‘Midway’ by David Homel

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

In an epigraph to Midway, his sixth novel, David Homel reveals that when Mordecai Richler died the American writer Jim Harrison told Richler’s son Noah, “You are now crossing into that eerie land where there are no judges.” A man spends the first decades of his life measuring himself by his father’s standard, and the last, if he is lucky, coming to understand the man who gave him half his genes.

Midway is situated very close to Mordecai Richler territory. It opens on a recent, cold, blustery St. Patrick’s Day in Montréal. College English professor Ben Allan has brought his aged father, Morris, down to rue Sainte-Catherine to watch the parade before taking him back to his room in the “Mature Living Centre.” Morris, still spry enough to be living on his own, has chosen to move to a nursing home so that he can be the top dog of all the geriatric inmates. He has also rejected life in a Jewish senior’s home “with a Sabbath elevator that automatically stops at every floor.” Being surrounded by his own kind, he assures his son, would kill him. He reminds Ben of a Philip Roth character, “an old man with a defiant, raging phallus.” Morris has the libido of a much younger man, although senescence is beginning to show in periodic fits of stupor. Morris Allan, seniors’ residence Don Juan, occasional narcoleptic, represents one of two domestic pillars between which his son finds himself increasingly squeezed.

Ben’s wife and teenage son form the other impinging column of concern. Laura is an art therapist who is usually asleep before her husband comes to bed. Son Tony exists in a state of relative paralysis, prostrate on the couch in front of the TV. Laura thinks Tony needs psychological help, whereas for Ben the time spent watching “the idiot box” with Tony is intimate and revelatory. The television occupies a neutral space between father and son, allowing them to bounce communication obliquely off it and its unruly content. Unfortunately Ben and Laura have no equivalent connective medium.

The male-midlife-crisis novel is well represented in North American literature, its tropes—the affair with the younger woman, the zippy new sportscar, the sudden health crisis, the professional about-turn—extensively dramatized. Midway is a notable addition to the subgenre because it navigates these familiar waters without resorting to cliché. In fact, Ben’s adventure in waywardness is so reasonably negotiated that it seems less a transgression than an intriguing mystery with him as the starring detective. Even at its most urgent the narrative adopts an analytical, sometimes discursive tone, one in which we are never left wondering what Ben Allan thinks.

It is no coincidence that Ben’s wife is an art therapist. Art, illness and treatment come together in the person of Carla McWatts. Ben meets Carla when she interviews him for a profile she has been assigned to write as their college’s communications officer, a piece about “the man and the work.” The work of interest is a prize-winning essay Ben has written about a curious psychological disorder called dromomania affecting men from Bordeaux in the late nineteenth century. First documented in a man named Albert Dadas, dromomania was manifest as inexplicable travel. After lapsing into what came to be thought of as a fugue state, the dromomaniac would wake to find himself in a distant city always east of home, Moscow or Vilnius, for example, and unable to account for his displacement. Ben wrote his lyrical personal essay in a similar fugue state and, like the subjects of the piece, is unable to fully account for its creation.

Art and therapy converge in Carla in a form better discovered in the reading than revealed here. Suffice it to say that she and Ben become more than colleagues, one interviewing the other (and poorly, at that) for a bit of institutional drum banging. The strange thing about it is that Ben seems to back into the affair, if his relationship with the younger woman can be so labeled. It is telling that his most enjoyable time is spent alone in Carla’s apartment, surrounded by her possessions. We do get some of the background to Ben’s present state of psychic dislocation. As a boy Ben liked to wedge himself into tight spots, darkly forbidding closets, for example, and the narrow spaces between adjacent buildings in his native Chicago, and wait to be found. A psychiatrist would know what to do with such information; a novelist can only throw it at the page and see if it sticks. Ben, adopting a persona more suited to rescuer than lover, nimbly avoids becoming stuck in anything messily romantic. At no point can we say that his marriage is threatened by his interest in Carla McWatts. So, you would be right to ask, what’s it all about, if at every step our hero plants a defensive hedge against catastrophe?

Lengthy passages, possibly from Ben’s essay (although they sound less poetic than journalistic) inform us about Albert Dadas and his Bordeaux brethren, who were treated by the fledgling science of psychiatry as examples of  “male hysteria,” a vague term that enjoyed only a brief life in the medical literature. They were middle-aged Frenchmen hailing from a tightly buttoned provincial enclave best known for its wine, and they were apparently so repressed that they stepped, unconsciously and in self-preservation, right out of their lives. Foreshadowing this notion, after the St. Paddy’s Day parade Ben and his father find a pair of shoes abandoned on a cobbler’s doorstep. Much later in the story, in a Montréal asylum, Ben encounters a group of men who have been convinced by an unscrupulous doctor that they suffer from male hysteria. At first Ben thinks they are Italian-speaking members of the hospital’s staff playing bocce outside on their break. They have in fact stepped out of their former identities to adopt a nonsense dialect that sounds like Calabrese. Their troubles, like Ben’s experience of being stuck in a lifeless marriage and an unchallenging teaching-job, are unique to the individual, but collectively they have become a squad of docile drones suffering a common ailment and carrying out their unhinged master’s bidding.

Also on the book’s epigraph page are two lines Homel has translated from the Renaissance poet Petrarch: “I know no peace / yet have no cause for war.” No sentiment better expresses Ben Allan’s angst. His existential state is one of irresolute tension caused not by being in love but out of it and unable to feel. Ben tries to picture himself the way others see him, “stiff, anhedonic, holding the world at a distance.” The inner Ben, yearning, sensitive, opinionated and naively sexist, is anything but. An archaic chivalry resides in him. Assuming out of earshot that two women are sharing a lusty joke, he deems their exchange one “of decidedly unfeminine taste.” In a similar observation, a doctor’s touch on the back of a nurse’s neck causes her to shiver, the assumption being that the man’s touch was “as cold as a reptile’s.” But could her shiver not have been one of delight and arousal? This time the adjudicating onlooker is not Ben but Carla: “[The sandy-haired nurse] was a slender woman with a graceful neck and a delicate colour, a swan, a beauty, and she deserved more. All women did, starting with her.” What this “more” could be is not identified. Sweeping generalizations aside, the nurse didn’t shudder. She shivered. Perhaps Homel is suggesting that Ben’s midlife crisis and Carla’s problems, too, stem from his failure to see women without preconception, and her inability to see herself, clearly and whole.

Ben is left to search through his wife’s patients’ artwork for evidence of her, Laura, the person with whom he would still most want to have an affair. She has left the door of seduction open to him. It is a hopeful note on which to end and it is entirely appropriate to the way Homel has let the story run. Midway manages to inform without being didactic, entertain without resorting to silliness, and impress with serious emotional weight without tipping over into sentimentality. If on the surface of Ben Allan’s world the upheaval has been minimal, the deeper movement is profound, evidence of an accomplished artist’s steady hand.