Monday, November 25, 2024

Judith Guest: Ordinary People

 The most astonishing thing to me is how accurately and deeply the author has captioned the subtleties of male pain.  It is no doubt a socially conditioned --and inaccurate--thought of mine that female pain is larger, deeper, and crueler than anything I will experience in life.  I am in fact finishing a cross stitch of the famous Rukeyser quote to that effect for my sister's Christmas gift.  Even if it were just the tyranny of biology, the bloody cycle of pain and turmoil every month, the bittersweet holding and incubating of life, a woman's life would be sharp enough that no male should ever have the gall to look her in the eye.  And yet on top of that body is layered sheet after sheet of societal pain and daily indignity.  How could a man dare to imagine?

And yet men do, especially authors. The nature of women's pain makes it especially tempting, I'm sure, to try and capture a theatrical version of it.  I can't resist attempting it myself, even.  And men do sometimes capture the flavor of a woman, in the same way that a seltzer water tastes vaguely like the fruit displayed on its label.  I am certain, however, that any woman, reading or watching a member of her gender written by a man, must smirk at the flimsy, if well-intentioned, result.  "Good effort," they must think.  "But if they only knew."

Men's pain, in my experience, is generally more subtle.  It is difficult to capture even the hint of it in words, and such efforts often feel forced and cloying, even by men themselves.  At best they feel clinical, sterile, like trying to bottle the the wind.  At worst, they are justifications, disingenuous attempts to compare that which has no corollary.  

In this book, Guest has accomplished that which I have never seen a man do.  She has distilled that pain down to its essence, lain it bare, and presented it for the reader in a way that may in fact succeed in giving men words for their pain, and women at least a window.

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