Site Presented By
Thursday, Oct 16, 2008
Passionless and confused, they swim torpidly about in the dating pool, driving me and my single girlfriends to despair. I asked Benjamin Kunkel, author of the hit novel "Indecision," to explain to me what's wrong with young American men.
Sep 20, 2005 | For some time now I have been anxious to let loose on the sorry state of the young male population of this country -- or at least of New York City. But I've held myself back, realizing that the complaints of a woman who has not yet met a mate do not exactly qualify as breaking news.
Still, I'm haunted by the suspicion that my tale is different from those told by Edith Wharton and Candace Bushnell. The men I meet are not the rakish, workaholic, cheating cads of yore. No, I'm bearing witness to a bona fide crisis in American masculinity, one that seems especially, but not exclusively, to afflict the young, urban and privileged. And with it, I have observed the birth of a new breed of man: a man of few interests and no passions; a man whose libido is reduced and whose sense of responsibility nonexistent. These men are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession or ideology. While they may have mildly defined areas of interest -- in, say, "Star Wars," or the work of Ron Jeremy -- they have trouble figuring out what kind of food they might want to eat on a given night. And, in an effort to cure what ails them, they have been medicated to the gills with potions designed to dull their feelings even further.
Alas, there hasn't been an especially timely occasion to shine a floodlight on these men, and I have been delayed, perhaps, by my understanding that doing so would make me sound like an emasculating harpy. Well, Benjamin Kunkel -- the 32-year-old, freshly anointed darling of the New York literary set and author of the new novel "Indecision" -- has saved my ass and broken the story for me.
"Indecision" doesn't address the phenomenon of the new male torpor directly. But in its hero, Dwight Wilmerding -- a 28-year-old New Yorker with several roommates, no job or opinions, a listless romantic relationship, and an ill-gotten prescription for Abulinix, a remedy for chronic indecisiveness -- Kunkel has crafted an emblem of the vigor-impaired idlers currently clogging the dating pool.
Happily enough, "Indecision" is the tale of Dwight's lurching emergence from his apathetic chrysalis. A recently "pfired" Pfizer employee, Dwight begins the book emotionally paralyzed by everything in his life: his tepid feelings for his girlfriend, his incestuous impulses toward his sister. He cannot process the impact of damaging events such as his parents' divorce or his hallucinogenic experience of Sept. 11. His only conviction is that he can find true love with a former crush he hasn't seen in a decade. Dwight's pursuit of this fantasy, along with the pills he believes will cure his little impassivity problem, lead him accidentally to start making actual choices, like traveling to Ecuador, and to experience authentic feelings: for the woman he meets there and the political situation he encounters.
After I finished Kunkel's novel, I was curious about the man who had so precisely drawn a figure whose initial indifference is so painfully familiar. With Kunkel, I thought I might be able to have a safe, objective conversation about the kind of guy Dwight is as his story begins. How did we get a population of Dwights? Will they ever get better? Why do my friends and I continue to date them?
Kunkel and his fellow co-founders of literary journal n+1 have recently been identified as members of a new generation of "public intellectuals." So imagine my surprise when he not only consented to my frivolous request to discuss gender relations, but suggested we have our talk over Friday dinner. "Dinner dates are what all those indecisive men go on, right?" he wrote me by e-mail. For the record, Kunkel's date planning was decisive: He wanted Indian and presented me with a list of restaurants in descending order of preference and costs. (Since this was, in fact, a fake date, Salon was paying.)
Kunkel, dressed in a dark suit-jacket and white shirt, has a small frame and a handsome face -- covered with downy blond beard and mustache. When I arrived at the restaurant, he was drinking single-malt Laphroaig Scotch.
He also wasn't shy about expressing his preferences: He eats only fish and vegetables, and in a previous visit to the restaurant had found the saag paneer too spicy. Over a crispy tangy bitter melon salad and halibut, we quickly covered his background. He grew up in Eagle, Colo. (famous now as the resort town in which Kobe Bryant was charged with rape), before attending St. Paul's prep school in New Hampshire, followed by Deep Springs College in California and then Harvard. After a stint in France, he moved to New York. When we met, Kunkel had recently returned from Colorado, and expressed all the ambivalence about New York City that any good New Yorker should.
But we soon settled into the task at hand: picking over "the scourge of indecisive men," as I had delicately put it in my e-mail. Kunkel insisted he himself was not of their number, and declined to reveal whether he was currently dating anyone.
I should start by asking: How much of you is in Dwight?
Not too much. My psychological approach to the book, if I could define it, was to break apart my personality and distribute it among the various characters. One of the things that appealed to me about Dwight's character was his ample endowment of something that I don't have nearly as much of, which is a cheerful good nature. He's willing and ready to believe all sorts of things in a way that I haven't been and am not.
He's available to experience in a way that is admirable; it may be one of the few admirable things about him. Of course his availability to experience ends up being shallower than he'd like to admit; this is something [Dwight's love interest] Brigid points out to him mercilessly at one point. In some sense he's available to experience because he doesn't let any of the experiences penetrate too deeply ... But I've had a much clearer idea of what I've wanted to do with my life than he had.
My sense of the sort of relationship he's got himself in at the beginning of the book -- this twilight relationship that has never quite begun and is constantly ending -- is not entirely theoretical.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
