Mind Picker: All That Man Is

Floating over the world, the hard earth fathoms down through shrouds of mist and vapour, the thought hits him like a missile. Wham. This is it. This is all there is. There is nothing else.
A silent explosion.
He is still staring out the window.
This is all there is.
It's not a joke. Life is not a joke.

All That Man Is is a strange kind of book: With nine (mostly) unrelated chapters about nine different men at different stages in their lives, we're not to think of this as a collection of short stories (which is good, because as short stories, they don't quite measure up), but rather as forming one cohesive novel. And I honestly don't know if it achieves that goal. Official opinion is split on this question as well: The Telegraph declares, “As the stories accumulate, the larger structure emerges and you realise that this is a novel, albeit an odd one, and that Szalay might have found in All that Man Is the perfect vehicle for his particular talent.” On the other hand, The Guardian concludes, “Yes, there’s a thematic consistency that makes this more than a collection, and Szalay even throws in the odd narrative link (the 73-year-old, it transpires, is the 17-year-old’s granddad). But still, a novel? I don’t think so.” I tend to the latter opinion myself, but other than making me think this is a curious choice to have made the Man Booker longlist (which is solely awarded to novels), that doesn't mean I didn't find it a worthy read.

So, nine chapters (pointedly untitled so we don't confuse them for stories), and as I want to note the internationalism of the characters, and am lazy, here's a summary from that same Telegraph article:

The civil servant turns out to be the teenager’s grandfather, but these are the only two characters directly connected to each other. In between we meet a French slacker on the pull in Cyprus; a Hungarian working as “muscle” for an acquaintance who pimps his girlfriend in Park Lane hotels; a Belgian scholar of medieval history driving across Europe to meet his Polish girlfriend; a Danish hack flying to Malaga to confront a minister about his affair; an English estate agent trying to make fast money from Alpine chalets; a Scottish alcoholic falling apart in Croatia; and a suicidal Russian oligarch on his yacht in the Mediterranean.

In the nine chapters, the protagonists progress in age, and when it was finished, I realised that it had been subtly progressing in time throughout the same year from spring to winter (this occurred to me when in an early story someone watches an illegal MP4 of Iron Man 3 before it was released in theaters, and near the end, some characters go to watch the same movie in a cinema: this could have been hokey, but it worked for me; I appreciated the reminder that, although the ages of the main characters jumped by five or ten years each time, the timeframe wasn't significantly changing.) If I caught the overall theme correctly, the reader is also watching the evolution of a (typical?) man's personal philosophy (and especially as it relates to the pursuits of sex, family, career, and money). The first chapter features a seventeen-year-old, Simon, and his friend who are Inter-railing through Europe before starting Oxford in the fall. Simon is a serious and self-important type, and his philosophy is of the immature-grandiose kind:

From somewhere an image has entered Simon's head, an image of human life as bubbles rising through water. The bubbles rise in streams and clouds, touching and mingling and yet each remaining individually defined as they travel upwards from the depths towards the light, until at the surface they cease to exist as individual entities. In the water they existed physically, individually – in the air they are part of the air, part of the endless whole, inseparable from everything else. Yes, he thinks, squinting in the mist-softened sunlight, tears filling his eyes, that is how it is – life and death.

Chasing sex and a stable career take up most of the character's energies until the fifth chapter (about the nearly forty-year-old Danish journalist who has that all settled), and by the sixth (about the mid-forties Alpine estate agent) the main character feels sorry for his bachelor friend who brags about being picked up in a piano bar (where the friend performs) by a couple who wanted him to make love to the wife while the husband watched. Any character earlier in the book might have offered a high five to this story, but James isn't impressed; with a wife and two children back home, he's the first apparently monogamous man we meet; and yet that might be because at his age his focus has shifted more firmly from sex to money:

Life has become so dense, these last years. There's so much happening. Thing after thing. So little space. In the thick of life now. Too near to see it.

In the seventh chapter, we meet the Scottish wastrel and I thought this was one of the stronger storylines, and especially because there's a bit of bait-and-switch at the beginning: attending his mother's funeral, the mid-fifties Murray looks down on his younger brother's outfit and his sister's plain house, and as he's wearing a smart suit and tie, and bragging about being semiretired on the “Croatian Riviera”, I assumed he was a successful man. As it turns out, he's a man with very little: no family, one friend, and from the rent he charges on the house he owns back in London, he has just enough income to live carefully in a small, dusty village two hours inland from the Croatian coast. His situation goes from bad to worse (the locals believe he has been cursed) until Murray has an epiphany:

And look at that! Look at the way the sunlight falls down between the clouds! White the sea underneath it. Sudden islands of blinding white. The yacht turns black, waves blink around it. Sudden islands of blinding white. And in Murray, watching, an unfamiliar euphoria. Sudden islands of blinding white. Then melt away. The dull sea.

(And what is his epiphany? “Fuck it. Aye, fuck the lot of it.”) I liked that the yacht Murray is watching appears to belong to the Russian billionaire in the next chapter, but not much else about that bit interested me (I suppose it is sad that a man who devoted his entire life to the pursuit of money could lose most everything in his sixties, but I'm not very sad that he might be left with only ten million pounds.) The final chapter – about a 73-year-old British peer recovering from heart surgery at his Italian vacation home – was also very strong (and not least of all because it finally features some non-cartoonish women characters). By this stage in his life, Tony's concerns are post-sex, post-career, post-money issues, but as he confronts his own mortality, he is granted an epiphany of his own:

The passing of time. That is what is eternal, that is what has no end. And it shows itself only in the effect it has on everything else, so that everything else embodies, in its own impermanence, the one thing that never ends.

It's a nice touch that Tony learns this truth from a poem that his grandson Simon, from the first chapter, wrote; as though Simon's youthful intuition and Tony's hard-earned wisdom lead to the same place. (And I want to add that speaking of poetry, the first chapter has quite a few poetic line-breaks and I did notice that this device waned and then disappeared as the chapters progressed and the characters aged.)

I don't know what all this adds up to. The chapters don't have the snap and depth of great short stories, but the reader is still forced to start over again every fifty pages or so, meeting new characters and catching up to speed. As for the writing, there's a comforting sameness of tone throughout that keeps it cohesive, there was quite a bit of dark and deprecating humour, and I enjoyed the traveloguing throughout western Europe. But is this, indeed, “all that man is”? Horny to acquisitive to disappointed to accepting, with various humiliations and successes along the way? Did I need this book to lay that out for me? All That Man Is didn't blow my socks off, I still don't buy it as a “novel”, and I'm rounding it down to three stars as a ranking against the other books on the 2016 Man Booker longlist.