Losing Face by George Haddad.
Joey is a nebbish,perennially insecure about his class,his race,and his masculinity. His grasp of Arabic shames him. He gets ripped at the gym – or tries to. It doesn’t really matter. Buff or not,“Joey had never actually wanted to play a part and he suspected most people didn’t.”
His ineffectuality leads him,during a night out,to stand by while a young woman is gang-raped. Facing prison,Joey is forced to confront his family’s repressed histories.
Not every novel requires a psychoanalytic reading,but,in the case of a work likeLosing Face,it would be a disservice not to apply a few. Alexander Portnoy would kill for Joey’s mummy issues. Joey fiercely resents his,a Lebanese woman named Alma,for having had a life of her own before him.
The wound stems from a sense of abandonment:his father,a white Australian named Simon Boyle,is imprisoned when Joey is young for accidentally hitting a cyclist. Watching his parents’ wedding tape,Joey notes Simon’s facility with Arabic,envying his dad’s “thicker” physique even as he begrudges the re-entry of the man who “jizzed Joey into existence” back into the family household.
The sins of the father,like the failures of his family – or what Joey perceives as such – prevent him from grappling with his past. Joey’s primary conduit to family history comes via his grandmother,Elaine,with whom he alternates chapters. Gambling at the pokies,living on a disability pension (anxiety,bad knees),Elaine has worked in factories since migrating to Australia,the child of “a farming family of thirteen”. Having become a mother,“her stint at being anything else was over”.
This sense of motherhood as death sentence speaks to Joey’s complicated relationship with mothers throughout the novel. During a moment when Alma expresses her desire to visit a friend for dinner,Joey accuses her of leaving him with his father again (“You orchestrated this shit,didn’t you?”).
His emasculation is apt to take such misogynistic turns. Noticing his friend Emma making out with Boxer – a man in his friendship circle whom Joey particularly fears – he describes Boxer’s “grubby hands crawling all over her body like horny huntsmen”. “How stupid Joey was”,Haddad writes,“for plugging the components into the equation so cooperatively.”
All of which could be read as straightforward psychic or sexual repression. But,given Joey himself is queer – even his straight friendships,with their diligent observance of machismo,admit a fair degree of homoeroticism – there is perhaps something more. Of Boxer,he observes,“[e]verything about him was thick and square,including his dick,which he often whipped out in front of the boys for a laugh”.
Part of this is to do with identification issues. Joey is only just beginning to distinguish himself from his friendship circle. On a deeper level,he is learning to separate himself from his family,particularly his mother. Early on,he observes that she had once “been young and pretty”.
“Gobsmacked” by her vanished beauty,he intuits that he is “responsible for its demise”,having “slowly eroded all that was dazzling about her”. Resentment and self-hate become petty contempt for the way she tries to care for him (“Look. At. My. Spunk!” she wolf-whistles at one point;he can only rage against the way she cuts his fruit and then dares to keep it stored for him in the fridge).
Freud was famously agnostic on the question of women’s sexual lives. It is something Joey’s family shares in common with the Austrian psychoanalyst. The gender divide in Haddad’s novel is relentlessly Manichean.
Joey’s grandmother,hearing Joey refer to a magistrate as a “nice lady”,hypothesises that it is not so much niceness she wields as pity,reserved “mainly for men,because they are the most stupid”. “Deep in the mind,” she continues,“any man from all time,no matter what they like to f--- – women,other men,goats – deep in the mind,they still believe woman is weaker than man.”
Essentialising gender,of course,is just misogyny by other means. It denies women the opportunity to be portrayed as full and contradictory and complex,rather than one-dimensional Madonnas. If men are congenitally prone to violence,it becomes seductively easy to engage in a series of reductions ad absurdum,culminating in the conclusion that violence masculinises,peace feminises,and never the twain shall meet.
I mentioned earlier that Joey was a nebbish,but his insecurities around class,race and masculinity are often so panoptic that they act like a salve,a luxurious protective mechanism. “A man used to come tell them Dreaming stories”,Haddad writes of his childhood. “Stories that had made Joey feel tiny.” The observation suggests he is perhaps comforted by his sense of insignificance,wrapped up by – if unable to participate in – bigger,adult narratives.
Does his self-hatred provide him with an easy out? Is he a fatalist? Is he simply committed to Homer Simpson’s deathless philosophy:Never try,never fail? There are no easy answers,not least because,as the cliched invocation of “easy answers” reminds us,no question worth answering can afford them.
Losing Face byGeorge Haddad is published byUQP,$29.99.
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