AMERICAN MEN, by Jordan Ritter Conn
WHO NEEDS FRIENDS: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America, by Andrew McCarthy
“Every Saturday night when I was in high school,” Jordan Ritter Conn’s new book, “American Men,” begins, “I sat in a room with a half-dozen other teenage boys, and I announced whether I’d made it through the week without masturbating. Usually, the answer was no.”
Bleak, right? But it turns out that Conn’s weekly Bible study was the best of times as well as the worst of times. The meetings that shamed him for self-abuse also offered wicked good fellowship. “I still recall those Saturday nights as some of the best of my life,” Conn writes. The conversations fostered intimacy of a kind he now finds rare among his fellow grown-ups. “We grew into a group of young men who actually cared about each other’s inner lives.”
Conn, the author of a previous book about a pair of brothers caught up in the Syrian civil war, no longer subscribes to the conservative Christianity in which he was raised, but he is still interested in men and intimacy. In “American Men,” he describes how four men “navigate the gap between the men we think we should be and the men we actually are.” The book is readable, empathetic and quietly profound, with, as he concedes, “no bold proclamations or grand theories.” In rotating chapters, he takes us inside the lives of Gideon, a white West Point graduate figuring out life after the military; Nate, an underemployed Black trans man looking for love and purpose in postindustrial Ohio; Ryan, a gay Native American with a penchant for bar fights; and Joseph, a married white law student with a traumatic past. (Conn has changed some of the men’s names and those of others around them to protect their privacy.)
The men never meet, but they speak to one another across chapters about shared demons. All four struggle with sex and sexuality. Grappling with repressed memories of sexual abuse, Joseph stops sleeping with his wife and develops a porn addiction. After Gideon’s wife at the time, a fellow soldier, has an affair, he becomes obsessed with her lover’s penis size. It’s as if Gideon and Joseph — white, middle-class, cis-het — are calling out to Nate and Ryan, queer men of color, saying, “It’s not so easy for us, either.”
They drink. Ryan’s bar binges lead, inexorably, to fighting, which is his real vice. Eventually, he channels his rage into mixed martial arts. When Gideon can’t find adequate work after the Army, he nearly drinks his second marriage to death. (His wife, Addie, is one of many decent, relatively grounded women who belay these men, stopping them when they are about to fall.) Joseph, in order to save his marriage, promises his wife that he will go to therapy — a good decision, but a complicated one. “Joseph liked to get a little drunk before therapy,” Conn writes.
Our culture offers these men no shortage of diagnoses. Gideon has alcoholism. Nate has depression. Ryan struggles with anger management. Joseph has, to go with his porn addiction, what appears to be obsessive-compulsive disorder — he washes his hands constantly, and when driving he can’t go left, like Derek Zoolander on the catwalk. (These men would all get the reference, as Ryan was born in 1981, and the others seem about the same age.)
But their common illness is loneliness. To be sure, Conn is attuned to the other forces they contend with: racism, transphobia, abuse, the precarity of the American economy. But Ryan and Nate, Gideon and Joseph would surely navigate the obstacle course of life with more dexterity, optimism and joy if they had more companionship. None seems to have a very close friend, let alone a loose posse of chums who’ve got their back.
At one point, having thoughts of suicide, Gideon calls two old friends, but neither picks up. “The three of them used to call each other often,” Conn writes. “Lately, it just seemed like it was only on birthdays, or on the anniversary of their other friend’s death. Now, when they didn’t answer, he didn’t know who else to call.”
The search for male friends — how to make them, where they disappear to, how to find them again — is the subject of the actor Andrew McCarthy’s “Who Needs Friends,” in which he chronicles a cross-country drive, New York to Berkeley, tracking down old friends and, along the way, striking up conversations with (male) strangers about their own friendships. It’s a sweet, soulful book, filled with the kind of bighearted, amiable characters who one hopes will populate any road trip.
If you thought that playing Blane in “Pretty in Pink,” starring in a Tony Award-winning play, becoming a successful TV director and crafting a career as a travel writer would guarantee a loyal clutch of friends, then lose your illusions. The book begins as Sam, McCarthy’s 21-year-old son, looks up from his guitar and says, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” McCarthy’s reply proves unsatisfying the moment he utters it: “I have friends, Sam. I just don’t see them.” He resolves to do some reconnecting.
In Baltimore, McCarthy visits Seve (a nickname for Stephen), who in the years since they were close has become a shut-in and a hoarder. He sees old friends in Kentucky, Texas, Wyoming and California. In bars and diners, he meets friendless men, but he also encounters men hanging with buddies they openly adore. At an open mic in Tennessee, McCarthy meets Mark and Tim, 30-somethings who bonded over movies but have found a deeper connection. “Everything in our lives, man, we relate to movies and each other,” Tim tells McCarthy. “Remember in ‘Superbad,’ those two best friends? That’s us.”
McCarthy notes that men can actually be easy friends to have, slow to hold grudges or worry about the small things. Among men, “unless the transgression is so great or character flaw too extreme, we generally incorporate them into the dynamic of the friendship, usually without even an acknowledgment, and move on.” So why do men seem so alone?
In both books, we see how men make friends by doing stuff; they bond around activities. Gideon, for example, once had baseball, then the military, communities where, Conn writes, “proximity begat intimacy.” It’s a sign of our times that practically none of Conn’s or McCarthy’s men, who feel so isolated as they negotiate modern manhood, look for other men in a church, a parent-teacher organization, a local political committee, a bowling league, a trivia team or a book club.
One who does reach out is Nate, who joins a dozen men on a “Black Transmen of Ohio” retreat. Sitting around an Airbnb, grilling burgers and hanging in a hot tub, Nate talks about his struggles, with men who listen. When he gets back to Youngstown, he has a thought: “What might it be like to have friends?” He decides to reach out to some people he knew in high school.
“He asked if they wanted to hang out,” Conn writes, “and they said yes. Then he met their friends, and he asked those friends if they wanted to hang out, and they said yes too. Had it always been this easy? Nate struggled to remember.”
AMERICAN MEN | By Jordan Ritter Conn | Grand Central | 311 pp. | $30
WHO NEEDS FRIENDS: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America | By Andrew McCarthy | Grand Central | 305 pp. | $29
The post Why Do Men Feel So Alone? These 2 Books Have Some Theories. appeared first on New York Times.
