Welcome To Adulthood

This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is. It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and stay together a few days at a resort in Germany.

The story begins with the protagonist in London: “It is light when he leaves the hotel. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence.”

We can immediately assure ourselves that we are in third-person, present tense narration, and that the style of the first story, with its sentence fragments and poetic descriptive style, continues. There is, as well, an anonymous narrator/observer, who is telling the story. “It” sees the protagonist leaving the hotel and describes the scene in lovely prose. Questions immediately arise! Why is “he” leaving the hotel? Who the heck is “he” and what is his goal? Also, we know from our reading of the book so far, that each story presents a man at a different age who is experiencing a crisis of meaning. So, we wonder how this story and this protagonist fits this pattern.

What is the protagonist like in the beginning?

He goes to his car and sits inside a moment, “enjoying a feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing…” He starts the engine. “He is aware that he does not know exactly which way to go.” Last night, he met with a colleague, a fellow academic who drunkenly asked the protagonist, “‘How’s your sex life?’”

“Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.” He passes a gas (petrol to you) station, and here we have another textual variation, an indented sentence fragment combined with repetition.

“Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.

                                                Someone walking away.”

What do these features accomplish?

The pedantic man tells us: “Repetition of words is a literary and rhetorical device using repeated words or phrases for emphasis, rhythm, or clarity, with specific types like anaphora (beginning of clauses) and epistrophe (end of clauses) creating powerful effects, while unintentional repetition can weaken writing. It helps make ideas memorable, persuades, adds musicality, and can signify importance, though overuse can be tedious.”

In the above case, I think, the repetition and indenting serve to highlight a feature of the protagonist’s inner state, that his experience of the streets is lyric; he attends to the emptiness and anonymity of life and experiences it as moving and poetic. Is this the existential crisis that all the protagonists in these stories confront? No, best B. I don’t think so. This preoccupation with the present moment seems to be a sort of steady state for this protagonist, a characteristic of him before he faces the crisis of the story.

As he drives on through London, headed for the Channel ferry, the protagonist muses on his chosen profession; “Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies—the languages, the literature, the art and architecture—to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other.”

“…yet he still thinks of his adulthood as something that is just getting underway.”

A colleague asks him about Waleria, “what was happening there?”

“I don’t know…Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.”

The protagonist remembers an interaction with Waleria, and it is appropriately in past tense. She was visiting him in Oxford and had just done a tarot reading of him. (He is surprised by her New Age side). “’I think these cards are suggesting that you should stop thinking about your…thing all the time.’

“He laughed. ‘My thing?’

She put her finger on it.

‘What it means,’ she said, looking him in the eye, ‘is that your skirt-chasing days are over.’”

The protagonist is a still single man—he regards himself as single, despite being in a relationship with a woman—who likes to think he lives very much in the present. It is ironic that his career interest is in the past—medieval studies. He revels in the beauty of the world, the sensuous world, unencumbered by responsibility. A part of that world is his girlfriend, Waleria, who is attractive and sexual. He revels too in remembering other girlfriends, regarding them, perhaps as conquests made rather than existing as other fellow humans. Solitude is equated with freedom. In the forefront of his mind is an incident where she “put her finger on” the issue of his approaching maturity, of the need for him to settle down and stop “chasing skirt.” She is like a messenger from the future who wisely tries to warn him of something he’s not ready to hear. He is on the brink of something he fears—commitment feels like a loss of freedom.

‘Kay. Let’s stop there and resume next time. We’ll see what becomes of our young scholar.

Till then.

#AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray