Volume 28, Number 12 · July 16, 1981
Clubland
By John Thompson
The Men's Club
by Leonard Michaels
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 181 pp., $10.95
A far cry from London SW1 is Berkeley, CA 94701. A far cry from White's Club, or Boodle's, or Buck's, or Bertie Wooster's Drones, is the association imagined by Leonard Michaels in his novel The Men's Club. The story is of six men of early middle age and of middling station, a tax accountant, a lawyer, a college teacher, a psychotherapist, a real estate man, a doctor—or so I make them out—transplanted New York Jews most of them, so it seems, some of them already friends, some not. They gather one evening in a hideous California living room when the wife is away, and declare themselves a club. They find nothing better to do than tell boring stories about their failures with women, get drunk, devour the lavish collation prepared by the absent wife for her next day's women's group, fight, smash up the place with the host's assistance, and ride off into the dawn in a pickup truck singing 'For he's a jolly good fellow.'
Review, 2112 words
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