A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living [Buy Now]
by Michael Dahlie
W. W. Norton, 281 pp. $24
For all its mannerly reserve, its upper-crusty starch, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living is a thing so wispily fabricated — more eiderdown fluff than sailcloth — that any critical gust aimed at it is likely to scatter the whole works all over the floor.
Gentleman’s Guide comes by this recessive gossamer-itis honestly: direct from its hapless protagonist, Arthur Camden.
Fifty-ish, born into well-heeled Manhattan society, Camden, when we meet him, is on the verge of tears. His life is in tatters. Cuckolded for years, his wife has finally given him up. The Camden family business, handed down to Arthur’s management, has been run into the ground, a fact his two adult sons complacently, mercifully, overlook.
In Arthur’s eyes the only remaining bright spot is the Hanover Street Fly Casters, the exclusive Catskills fly-fishing club his great-grandfather helped to found in the age of robber barons. Membership is hereditary and it is among the other 10 members of this club that, in the first chapter, Arthur makes his blubbering, unsolicited admission: “Despite the difficulties I’ve recently faced… I want you to know I’m still hanging on, and the reason I’m still hanging on is that I love every single one of you.”
It’s a scene worth noting since it is the most straightforward, and perhaps the least craven thing Arthur Camden will do for the rest of the novel.
At the insistence of Ken Fielder, his one well-meaning friend, Arthur early on submits to dating recent Manhattan divorcees. The reader is not privy to most of these dates, only to Ken Fielder’s post-mortem revelation, “I guess it didn’t work out so well.”
Arthur, believing the opposite, hadn’t realized this on his own. He’s that dim-witted.
On one date, his lively companion teases and goads him into the adventurous suggestion that they visit Maidenhead Grange, the Fly Casters’ lodge. Non-member visits are strictly forbidden in club by-laws and, if the violation is discovered, it will result in his expulsion but Arthur gives in to her insistence.
This time, the date does seem to be going well, at least until Arthur decides to light a cheery fire in the hearth and — wait for it, oh yes — accidentally burns the lodge to the ground.
Out of embarrassment, Arthur decides to lie about breaking club rules. By way of restitution, he offers only to make himself scarce, tendering his resignation from the club.
(Tut-tut, Mr Camden. Even the hen-pecked milquetoasts of bygone generations — Walter Mitty, for one — showed more imagination and were made of sterner stuff than this.)
In general, the Fly Casters, now sans lodge and the financial means to fully restore it, feel well shot of him.
Vacillating between two emotions — shame and fear (principally the fear of giving offense and thereby calling attention to himself), Camden’s life strategy is to remain a moving target.
Most of the novel’s action follows him in meandering, as his ample income allows him, from comfy, ritzy place to comfy, ritzy place, forever intending to get his life in order, forever entangling himself in further embarrassment.
Camden is clearly meant to be a sympathetic character in the same way that sit-com Dads are meant to be embraced as lovable nincompoops. We are meant to root for him, to genuinely feel for him when he weeps — as he does quite a lot. Yet a greater, genuine sympathy fails to kick in for the same reason in both cases: There is no there there.
Instead, Camden reads like that most annoying of acquaintances — a self-made wretch, channel surfing through personal dilemmas, compulsively clicking away from his situation whenever things might get interesting — that is, whenever there is a hint of honest confrontation that might begin his redemption.
In life, this trait may be forgivable, perhaps even, as the author would have us believe, endearing. In fiction, it’s poor play.
Author Michael Dahlie may have a great affection for his protagonist, but in order for the reader to feel the same we really need Dahlie to show “a little stick” — as Arthur’s vastly more successful eldest son advises his father — and use it to bash his character around a good deal more.
It would have been welcome to see Arthur pressed to rise above mere self-loathing and forced to ante up a stake in the outcome of his own life. But the stakes here are never high enough to take much interest in them. The incidents barely squeak through for laughs — comedy generally requiring impossibly high reaches. The emotional bar here is set so very low, one might just as well skip over it.
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