is the sole reason for writing this story, but in that one day we are given insights into Isherwood's thoughts on education, social order, morality, bigotry, and relationships - casual and bonding. With razor sharp clarity Isherwood deliniates characters, simple situations, places, moods, conversations so that at the final pages we comfortably join his autobigraphical George as he slips into sleep, having walked through "a day in the life" experience. Christopher Isherwood continues to surprise us even now some fifteen years after his death. Perhaps the publication of is diaries, and the added luxury of his life partner Don Bachardy's drawings and reveries.....perhaps these are reminding us what an important literary figure and thinker he was. Time is not only kind to Isherwood...it is lauding!