A DAD'S LIFE:It's nice to read a book about middle-agers and compare, writes ADAM BROPHY
I’M SITTING on the deck with my buddy soaking up rays. His shoulders are burning but I don’t want to tell him because he’s convinced the Irish sun can’t do him any harm. His beak and shins aren’t far behind. I’ll point out the first blister when it rises.
He catches me peeking over the top of my book and peeks back. You see, sad as it is, we are reading the same book. It is a new experience to read and engage in a running commentary. The book is The Slapby Christos Tsiolkas, strapline: "One day, at a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own . . . " It's an easy enough read so we're bounding through. He's a little ahead of me so I can comment in real time.
“I hate sex scenes in books,” I say. “What is the point? Do they move the story along? Do they develop character? Do they arouse you? No, they are there to let you know the author has had sex. Well done him.”
Buddy disagrees. He doesn’t mind them if they’re “different to the way sex is usually written”. We chew on this and come to the conclusion that it is usually written to be better than it is. Sex scenes are less “perfunctory” than the real thing, he says. This puts our own performances in perspective and we look down the garden in silence, acknowledging our shared lack of bedroom athleticism. Both attempting to give off an air that we are undermining our own abilities to make the other feel better, and failing.
Of course, what the sex scenes in this book have done is distract us from the narrative which is what annoys me about them at all times.
From the title and strap, you would think the book is an exploration of whether corporal punishment is ever appropriate but it appears, and I’m less than a quarter of the way through, to be more concerned about how a varying band of middle-agers see themselves in the world.
It’s always nice to read a story that pushes your own comparative buttons and, as I am approaching 40 with nothing but uncertainty as to how the next 40 might unfold, intrigue grips me. Each chapter is written from the perspective of one of the people involved in the high concept incident, “the slap”. It doesn’t hold back, addressing infidelity and racial tensions from the off, but I don’t find the first character credible. Hector is married with kids, hosting the barbecue at which the slap occurs and having an affair with a much younger girl. The way he relates to his wife and children only happens in books, much like the way he infuriatingly (to me) seduces his missus after the event.
Buddy disagrees. I’m thinking now his forehead might start to crackle if he doesn’t get some cream on it so I pretend to take his points on board. He feels that Hector is attractive, that he wants to get to know him better. Hector presents a dichotomy, that of the settled family man and also (because Hector takes speed at the family barbecue) a rager, someone who still wants to knock spots off the world. I get this, but I get it not because Hector is blasting lines up his nose in the family bathroom and shagging a teenager, but because that’s how every father feels. We don’t need the introduction of class-A drugs and the fear of a lifetime of monogamy to highlight the worry that once you breed and saddle up with the mortgage and the ring on finger you are looking down the barrel of the gun called the end of your life. We live it every day.
You get up and, if you’re lucky, go to work to provide stuff for your family and the family’s desire for stuff is insatiable. When the week is over and you are released from the job, which in all probability you would happily firebomb, you go to the boozer and unwind. But not too much. You don’t usually make a pass at the attractive blonde who smiled as you went by and, most of the time, you keep a lid on the consumption because you will be jumped on at 6am and instructed to build a trampoline in the garden.
You chose this life in spite of the fears that it’s not the right life for you. You chose it because you perceived this to be the best path, knowing all along what you might be giving up. You relate to your wife and kids with uncertainty but a constant desire to do right by them even if your actions don’t always match that desire.
Buddy finally notices his pink shoulders and winces. We read on.