'Someone once said if you listen to any man’s story for long enough you’ll burst into tears. We know how a man might come to behave badly; and we try to forgive him, and in so doing forgive ourselves for the lingering impulse to make a little mayhem, to join in the pissing contest, the primitive, unholy urge to dominate tucked just beneath our sympathies.'

Where it seems a shame to be a man lately, Mandel writes of characters who are a storm of emotions and contradictions. Weak, strong, with friendships that others to others flirt on the edge of homosexuality, because naturally men can’t be close to other men the way women are without their sexuality coming into question. Men desiring every woman, in that animal way so many men try to contain and deny because ‘it just isn’t the thing’. Women tired of men, deciding they’ve had their fill and taking their leave while the abandoned refuses to appear diminished. Men confessing to their insecurities in the presence of other, bigger men. “And that is very bad news to me, because when there is a man close by who has any kind of questionable reputation, I think about him too much and I feel the need to keep a lookout for him, a kind of vigil, which is exhausting. For me there seems to be a man like this wherever I go, in every setting. I study them as if I were looking through a telescope at a meteorite and plotting its course right to the center of my forehead.” Men navigate the world entirely differently from women, we forget each have their own threat of violence.

Teeth grinding submission, well read minds, arse up humor in servitude, what the heck am I reading? I thought a lot about Charles Bukowski after reading Mandel. There is something raw and gritty, stories as confessional brimming with the things men are never to give voice to. The men are still here though, just sort of caged monkeys-diluted, safer, easier to digest when they guard their thoughts. I felt like they were released in A Goddamn Infinite Emergency: Love Stories. Of all the magazines women read, wondering ‘what makes a woman attractive’ (because feminism aside, those magazines still sell and women still care) just read. “She isn’t beautiful or pretty- but lovely, specifically. I studied her face for weeks. I thought I identified a trace of damage, something that illuminated her alarmingly pale face.” What draws a man in seems to be as much as mystery to them as it is to us. In resisting love, it becomes obsession, against self-interest of avoiding such tangles. As he says, “What passes between two people in the same room but trouble, after all?” Indeed.

Bum’s Rush was my favorite, it pulses with an angry heartbeat. Their love is a bloodletting! Love provoked, has everyone been there? Stupefied by lovers truths, love and violence commingle to form what is a love that terrifies others with it’s physicality and in our narrators thoughts there is a surprising tenderness. Love with nowhere to go but back to each other again and again, helpless against the tide of passion and love they hold for partner.

A man writes letters for other men, in A Goddamn Infinite Emergency and confesses that raging women are right, he knows nothing about their gender and certainly can’t write for them. Too, women don’t seem to be able to understand a man’s mind because they are clouded with a ‘rightful rage’ all owing to the many terrible things men have done. He has his own rules with his wife, in his home which would be a more loving, happier, peaceful place if not for the patterns of his moods. A man who roots around in words, not wanting to ‘stain’ with poor ones, to the point of fighting with his unwanted assistant. The wrong words, the right words, it’s all we have.

I am butchering this review, I know. This is such a clever collection, that trying to describe what I felt reading the stories seems like I have wasps in my head. I laughed, I cringed and I felt closer to what goes on in the minds of men, it’s a hurricane, it’s brutal and embarrassing and lovely.

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Solipsis Publishing

I read a lot of short story collections, and many of them tend to blend together in my memory but no way will these John Mandel shorts, they are in a league of their own. As I was reading them, I recall wondering whether the author were male or female; a cursory first search on Google mistakenly yielded Canadian author Emily St John Mandel but actual author John Mandel deserves all the credit in the world for publishing this: "He has a penis, for Christ's sake, in a world that believes all iniquity is represented by it--the sorry, withered thing, hanging down and waggling pathetically and uselessly from side to side in the dark all day long, like a little wrinkled and lonesome worm looking hopelessly for its mother, as its dimwit of an owner wanders stupidly through the city, through the day, uncomprehending and making trouble for everyone, and then called into service later at night for obligatory responsibilities regarded, in each and every way, as dissolute and debased."

Mandel writes as authoritatively about the comforts and merits of a certain overstuffed chair (whether it be upholstered in different dog breeds, or World's Fair monuments) as he does about arguing beautifully and unsettlingly, physically, mentally, philosophically, or in a balanced and nuanced manner. I look forward to reading more of Mandel's work.