All That Man Is by David Szalay doesn’t offer a lot of great choices for men. There aren’t a lot of great jobs and, when you get older, employers probably will find you superfluous. Here’s a guy from England who moves to Croatia and lives off the rent from his house in England:
And when they asked Murray what the fuck he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just taking it easy. Enjoying life.’ ‘Where you doing that then?’ the Pig said. ‘Croatian Riviera,’ Murray answered. ‘I’m semi-retired,’ he told them. ‘Semi-retired? What’s that mean?’ ‘Means no one’ll give him a job,’ Rainey quipped, adding an empty to the many on the table and turning his head towards the bar.
A rich Russian businessman is defrauded of most of his wealth. His wife leaves him after it becomes clear that, under UK divorce law, she can take the houses and most of the cash. He’s left with nothing to do:
‘No,’ Aleksandr says. He has never had a hobby – in his Who’s Who entry, he had listed his ‘interests’ as ‘wealth’ and ‘power’.
Guys who go down the responsible family-man route are freighted down with mind-numbing tasks:
Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?
On Saturday, though, he was short-tempered. Last week, in high winds, a substantial piece of chimney fell off the house – stove in someone’s new Nissan Qashqai which was parked in front. An insurance nightmare. Miranda had been on the phone all week to the insurers, without much to show for it. Just to sort out the chimney, even that seemed problematic. He spent most of Saturday in the low bed under the sloping roof, peering at small print on a tablet screen, furious at having to spend his time on it. So many overheads these days, that’s the thing. Mortgage. School fees. Laima’s salary – the Lithuanian nanny.
What would be described in the U.S. as rape/sexual assault is portrayed by the victim in a favorable manner:
[a 40-year-old hostess in Czech Republic] starts to tell them about how she lost her virginity with a swimming coach, in a hostel in Italy, when she was fifteen. ‘He was older than me,’ she says. ‘That was nice, you know.’ Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking. ‘It is nice, first time, with someone older,’ she says to him.
(Wikipedia says the age of consent is 15 in the Czech Republic and 14 in Italy so this wasn’t criminal.)
The book is kind of dark and not exactly action-filled, but I think it deserves your attention if you’re in a serious mood.