Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill review – men behaving badly

Good Trouble, the first story collection from Joseph O’Neill, opens with a satire about a writer in a mid-career funk. Mark McCain, the thin-skinned poet in Pardon Edward Snowden, cannot decide whether to add his name to a “poetition” – a petition in doggerel – which calls upon Obama to pardon the eponymous whistleblower. Yet he is only fretting over the reputational pros and cons so exhaustively because he feels increasingly outshone by hipper rivals, including his friend Liz whose “sapphic” verse is scooping acclaim. McCain’s sour petulance, as he squares up to the dethroning of the pale, male and stale, greatly whets the satire’s edge. In fact, many of the stories in this 11-strong collection feel current precisely because they depict outmoded masculinity in a 21st-century tailspin.

An Irish-born novelist resident in New York, O’Neill made a huge transatlantic splash with Netherland in 2008. It turned upon a melancholic Dutch-born futures analyst who distracts himself from divorce by hanging out with a flamboyant Trinidadian con man intent on popularising cricket in the US. While the plot suffered from the diminishing returns of a shaggy dog story, the narrator’s detours into the emotional nether lands of masculinity were hypnotically eloquent: the isolation following family breakdown, the quiddities of male friendship and the civilising rituals of playing cricket. Many of the stories in Good Trouble follow suit: a brazenly offbeat premise provides the springboard for a dive into the expectations laid upon men as friends, husbands, mentors and fathers.

The less memorable tales present hollow men whose lives have lapsed into the “mere likeness of vitality”, such as the family guy in The Death of Billy Joel, who organises a disappointingly attended 40th birthday golfing weekend in Fort Lauderdale. A couch-surfer in the throes of divorce finds it unexpectedly difficult to muster the two character references he needs for an apartment rental in The Referees, oblivious to the possibility that he is an “asshole”. In The Sinking of the Houston, a Manhattan father broods upon exacting revenge on his son’s mugger – he envisages breaking the legs of this “hoodlum Moriarty” with a baseball bat – but an elderly neighbour diverts him from bloodlust with tales of wartime heroism. If the myopia and solipsism of such men is sketched with delectable slyness, their resistance to self-examination results in stories that usually run out of road.

However, the norms of male behaviour increasingly discussed as “toxic masculinity” are elaborated toward a more disquieting end in The Poltroon Husband. Having recently moved to their “final abode” near Flagstaff, Arizona, a man and his wife are startled by the sounds of a possible break-in emanating from downstairs. The husband, however, is overtaken by a “dreamlike inertness”, which renders him unable to get out of bed, forcing his wife to investigate alone. In an oblique payback, she then withholds details of her encounter with the intruder, dismissing her husband’s plan to beef up security because she refuses to “live like a poltroon” (the dictionary tells him this means an “utter coward”). Unmoored by this shameful lapse in his masculine duty to protect the homestead, he is soon “standing sentry” in the moonlit woods behind their property.

If O’Neill permits an intermittent tenderness towards men burdened by their own troubled masculinity, the best story in this collection, The World of Cheese, radiates compassion for its rare female protagonist. Breda has sunk into lonely despair after being abandoned by a husband keen to grow a ponytail, surf in Costa Rica and exchange earthy sex chat with his new German girlfriend. Not only is their son prone to similar pettish outbursts, he pronounces Breda an antisemitic “persona non grata” for a stray remark about his infant’s forthcoming circumcision. The men in Breda’s life might consider themselves in possession of superior sensitivity, but we are led to see this as a cover for continued self-centredness.

If the decentring of white men has met with intensifying pushback since the 2016 US election, then conventional masculinity needs shrewd anatomists like Joseph O’Neill more than ever before.