Volume 52, Number 17 · November 3, 2005
Dangling Men
By Joyce Carol Oates
Indecision
by Benjamin Kunkel
Random House, 241 pp., $21.95
In recent American literature, if not in American life, the pathology seems to be exclusively male: an intense, monomaniacal, and often highly eloquent scrutiny of the (actionless, indeterminate) self forever poised to act, to 'choose to exist,' yet somehow suspended from action, paralyzed. Its symptoms, examined like rare gems, are virtually indistinguishable from one another: 'despair'—'malaise'—'strangeness'—'dissociation'—'ambivalence'—'self-loathing'—'self-revulsion'—'anxiety'—'abulia'—'low-level autism.' Surrounded by hordes of presumably normal people who make decisions with seeming ease, make choices constantly, 'wear the uniform of the times' (Dangling Man), the afflicted person exists in a kind of perpetual stasis, a metaphysical vacuum, detached from others whom he regards with commingled pity, contempt, and envy. Even if he's married like Bellow's young 'dangling man' Joseph ('dangling' as he waits with increasing anxiety to be inducted into the US Army in 1942), or allows himself to be drawn into a destructive ménage à trois like Barth's Jacob Horner in End of the Road, or, like Percy's genial New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling, is casually promiscuous with a succession of secretaries ('Marcias and Sandras and Lindas'), the afflicted person is essentially solitary and asexual; his asceticism can take the form of ceaseless self-examination and recrimination, ruling out sympathy for others.
Review, 3604 words
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