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The Way Things Are
Julian falls in love with a much younger woman, Mariane, who is still under the influence of her former college professor, Eliot Hawkins, who offers a nightmarish vision of the world
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1994
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February 23, 2010
A novel about sex and power, this book came up as part of a longstanding faith-versus-scientific-method debate with an old friend. The novel is ideological in the sense of using its five main characters to explore the thesis that, in a materialistic world, all meaning can be reduced to the pursuit of sex and power.
The narrator, like the psychoanalyst author, is an elderly doctor, and much of the book has the voyeuristic quality of an older man’s admiring perspective on younger women. Some of it is entertaining in a tell-it-like-it-is vein, and as a no-holds-barred examination of psycho-sexual realities, but the characters are not particularly subtle or complex.
The thesis on sex and power has a philosophical pedigree, certainly to Freud and Darwin, and probably to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but one can be detached from one’s drives, and I am more interested in evaluating the thesis in terms of contemporary existence and personal experience, as the novel does.
To bring the thesis home on a personal level, I ask myself (an older man) if I am motivated by the desire for sex and power. I feel a desire to be free from the coercion of others more than I feel a desire to have power over others. And while sex certainly has its appeal, I am also interested in the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, if those can be disentangled from sex. And there are many, many other things that have motivating force in life, such as art, music, natural beauty, physical activity, love of learning, etc., etc. Of course maybe I am just fooling myself, or maybe I have missed the point, but I don’t think I can go along with a complete reduction of life to sex and power.
The narrator, like the psychoanalyst author, is an elderly doctor, and much of the book has the voyeuristic quality of an older man’s admiring perspective on younger women. Some of it is entertaining in a tell-it-like-it-is vein, and as a no-holds-barred examination of psycho-sexual realities, but the characters are not particularly subtle or complex.
The thesis on sex and power has a philosophical pedigree, certainly to Freud and Darwin, and probably to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but one can be detached from one’s drives, and I am more interested in evaluating the thesis in terms of contemporary existence and personal experience, as the novel does.
To bring the thesis home on a personal level, I ask myself (an older man) if I am motivated by the desire for sex and power. I feel a desire to be free from the coercion of others more than I feel a desire to have power over others. And while sex certainly has its appeal, I am also interested in the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, if those can be disentangled from sex. And there are many, many other things that have motivating force in life, such as art, music, natural beauty, physical activity, love of learning, etc., etc. Of course maybe I am just fooling myself, or maybe I have missed the point, but I don’t think I can go along with a complete reduction of life to sex and power.
Displaying 1 of 1 review