Jolly good fellows

‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the blurb on this reissue of the author’s first and penultimate novel, originally published in the US in 1978. Admired and influential Michaels may have been, but that was largely in his homeland and then as an essayist and author of short stories, rather than as a novelist. The Men’s Club was not published in the UK until 1981 (by Jonathan Cape) and is only now, 35 years later, being made available in paperback by Daunt Books in the category of ‘lost classics’.

If the phrase ‘crisis of masculinity’ did not exist in the late 1970s, Leonard Michaels could be said to have both anticipated and captured it in this book. A group of seven men — friends and strangers — gather in a suburban house in California:

Women wanted to talk about anger, identity, politics, etc.