On the eve of his sixties, Brendan struggles to make ends meet. After being let go from a job as sales manager he had held for 27 years, he became a prisoner of what he calls the “Uber economy”.
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At the wheel of his car, he does weeks of 60 to 70 hours in the traffic jams of Los Angeles for an hourly income close to minimum wage, and becomes the disillusioned spectator of a privileged urban fauna who slams in an hour what he struggles to win in a whole day.
Behind the wheel, he also thinks with bitterness and resentment about his life, about the choices he never really made, yielding to his father’s demands and his duty as a good little Irish Catholic to build a life in the image of that which was expected of him – without risks, but without attractions.
When he accompanies a retired professor to a clinic that performs abortions, he witnesses an attack orchestrated by anti-abortion activists. The event marks a turning point in his life, as he continues to serve as a driver for this woman who becomes a true friend to him. “All the choices we make in life are complex and tinged with ambiguity,” she said.
Douglas Kennedy leads us into a deep reflection on these choices that we make, deliberately or not. About all the ramifications of those decisions that we make, whether it’s ending a marriage or an unwanted pregnancy. A return to the sources, in a way, for the American writer whose work is crossed through and through by these existential questions already raised in The man who wanted to live his lifehis second title which revealed him to the whole world 25 years ago.
Men are afraid of the light is a dark, terribly gripping novel, which mirrors a nation torn between extreme ideologies – where “the slightest disagreement is settled with revolver shots”, he writes with this cynicism that transpires over the pages to denounce everything that plagues the country. Douglas Kennedy even goes so far as to evoke a modern Civil War through the abortion debate that is raging in the United States at the moment and that nothing seems to be able to settle.
Charge against Catholic extremists, against the Church and against “the white male who feels his privileges slipping away from him and will stop at nothing to keep power”, Men are afraid of the light attacks “those bastards [qui] do not bend to any rules” and transform the country “into a banana republic entirely controlled by an ultra-rich elite”.
Never has Douglas Kennedy been so committed and vehement in his writing. And that is undoubtedly what makes all the strength and appeal of this contemporary novel.
Men are afraid of the light
Douglas Kennedy (translated from English by Chloé Royer)
Belfond
264 pages