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A review by _marco_
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
A Single Man is a brief literary portrait of George, a queer man who has only recently suffered the death of his lover. Isherwood takes us through George's day, sparing us no intimacy, either physical or psychological. In a way, it reads like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway if it had been written in California of the 1960s.
I was expecting George's grief as a widower to be expressed much more explicitly, in which the protagonist is afflicted with a visceral sense of grief that claws at his heart and moves the reader to tears. Instead, Isherwood gives us a different kind of grief. A mature grief, that sits in George's stomach and inundates his blood with a quiet yet heavy emptiness. And it is through this emptiness that we are spectators of George's life. The reader is made to feel the crushing weight of an absence; Jim (the name of the deceased) is mentioned all but four times.
I was expecting George's grief as a widower to be expressed much more explicitly, in which the protagonist is afflicted with a visceral sense of grief that claws at his heart and moves the reader to tears. Instead, Isherwood gives us a different kind of grief. A mature grief, that sits in George's stomach and inundates his blood with a quiet yet heavy emptiness. And it is through this emptiness that we are spectators of George's life. The reader is made to feel the crushing weight of an absence; Jim (the name of the deceased) is mentioned all but four times.
This absence is filled with soliloquy after soliloquy, offering us a clear glimpse into George's mind. Through the story, quasi-philosophical issues (the American dream, the purpose of the past, the body, consciousness, desire) are raised and discussed by the voices in George's head, all of which are implicitly and subtly tied to his immense loss. In other words, George is presented as a stoic, and his grief, rather than emotional, invades him psychologically and philosophically; his grief is relegated to his thought rather than to his sentiment. It is here where his prose shines most brilliantly.
Then, intent upon his own rites of purification, George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less.
In short, I adored this story. I come away from it with a greater understanding of ageing, loss, the immutability of the past, and how all these issues may and do affect myself in the present. There is just so much depth that I feel like i just skimmed its surface. A genuinely beautiful, contemplative read.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racial slurs
Minor: Racism and Xenophobia
Racial slurs are used occasionally throughout the book, although not in overtly violent ways. They seem to be entirely vestigial terms that were once socially acceptable in common usage. Nonetheless, they still taint the reader's experience.
There is a point in the book where George goes on a tangent regarding the social condition of 'minorities' in a class lecture. Perhaps it is the use of the aforementioned use of slurs, or because of what we now know as a society regarding systemic injustice, but George's monologue was a little off-putting to me. Once again I wouldn't necessarily equate them with *explicit* racial/xenophobic violence, but they are definitely controversial, and even more definitely outdated in comparison to the wisdom of today.