Is There Room for Rough, Tough Men?

There’s an unfortunate tendency, when discussing contemporary masculinity (one that even my last review for this magazine displayed), to hold up the gentler side of the modern “good” man -- his sensitive, intellectual, soul-searching side -- as his most important trait.

In this way of looking at things, the rougher side of masculinity -- the kind expressed in violent sports, lusty objectification of women, and outdoorsy, rifle-toting, one-with-nature-ism -- tends to get disparaged, tagged with some embarrassment as the way our fathers used to act, an old-fashioned set of values to be as thoroughly as possible papered over. Indeed, the struggle to become a good man is often simplified, unfairly, into the struggle of our civilized, modern sensitivity over “the thugs of millennia past.”

And yet when I force myself to think about it -- when I force myself to actually be a “good man,” and look at the situation with that compassionate objectivity we’re supposedly so in command of -- I wonder if there isn’t something very wrong about writing off the alleged brutes among us. In two new novels, arguably, brutishness triumphs.

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Plenty of words have already been written praising Jonathan Franzen’s latest work of fiction, Freedom (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $28), and I won’t waste any more except to say that it is, indeed, a damn great book. Franzen excels at writing characters who are both compellingly specific and painfully easy to identify with, and as you follow his latest fractured Midwestern family through the obstacle course he sets for them, you end up evaluating your own past choices as much as you evaluate theirs.

Franzen, though, is still quick to divide his male characters into the convenient categories of “nice and civilized” and “flawed and masculine.” The book’s most crucial relationship, for instance, is perhaps not the marriage between protagonists Walter and Patty Berglund, but the yin/yang, Abel/Cain, good/bad back-and-forth between Walter and his college roommate, Richard.

Walter, the “nice” one -- as even the other characters describe him -- is a moral compass, a thoughtful environmentalist, and a sensitive family man to a fault. Meanwhile, the lone-wolf womanizing musician, Richard, happily sleeps his way through armies of throwaway sex objects, and can’t even make things work, in the end, with the love of his life.

Things aren’t quite that black and white, of course -- Richard has his moments of sensitivity, and Walter a few of reckless brutishness -- but throughout the book our sympathies usually lie with the man who is primarily Mr. Nice Guy. Walter is the one with the detailed, troubled back story, while Richard’s upbringing is flattened into a few paragraphs; Walter is the one whose pain we feel most keenly at all his various losses, while Richard’s travails seem sometimes in the realm of caricature; and Walter, after all, is the one with whom the book starts and ends, while Richard drifts away in the last pages without much resolution other than the suggestion that, after everything, he’s still a lone-wolf womanizer.

And yet it’s Walter’s niceness that is often his most infuriating quality -- and those times when he abandons it the most satisfying. Only when he gives his goodness a rest do things actually get done in his life, and even then they’re a fraction of what Richard, mostly unbeheld by the concerns of “the good man,” manages to make happen. You begin to wonder -- even as Franzen paints his censorious portrait of the Bush years -- if shoot-from-the-hip cowboys are actually that bad.