When is a Man by Aaron Shepard

When is a Man by Aaron Shepard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DESCRIPTION: Impotent and defeated, Paul Rasmussen — a young ethnographer and academic recovering from prostate cancer — retreats to the remote Immitoin Valley. As an outsider, he discovers how difficult it is to know a place, let alone become a part of it. Then, a drowned man and a series of encounters force him to confront the valley’s troubled past and his own uncertain future. As Paul undertakes a study of the families displaced 40 years earlier by the flooding of the valley to create the hydroelectric dam, his desire to reinvent himself runs up against the bitter emotions and mysterious connections that linger in the aftermath of the flood. Meditative and erotic, raw and exuberant in tone, When Is a Man goes beyond the familiar narratives of memory and loss to offer a fresh perspective on themes of body and landscape, impotence and masculinity.

REVIEW: No question that the writing is good, which is a prerequisite for me. And I found it easy to feel compassion for, and to like the main character, Paul Rasmussen, a 33-year-old male whose cancerous prostate gland had recently been removed.

But not until well past the halfway mark does the reader get a hint there may also be a mystery to solve. This, despite a dead body having been mentioned in the first few pages.

I found that off-putting, having been led to suppose by the book's lazy, meandering - but no less interesting - first half, that its primary theme was of a young man struggling to cope with a health issue that had him questioning his masculinity. The fact of a dead body was treated with the barest mention.

To be more than halfway through a book before a hint of real mystery insinuates itself and whatever action related to uncovering its answer begins to start is not a good thing.

The odd structure of the novel suggests to me that perhaps When is a Man ended up fusing what should have been two novels. It was either trying to say too much and in too much of a hurry - there was a heck of a lot to track in the latter third of the book - or, having begun so well in setting a theme of anxiety and identity loss against a gorgeous backdrop of lake, stream and forest, it has forgotten its main thread.

In other words, I felt I was reading a work of general fiction through much of the first half of the book, only to learn as I approached the last third that I was now reading a mystery novel.

Near the end, I began skipping pages - too many esoteric details thrown at me at once.

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