Passive

If this book were an actual paperback, I’d fling it across the room.

I’ve thrown my Kindle exactly once, after The Red Wedding in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It was a childish thing to do but I was definitely feeling pretty childish (an author can only murder so many of your favorite characters before you lose your temper).

This is Where I Leave You didn't inspire that kind of rage. In fact, over all, I really enjoyed the book. It’s, for lack of a better way of talking about it, a book that’s about family drama. I read it shortly before packing my bags to depart for my own Upper Midwestern Euripides play and it rips me up.

It’s a book that’s like a punch in the emotional solar plexus. This seems to be my default setting for reading these days. Quite unintentionally, all of my reading in 2014 has been casually devastating and has left me with the urge to read existentialism (River of Doubt, Life After Life), pissed (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles) or just sad (Eleanor & Park, This is Where I Leave You). But sucker-punches aside, the more I think about This is Where I Leave You (and I think about it all night while I’m cleaning the house, making tea, settling in for a snow-bound Thursday) the angrier I get.

What has me so worked up is the main character in the book, Judd. One of my pieces of furious marginalia reads “Christ, we’ve already got one Hamlet. Who needs another?”

I’m pissed because the main character in the book reads like a walk-on character in his own story. He’s passive. He’s wishy-washy. He’s dissatisfied with his life without the courage to hit the reset button. He, quite frankly, is unsympathetic despite the fact that his father dies in the opening sentence of the book. The book is personally gut-wrenching, absolutely, but in spite of (rather than because of) the main character.

I’m unkind to fictional men.

***

You read a lot about fathers and sons.

It’s one of those tropes that has run through writing since Oedipus. Fathers and sons and the conflicts they have with one another and the love they share. How sons can never measure up to their fathers, who are actually muddling their way through fatherhood and are secretly terrified and, and, and . . .

You don’t read much about fathers and daughters.

Who knows why. Maybe we collectively decided that simply saying “Daddy issues” would sum up all the permutations of relationships between fathers and daughters. Maybe we aren't interested. Maybe ladies are too busy trying not to become their mothers.

I have a complicated, if undramatic, relationship with my father.

Complicated if undramatic could sum up most Upper Midwestern relationships. Every time I travel anywhere else in the United States I come home convinced that we are the most emotionally reserved people in the country.

My father is the epitome of Upper Midwestern emotional stoicism.

His daughter, on the other hand, is the emotional equivalent to a supernova.

We have a complicated relationship.

***

This is Where I Leave You isn’t the only book I’ve read in the last few months that features a man-child as the main character. Both Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of Poets (didn’t even bother to finish that one) had the same. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s main character is so passive he literally sits at the bottom of a well for the majority of the book (yes, I know there was deep metaphysical work going on there *Bronx cheer.*) Those are just a couple examples (I could give you scads more) of books where the male main character is so passive I would like to reach through the pages and slap him. Most of the novels are written about men in their early 30s who are experiencing emotional alienation from their (invariably) beautiful wives. Who are objectively, outwardly successful but still wander through their lives bitching about how their wives are falling for someone else, and they’re experiencing spiritual ennui and . . .

YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWN.

***

I’ve spent the majority of my life trying not to disappoint my father.

I often joke that the only three ways in which I’ve disappointed him are that I don’t like football, I can’t drive a manual, and I have flatly refused to learn how to shoot.

In reality, I feel like I’ve never known where the bar was set for me. I’m the only girl in the family, but I am decidedly not interested in traditional gender roles (not that there’s, you know, a lot of emphasis on this in our family). I was also uninterested in many of Dad’s hobbies over the years. There was NO WAY I was learning to hunt or fix things. I'd rather crawl into a hole and die than make small talk with strangers. The prospect of playing a team sport has me pulling on my running shoes and dashing away from whatever pickup game is starting in the backyard.

But despite never knowing where that bar has been set and the fact that it’s made our relationship tricky for me to navigate, I love my father. It’s really that simple. When I think about him I feel like someone is reaching into my chest and squeezing my heart with their bare hands.

My love for him is a visceral, complicated thing, and it hurts.

***

When I was just starting out in college I was on the phone with my father talking about how unhappy I was with the education classes that taking. I was really wound up, and gearing up for a full head of steam when he brought me up short.

“If you’re unhappy with something, change it.”

In 29 years of trying to figure out where the damn bar has been set in our relationship, in attempting to navigate the tricky intersection of emotional stoicism and, well, whatever the hell I am, this advice is the one thing I've been able to fall back on. It’s the advice that you get from your father that serves as the one inalienable truth in your life.

That’s what makes me craziest about this new literary everyman. I could get really self-righteous about how these fictional men reflect the actual men that I date, how I’m disgusted by the emotional retardation that these characters exhibit (I recognize that I’m probably not the best person to pass judgement on the emotional capacity of other people. Emotional supernova, remember?) and the fact that some of us seem to venerate it (or are, at the very least, are engaged enough by it to keep buying the books) is terrifying to me. Yeah, those things just throw kerosene on my dislike for this literary trope. I could hash out with my shrink how having the father that I do has impacted the relationships I have with men (real and fictional). Uh, yeah. No doubt.

I worry that if the heroes (ha!) that we’re enamored with are disaffected and disengaged that it’s a bigger reflection of the people who read the books. And that’s where my real frustration lies. I grew up worshiping at the altar of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps. Instead of making me a Republican it’s turned me into a person for whom long-term existential angst and spiritual ennui and whatever the hell else these authors are trying to convey is idiotic.

The number one lesson in the gospel according to my family?

You don’t get to be a passive observer in your own life.

It is the complicated, undramatic truth that has kept me anchored throughout the course of my life. It’s the lesson I had to relearn on the other side of five years doing just that. It’s the reason I’m frustrated by the characters in these books, and yes, damn it, with the men that I date.

Perhaps it would have been easier to say at the outset that I am unkind to men. But that isn't quite the truth. I'm this harsh with everyone I perceive as sitting and waiting for their lives to begin. Male writers and the characters that they create are the recipients of my ire right now because they happen to be what I've been reading.

That's an uncomplicated, undramatic truth.