Adam Berlin’s collection of stories, All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights, opens with an anonymous man standing in the front of the mirror and practicing poses.
Richard Gere doing low-key lines from American Gigolo, shift to Brando saying I could have been a contender, shift to Belmondo, he boxed too, rubbing thumb over lips, shift to Gere in Days of Heaven, just the look, just moving my eyes, looking away then fast at.
The man in the mirror is a striking introduction to the men who populate Berlin's collection. They are amalgamations: of Hollywood actors, of tropes and gestures. It is not new to assert that gender is socially constructed identity, more imagination and practice than anything real or essential to the human condition, but what makes Berlin’s man in the mirror arresting is the mirror itself. The reflexivity. The intention. Breaking down the moves. Berlin shows us what it means for his men to be men, pose by pose. The camera is on the deliberate artifice.
Across ten full-length stories and five flash fictions, Berlin explores men as they try to live up to masculine tropes. They find themselves stranded on boats in the Ionian Sea, breaking up their marriage in Hawaii, going to jail, failing as artists, and all around waking up with a nasty hangover and brushing their teeth with their finger in a new woman’s bathroom, ready to do it again. Berlin’s men stepped out of a gritty noir. They wander the streets of New York City, drinking nonstop at bars and picking up women. They fail at commitment and eschew domesticity. When they’re not prowling New York City, they yearn for their routine of what one self-aware, unnamed man calls “the non-living things I did in New York. Sleeping too much. Drinking too much. Hunting for sex. Starving myself so I was lean and mean, so I could drink cheaper and last longer.” A headlong rush toward breakdown.
Berlin’s stories can feel like getting boxed in the face, no glove. Bringing a sense of humor to the collection will brighten your smile after you’re missing a tooth. One of my favorite stories involves a man whose last heroic action before going to prison for three years is taking a shit while his girlfriend watches—preparation for life inside. Another man becomes a fraudulent karate teacher because he thinks he can scam rich families enough to start his own business—only to arrive at profound connection with an autistic boy by helping him express his anger. Berlin’s last story, “Ten,” is a tongue-in-cheek taunt to political correctness: his tenth OkCupid fuck calls him out on his fake male posturing and challenges him to an eleventh round in the ring, only this time he has to do something no man in the book has done before: mean it.
Berlin’s stories are made of light and sulfur, a match struck in your face as you sleep. The past back to haunt you, but it’s not a dream. It’s a movie that has escaped the reel and spilled into real life. Personally, I am reminded of The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller:
I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.
Berlin’s men are inheritor’s of Miller’s hyena hunger, but their dream of a masculinity where they drive toward absolute freedom and satisfaction of appetite gets derailed by prison, poverty, burnout, weariness, and age. One man describes his limitations as a movie as he breaks up with his wife: “I never felt happier than when I was alone and the night was ahead of me, free and young, me in my own movie, and I could do what I wanted.” Me in my own movie—the transportation from a world defined by constraint, duty, and obligation to a world where life is limitless.
Miller’s hyena is all id, pure Dionysian energy. As much as they would like to, Berlin’s men can’t abandon themselves. One man admits, “My camera’s always there. I’m aware of everything.” To be in one’s own movie, to be the only star in one’s private universe, the camera must always be rolling. The camera is more than constant self-awareness. It is self-objectification, a fantasy that transforms a man into a thing, a character, be it a hero or a villain.
Perhaps the resolution of this conflict between being a man and self-objectification is the problem the collection’s epigraph from James Dean describes: “Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.” Is it possible? Can a man be both artist and morally good human? Does creativity require the fodder of human experience, devouring everyone and everything available? The questions shine from bulbs and spotlights, that is, bare life and the dream of life's grandeur.
All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights is the winner of Livingston Press’s Tartt First Fiction Prize.
