Fiction

The author's favorite of his own novels, now back in print!

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

"A testimony to Isherwood's undiminished brilliance as a novelist." Anthony Burgess

"An absolutely devastating, unnerving, brilliant book." Stephen Spender

"Just as his Prater Violet is the best novel I know about the movies, Isherwood's A Single Man, published in 1964, is one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement." Edmund White

If he's seeking company with special ardor, it's because he's lost his male companion, Jim, to an auto accident, something the dreary late autumn approach to Christmas makes even harder to bear. The ghost of Jim flits in and out of so many of the novel's passages. George makes connections throughout his day, but we see one by one how they fall short of the intimacy he shared with Jim. His best friend Charlotte "Charley" and he have the kind of witty, boozy conversation longtime pals might have, but Charley's efforts to turn things romantic crash into George's homosexuality. George has friends on his school's faculty who kibbitz with him over lunch about their shared left-leaning politics, but these are hardly deep bonds. Also, George has a sickening feeling that, despite his oratorial brilliance as a teacher, he's not really reaching his students.

George visits a dying woman, also involved in the Ohio car crash that killed Jim. Once upon a time, Doris was a rival for Jim's affection. George's ambivalent reaction to her sad condition, somewhere between grieving and vanquishing a foe, testifies to the unflinching honesty of this portrait.

George raves about the hour he spends at his health club, entering a lively sit-up competition with a 14-year-old he finds incipiently attractive. "How delightful it is to be here," Isherwood writes, "If only one could spend one's entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy."

George's only hope for a full communion with another person comes with a happenstance nighttime meeting with one of his students, Kenny, at a beachside bar. The 60-year-old man and the 19-year-old youth enjoy smart, witty, and flirtateous conversation, which culminates in a Pacific Ocean skinny-dip and a visit to George's place. The visit is sensual but not sexual, leaving George short of the Jim standard again--but not without hope.

A ordinary day of an ordinary (but for his intellect) man. Why then is this book so spectacular? The prose flows. Check out these stunning sentences: (Of Doris dying in a hospital room) "Here on the table...is a little paper book, gaudy and cute as a Chrstmas card: The Stations of the Cross. Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (Of George diving into the ocean nude with Kenny) "He washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes, again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less."

Isherwood's warts-and-all approach to his semi-autobiographical lead character is so refreshing! And the novel makes the most of its beautiful, decadent SoCal setting. Who would have thought that one of the greatest novels of the 20th century could be so simple and honest? I'll always love this book. It is my crystal ball, since I may be very much like George one day. Don't ask me in what ways!

42 of 43 found the following review helpful:


Isherwood's Neglected Masterpiece  Nov 28, 1999
"A Single Man" is one of the dozen or so genuine masterworks to appear in English since World War II. A quiet, unassuming story about a quiet, unassuming man (who bears a strong resemblance to the book's author), its painful and profound emotional undercurrents may escape the careless reader. This is writing so precise and clear that the characters -- George, Kenny, Charlotte -- come to exist in your mind almost as vividly as people in your own life. The book is partly modelled on "Ulysses," and so will be of extraordinary interest to students of Joyce, but I hasten to add that the novel is brief and easy-to-read. Indeed, I have read "A Single Man" countless times and will read it countless times more. Isherwood will always be best known for his "Berlin Stories" (and that largely because the musical and movie "Cabaret" was based on one of them), but this unforgettable short novel is his masterpiece.

45 of 47 found the following review helpful:


A Pefect Novel  Sep 23, 2002 By H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin"
This was my fourth reading of this brilliantly perfect novel. I am deeply moved each time I reach this book; I cannot imagine how it would have affected me had I read it in 1964 when it was first published. This novel covers one day in the life of George, an English professor at a nondiscript college in California. The time is just before the Christmas season, that time in America dreaded by many of us who live alone. His lover Jim has recently died in a traffic accident. George is an outsider on many levels. He is British living in America, he is gay living in a heterosexual world, he is brillliant among mostly dull, uninteresting and uninterested college students, he is a man of good taste surrounded by tasteless neighbors.

Isherwood makes brillilant observations about people: that straight women friends often refuse to give up on making their gay male friends. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers." And George says what I have been saying for years, that all too often minorities hate all other minorites. Another observation is that middle-aged gay men look better than their straight counterparts: "What's wrong with them [straight men] is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because. . . he hasn't given up." Finally, Isherwood describes poignantly the unawareness of friends: "How many times, when Jim and I had been quarreling and came to visit you--sullking, avoiding each other's eyes, talking to each other only through you [haven't we all been in that awkward position]-- did you somehow bring us together again by the sheer power of your unawareness that anything was wrong?" There are countless gems like these through out this wonderful book.

A perfect novel about loss and loneliness, A SINGLE MAN constantly gets named near the top of "best gay" lists of books as well as one of the great novels of the 20th Century, both distinctions it richly deserves.

22 of 24 found the following review helpful:


Read this book!  Oct 16, 2003 By gac1003 "gac1003"
This short novel follows one day in the life of George, a 58-year-old English professor at San Tomas State College in Los Angeles, CA. From the moment he wakes up and shuffles to the bathroom, we are immediately thrust into his perception of life both as a gay man in the 1960s, and without his partner Jim who died in a car accident. His views are based upon both of these events, sometimes viewing the world as a big, happy joke, and other times as a very hostile place.

It's a great character study into something I think we don't read about too often: the life of a gay man in his fifties. Too often, gay books deal with men in their twenties and thirties, and if someone older than that appears, he's a caricature or stereotype of the dirty old man. George is very human and is presented in a very realistic manner.

Beautifully written. Definitely worth reading.

11 of 11 found the following review helpful:


A classic, and worth reading before the movie comes out  Jul 14, 2009 By RonAnnArbor
This is a classic novel of early gay literature -- and it is a very good read at that. Basically following a gay widower over the course of one day, it includes typical events and thoughts that occur during the course of that time, and the observations are keen and insightful.

I would recommend reading the book BEFORE the movie comes out (Tom Ford directing Colin Firth in the lead role) because there is really no logical way to just adapt this into a screenplay. It's a work of an internal thought process. It will be interesting to see how it translates to the screen). The book itself is highly recommended.

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