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Jacob's fall >> The last suburban virgin in Jacob's Ladder by JULIET WATERS
It's not that the passive hero has never existed. He's been around probably even before Aesop's turtle. But every once in a while you feel a social pull toward a certain archetype. Maybe it's fourth-wave feminism that's leaning toward positive reinforcement of the harmless guys, instead of all that negative reinforcement of the abusive ones. Or maybe it's part of the tide of first-wave male movements, the kind that Yanofsky satirizes so beautifully when he describes the therapy at Dr. Howie's True Life Companion workshop. The True Life Companions are not working on locating their self-esteem so much in women. One night a week, these men get together with Dr. Howie to learn how to be better friends with each other and more dependent on other men. Then, after a group sing of "My Way," they send out for a pizza. But Jacob Glassman, who learns of these meetings as the ghostwriter for Dr. Howie's weekly column, isn't too likely to show up at any of them. Midway through the novel he still regrets not allowing himself to be seduced by his best friend's wife in the first chapter. And every millimetre of his self-esteem is invested in the entirely hopeless goal of winning the love of a local talk-show hostess, inappropriately named Hope. This is a world where the woman who is trying to seduce Jacob has never slept with anyone other than her husband. And a world where it's still conceivable that she's slept with one more person than Jacob's ever slept with. The charm of Yanofsky's novel is that while most 35-year-old guys would be going through the early stages of midlife crisis, Jacob has so successfully postponed his adolescence that the journal he's writing reads more like a midlife coming-of-age story. Jacob's Ladder is a consistently well-written, fluidly structured romantic comedy. But it's pretty easy to make the passive hero endearing and funny. It's a more difficult challenge to make him really interesting. Shields and Strube accomplish this because they dig into the dark areas to nourish the humour of their novels. They go for the moments of real emptiness that exist in a life of emotional inertia, and emphasize the inevitable and sometimes terrifying crisis that entropy creates. Yanofsky never quite gets down there. His plot tends to take the path of least resistance and he avoids anything that will really raise the emotional stakes. This said, there's still a lot to love about Jacob Glassman. There aren't too many insanely devoted romance-addicted men left in the world, and it's good to know that some writers are still involved in the cause of protecting this fragile, threatened species. Jacob's Ladder by Joel Yanofsky, Porcupine's Quill, pb, 191pp. $16.95
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I'm sensing a trend in this fall's crop of novels. Some kind of force seems to be nudging the passive hero into the forefront of my literary landscape. First there was Carol Shield's Larry Weller. Then there was Cordelia Strube's Raymond Gage. And now, in his first novel, Jacob's Ladder, Prix-Parizeau nominee Joel Yanofsky introduces us to Jacob Glassman.