Book Reviews
Hold the front page! This is what the papers say. If you’ve come across anything else, please let us know. Apologies for the lack of radio interview sound bytes – coming soon!
The Crack
January 2005
“MEN Speak the Unspeakable”
by Michael Elias and Edward Seeker
You may well have a friend, or several, with whom you get on so well that when you’re together you feel scintillatingly intelligent, and wish that those who we want to impress could listen in to understand your true greatness. Only a few of us feel the same the next morning. The authors, or providers of material, for this book, are two of these rare people: two 30-something London intellectuals who blether on companionably about “big” men’s topics, like sex, self-worth and their relationships with their fathers (but not, I note, football, contraptions or music). Is it worth it? Well, they are sweet self-revelatory, thoughtful and sensitive, and seem to have had some interesting lays; but I don’t think the two friends’ boasts and psychiatrists’-couch debriefings can possibly speak, as the title seems to imply, for all or any men. Minimal editing is provided by the father of one of them*. A parent is unlikely to be the most rigorous judge of his son’s outpourings, even if the son’s talking about wanking against the curtains and his intervention is limited to the provision of footnotes to explain – presumably for the benefit of future historians – what the boys mean by “communism”, and “fingering”. But he doesn’t tell us who they are referring to when they mention past lovers, children, etc. I suppose future historians are just going to have to know about them. I can’t be condemnatory about this book, because it’s a nice idea, and plenty of less interesting made-up dialogues have been printed in the name of literature; but I wonder if there’s a slim volume just itching to get out?
*Ed’s dad did an intro for Ed; no one has edited the book.