Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed

Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies this crisis and personally confirms it. ‘I came naturally — haha — to observing my posse and me, guys late twenties to forty, and our attitudes to women, ourselves as “men,” etc’ he says, by way of introduction to his anthropological thesis about growing up under feminism. Prepare for mansplaining littered with tedious verbal tics, which is oddly compelling to read.

Zeke is between things. Born on the cusp of Gen X, a middle child to middle-class parents, he’s loitering on the tenure track of East Coast ‘Acadoomia’. There’s his Mother, an editor, who never loved Father, ‘a condescending asshole’, Brother Hart, a bully, and Little Sister, a ‘selectively mute’ fan of Virginia Woolf, who also kills herself. Zeke is saved by marrying Maggie, the love of his life, but she then goes off with his best friend. Most of the novel is Zeke’s monologue about the strain of these relationships, interspersed with photographs from his research into representations of anonymous American families. He pines for the analogue world of his first Kodak, but also envies — as an outsider — the togetherness of a group selfie.

Working at the frontier of fiction and criticism, Lynne Tillman is admired for smuggling theory into novels. As well as references from Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag, the final quarter of the book is a draft of Zeke’s thesis, MEN IN QUOTES, a parody of ethnography that is thick with solipsism and thin on method. Although the switch in form is jarring, and not altogether successful, Zeke’s respondents do speak to troubling episodes from earlier in the novel.