Christopher Isherwood ______________________________

A Single Man

First published in 1964

This is an American novel in that it was written by Isherwood after he had taken USnationality. American critics felt that it was a British novel. One could spend many pagespondering what makes a book with an American setting specifically British. The heroGeorge? He has an English background, but he is as much a naturalized American ashis creator (whom he much resembles). It must be something to do with the style--delicate, elusive and allusive, unbrutal, not like Mailer. I do not like the division of thenovel in English into national entities. This is a fine brief novel in the Anglophonetradition, whatever that means.A Single Man has been termed a novel of the homosexual subculture. George has knowna long loving attachment to a man who is now dead. He lives alone and we are given aday in his life. He is fifty-eight, a lecturer in a Californian college (we see him teaching,very amusingly, Huxley's After Many a Summer). He is charming, liberal, a not very vocalupholder of minority rights. His own homosexuality is subsumed in other assailedminority situations. He tells his students that "a minority is only thought of as aminority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. Andno threat is ever quite imaginary... minorities are people; people, not angels." But heseems a threat to nobody--withdrawn, refined, out of sympathy with Americanphilistinism and brashness, a man who has lost his real reason for living. He belongs tothat majority (or is it a minority?) called the living, and living means getting through theday. His day is absorbing to the reader, though nothing really happens. He ends updrunk in bed, masturbating. He has a lively vision of death--remarkably described: thesilting up of the arteries, the tired heart, the lights of consciousness starting to go out.He goes to sleep; the day is over. To make us fascinated with the everyday non-events of an ordinary life was Joyce's great achievement. But here there are no Joycean tricks toexalt mock-epically the banal. It is a fine piece of plain writing which haunts thememory.--Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939