Writing About Men

After yesterday’s blog I got a couple emails from readers who asked me to tell them which contemporary books, written by female authors, had male characters that I thought were well-done. What an intriguing question! First of all, I think becoming fascinated by a man in a book is not entirely unlike becoming fascinated by a man in real life. What intrigues one woman may not appeal at all other women. I tried to think which male characters lived in my mind long after the book had ended and, strangely, the four that came to mind were a pair of sheriffs, a killer and a priest.

I’ve always liked the men in Alice Hoffman’s books. She has a penchant for creating men with deep flaws who are interesting and basically good - sometimes reluctantly good. I pretty much fell in love with Julian Cash in Turtle Moon - his ugliness and his bad-boy past and his hermit-like existence made him delicious to contemplate. Similarly Gary Hallet, the strong, silent-type cop in her Practical Magic was memorable for his struggle between being a good cop and loving Sally. Alice Hoffman is a unique writer. In her books the plot is secondary to the inner lives–-the hearts and souls–-of her characters. She draws you into landscapes that are characters onto themselves but when the book is over, it is the characters you remember, though not necessarily the plots.

Henry Winter in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History seems to have captured the imaginations of more women than mine. He is a big, handsome, effete, brilliant, amoral college-age man who sees no particular problem with killing one of his classmates for his own good. I can’t say what it is about Henry except that for someone so physically and intellectually gifted he is astonishingly naive. I called him “amoral” but that might be the wrong word. He has standards, very high standards, he just believes that a friend who does not live up to his standards might be better off dead.

I fell hopelessly in love with Emilio Sandoz in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Emilio is everything lovable, a boy with a terrible past who is handsome, funny, charming, intelligent, and ... a Jesuit priest. Russell’s book is just plain brilliant. There are few books I have ever read that kept me as totally enthralled as did The Sparrow, in part because of Sandoz and in part because of the books abundant wisdom. And, too, I have wondered if Russell chose his name deliberately. “Sandoz” was the name Emile Zola gave the characters in his books that were himself. Just as Zola became the sacrificial lamb in the scandalous Dreyfus case, so Sandoz was sacrificed by the Church for his particular mission. Emilio Sandoz is as real to me as any real-life person I have ever met.

I haven’t mentioned Jamie Fraser from the Diana Gabaldon novels who is certainly memorable but, since he has a literally thousands of pages devoted to making him so, lies a little outside the parameters I was considering. Still he is delicious.

Writing about a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores last week, John Updike said “the woman present in the flesh, the wife or surrogate mother with her complicated, obdurate reality and pressing needs, is less aphrodisiac than the woman, imagined or hired, whose will is our own”. Maybe that is true of all imagined characters–-male or female, from books or from fantasies. A writer who can create a character that tantalizes the imaginations of his readers has given them an opportunity to explore aspects of themselves that life might not otherwise provide. That is why many of us read in the first place.

Thanks for reading.