Next: By James Hynes

I might have never heard of Next were it not for the Morning News Tournament of Books. I'm glad I read it, and grateful to the TOB for bringing it to my attention. I hope this book goes far; it deserves a bigger audience, and it should be able to generate huge discussions. Be aware, mild spoilers are included.

Next, by James Hynes, is a novel fundamentally concerned with men's issues. I say this as a warning and as praise; I can see women opening up Next and not finishing it, in the same way men pick up chick-lit and can't stand it. But for a certain kind of man - that is, for white males approaching fifty - Next is a deep, complicated meditation on the role of men in contemporary America.

It would be a stretch, but not much of one, to call the main character of Next, Kevin Quinn, a typical macho asshole. He sees women as objects, either of desire or scorn. He's over fifty but has a much younger girlfriend, who is a source of bemusement, exasperation and terror when she's not delivering great sex. She has him so spooked with talk of having a baby he's fled south on a plane from his native Michigan to the arid, alien world of Austin, Texas, for a job interview. It's also a few days after a major terror attack in Europe, so he's spooked about that as well.

Once in Austin, with six hours to kill, Kevin freaks out a little. He becomes dangerously obsessed with his seatmate from the plane, an even younger woman who reminds him of his most fulfilling sex partner ever, from twenty-five years earlier, a woman he'd taken sexual refuge with when the woman he was really in love with told him she could never love him. His meditations distract him not only from the job interview, but from current events which are about to overwhelm him.

Kevin has a problem typical to men: He's aware of his emotions, of his own shortcomings, and that his instinctive responses are often misogynistic and cruel. White liberal guilt, in short. But he has no mechanism to process his filters into consistently rational action, so when it comes time to act, he's paralyzed. He backs into every big decision. It's like Hemingway through a modern mirror, but where Hemingway's characters were able process their sensitivity into masculine hyper-activity, Kevin Quinn founders, emasculated by female empowerment and societal expectations, becoming resentful and unable to make decisions.

There's a lot of micro-detail in this novel: it takes place over eight hours, and every moment of Kevin's life and its middle-class bourgeois consumerism, is examined in minute detail, to the extent that you wonder why you should keep reading. Please do. Because the end may look like an action movie, with explosions and opportunities for heroism, but it's not, really. It's about redemption. Or, rather, the mechanisms of redemption - to ask whether Quinn is redeemed or delusional at the end is perhaps the central question I'm left with when this novel ended. In that, it echoes Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, and to paraphrase the Misfit's final words: Quinn would have been a better man if there were someone there to shoot him every minute.

I'm sure other readers had other reactions; I'd love to hear them.