It’s Beginning to Hurt

The type of male character portrayed in James Lasdun’s excellent short-story collection is the kind of guy you’ve always promised yourself you’d never become. Middle-aged members of the middle-class, they’re cases in human uncertainty, if not paralysis. Whether it’s a plummeting stock, a neighbor’s seductive wife, or a mysterious lump in the throat, there’s no reason small enough to second-guess every instinct, or self-doubt every motive.

English novelist and poet Lasdun—whose previous book of short stories, The Siege, was adapted into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci—shows a knack for trapping his characters in nearly comical psychological minefields. In “Cleanness,” a divorced banker suffers Oedipal dreams of his late mother on the eve of his 70-year-old father’s second wedding. In “The Natural Order,” a middling travel-guide writer cautiously considers an affair as his travel buddy racks up score after score. And finally, in the melancholic title story, a man dutifully buys groceries for his wife after attending a former mistress’s funeral.

More than another look at the mid-life crisis, what emerges from these miniatures of male apprehension is a portrait of the modern man perpetually understudying for a grander, sexier life as he awaits his transcendent moment—one that, if it ever does arrive, is rarely as absolute as he’d like. As nervousness yields to anxiety, and as anxiety gives way to terror, Lasdun’s calm, orderly prose never falters in tone, steering these stories with a confident, white-knuckled steadiness. To cut this deep, there can’t be a single tremor.