Not Your Average Joe

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man is the third book in a stretch of "immersion journalism" stories -- tales of identity deception -- I've read in recent months. I had just put down Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, in January when I found Howard Griffin's Black Like Me behind the Sky Mall magazine on an airplane ride.

Ehrenreich turned herself into a lower-class wage slave and took a bunch of bad jobs across the country. Griffin, a white author, took some skin medication that turned him black and passed himself off as a Negro in 1960s New Orleans. Both of those books left me muttering variants on that great maxim of Martin Luther King Jr.'s. With Ehrenreich I thought, "It's class," and with Griffin, "It's definitely not race."

After reading Self-Made Man, I found myself saying, "It's not gender, it's Vincent's class."

In her normal life, Vincent, a newspaper columnist for the L.A. Times, lives in Greenwich Village, New York, with her wife. She's done fabulously well on the money wheel, and Self-Made Man will surely net her a nice sum, judging by its trajectory on the New York Times bestseller list.

Vincent explains that as a young girl, she was a tomboy and a late bloomer, mocked for having "no ass and no tits" by her brother's friends while her female classmates were bulging with curves. It was around this time that the idea for her alter ego "Ned" was born. The purpose of her book, Vincent writes early on, is to share "a woman's-eye view of one guy's approximated life." Also, she hints in another explanatory passage, she wanted to use part of her book to "infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and, if possible, learn their secrets."

So Vincent does a little weightlifting to pad her unusually tall 5'9'' frame and glues fine particles of her hair to her face to create the stubble effect. Add in a few lessons with a voice training coach from Juilliard, and presto: Norah Vincent is Ned.

Ned isn't really "manly" -- he's a metrosexual, a bicoastal twerp you might find blathering in the opinion pages of a major newspaper: David Brooks or Michael Kinsley trying to pour concrete. That's the kind of man Vincent became, not your average Joe.

Ned's life in Manville starts in a blue-collar bowling league with a bunch of construction worker types. Vincent lets us know at the beginning of that chapter that she's aware the obstacles of class difference are going to impede on her epiphanies about what makes men men. Her "proudly self-confessed trailer-trash" friend warns her, "Just remember that the difference between your people and my people is that my people bowl without irony."

Vincent translates that for us in case we didn't get the point: "Hide your bourgeois flag, or you'll get the smugness beaten out of you long before they find out you're a woman." We're on notice that she's on notice.

Yet not three pages later, Vincent is sneering at the playground of the lower class, savaging the bowling alley as only a bourgeois could: "There were the smells; cigarette smoke, varnish, machine oil, leaky toilets, old candy wrappers and accumulated public muck."

That's before she meets the guys who have agreed to let her join their league. When she does meet them, out again comes the smugness. Here's part of her account of meeting Jim, one of the most sympathetic and interesting guys in Vincent's book: "His face was permanently flushed and pocked with open pores; a cigarette-, alcohol- and occupation-induced complexion …" His job, his Marlboro, his bottle of beer -- that's Jim's "masculinity," and his face is stained with it.

When it comes to the expected gay bashing, chauvinist, racist, etc., behavior of the guys in her league -- the painfully obvious objective of Ned's first gender-bending expedition -- Vincent has disappointing news for the readers back in New York. These trailer-park beer guzzlers are among the most enlightened and tolerant Americans ever born. They "never spoke disrespectfully of black people." "Gay people and their affairs didn't much interest them." Outrageous jokes are introduced with an "appropriate caveat." Even as these men slip out to the occasional titty bar, they "cherished their wives" and spoke about them with "absolute reverence."