‘When is a Man’ by Aaron Shepard

Reviewed by Lonnie Smetana

A man. Those are the words that stood out when I read the title of Victoria, BC writer Aaron Shepard’s debut novel.  The web is flooded with self-help articles and blog posts that purport to define that word. Defining masculinity and male sexuality was likely not the goal of Shepard’s novel, but he does a fine job of exploring the topic nonetheless.

The novel’s central character Paul Rasmussen (the term hero only seems to apply in the most literary sort of way) wants to be an ethnographer when he grows up. Paul is thirty-three but in many ways has yet to mature. His academic career lacks focus as he leaps from one thesis topic to another. His relationship with his girlfriend and fellow academic Christine fizzles out like many of his thesis ideas. By all accounts you could say that Paul has accepted his mediocrity and his “failure to launch”.

However, as the novel opens we learn that Paul has been displaced from his arrested development and moved into a state of being that one normally associates with a man of advanced age — incontinence, impotence, a reduced self-confidence about his virility and masculinity. All this is brought on by prostate cancer and his post-surgery recovery journey. Those two wildly different mental ages create a tension in Paul’s character that allow for a wide exploration of the possible range of what it means to be a man.

The portrayal of masculinity is artfully played with in various characters. Our lead, Paul, is timid and in ways frail but he’s also clever and has surprising fortitude. Jorry and Billy are both rugged outdoorsmen who rely on their physicality more than their intellect. Both are more emotionally vulnerable than their outer personas would give away. Several drowning victims in the Immitoin River (a fictional stand in for the Kootenay River) and a tense rivalry between Paul and Billy adds an element of thriller to the novel that provides just enough breathing room for the weightier issues to play out.

I often wonder why as a society we are so conflicted about manhood. Perhaps it’s less a state of being conflicted as one of commercial conformity. Men are bombarded with messages about the ideal body image (still nowhere near as bad as women), the truck you should drive if you want to be a ‘real man’, or the type of beer you should drink to impress women. The question I then pose to myself is the one this title evokes in me. When is a man a man? Is it your physical actions? Is it your sexuality? Clearly sexuality is a factor as there had yet to be a significant shift by many of the major corporations to embrace same sex relationships in advertising, until Chevy debuted an ad during the Sochi Olympics.

Irrespective of social and commercial considerations, the answer to the questions of manhood may simply be that there are no answers. At least not answers in the sense of a unified theory or a universal truth. The construct of “manhood” as we’ve been accustomed to it may be past its prime; maybe it was flawed from the start. A man can only answer the question of what and who he wants to be to himself in stark honest terms and then do his best to live his life with that answer as his guiding principle.

I know I have not done justice to other issues that the novel covers such as the displacement of a community and I duly apologize to Aaron but I felt those were not the issues that carried my interest.

I am a fan of the sublime KCRW podcast “Bookworm” with the unapologetically intellectual Michael Silverblatt. He was speaking with George Saunders and a moment of their conversation struck me as the best description of what I found intriguing in Shepard’s novel. Shepard takes a character, which most readers would view as at best a mediocre person, puts him into a particular scenario and by the end turns him into someone to whom something matters. In particular, Paul’s rediscovery of his sexuality is at the heart of this and while it may be uncomfortable to bear witness to, one can sympathize with his plight.

The shift in Paul’s character may seem like a small movement but when you follow the entire arc of consequences it is truly a deft and artful evolution of the character, a great trick that only an accomplished writer can pull off. Considering the first part of this novel started life as an MFA thesis that Shepard revealed in an interview he had to discard large sections of, the end product is fine proof of the skill the author has for grafting and crafting words into a memorable journey through the human condition.

Brindle & Glass | 288 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927366264