Amateur Barbarians: A Novel

By Robert Cohen

Book Overview

Acclaimed, award-winning novelist Robert Cohen delivers a bold, provocative exploration of the panic of midlife, following two men plateaued on either side of their forties and the unexpected... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743230361
• ISBN13: 9780743230360
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.4" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Absorbing and thoughtful

I chose this book from my library's "new fiction" section, and the opening sentences drew me in. (In fact, budding writers should take note of how skillfully Cohen leads into his story and its themes.) I will be seeking out more of the author's work.

An adult comedy with depth and wisdom

I loved this novel. Packed with unvarnished temptation, bumbling foibles and sometimes depressing authenticity, this novel seems to be about nothing less than what is to be a man in Americana the end of the last century. With his lapidary precision, Cohen provokes laughter as much as rue. From a scene early in the book when Oren teaches Hawthorne's Wakefield to a class of checked out (and completely believable) middle school students to the erotic adventures later on, the characters' bonds, their midlife examinations and reconciliations strike us as once new and familiar. Many reviewers have talked about this novel in terms of male mid-life crisis, comparing it to Percy's MovieGoer and works by Roth and Bellow. But unlike most of his predecessors, one of Cohen's signature strengths as a writer is his uncanny ability to depict credible, female midlife heroines who, despite their exhaustion and mild cynicism, strike us as superior to their male cohorts in almost every way.

Brilliant insights, breathtaking prose & funny!

No other contemporary author (or at least the ones I read and know of anyway) writes the way Robert Cohen does. He crafts the most beautiful, thought-provoking sentences I have ever seen. He can string out metaphor upon metaphor without ever overdoing it. To read his prose is to constantly marvel at the fertility of his imagination and the masterfulness of his artistry. His intricate sentences are never obtuse and always endowed with a light touch that keeps you chuckling as you digest the steady diet of brilliant insights. In this novel, he explores the inner lives of two men -- Teddy Hastings, a 50-year-old disgraced principal of a middle school in northern New England, and Oren Pierce, a feckless 30-year-old who replaces him during Teddy's temporary forced "sabbatical." On the surface it's the tale of one man suffering a major mid-life crisis, while the younger man tries to gain a foothold on adulthood after years of living without direction and enduring numerous false starts. The novel is told from their alternating perspectives, although one chapter deviates from that as we go inside the head of Teddy's daughter Mimi on a night she's out partying with her high school friends. After so many pages of deep insight into the male psyche, it's a marvel to witness how effectively Cohen gets inside the head of a teenaged girl as she drinks with her friends and grows tired of an overly solicitous boyfriend, whose solicitudes are no more than selfish demands for attention and praise. The novel has some intriguing twists along the way. Without giving too much away, there is a wonderful exploration halfway in of why Teddy got into trouble and had to spend several nights in a jail. Let's just say he "suffered for his art" in the midst of becoming obsessed over his homework for an adult-ed photography class. Teddy's wife Gail also plays a key role in the novel -- both in Teddy's life and Oren's, but I won't say more to avoid revealing some of the plot turns in the book. The path of Teddy's mid-life crisis takes him to Africa, originally in pursuit of his oldest daughter, who took a junior year abroad and then decided not to come back while hopping her way across Asia and East Africa. One of the media reviews suggested the novel is squarely in "Updike country" but in my knowledge of Updike (admittedly limited to the first two Rabbit books) he never left American suburbia to explore East Africa. The passages as Teddy accompanies a doctor on his rounds through various towns and into a desert are breathtaking -- particularly the descriptions of a visit to the walled city of Harar, Ethiopia, and a local shaman who tames wild hyena with raw meat dangling from his mouth. Like most literary novels, it's a character-charged, not plot-driven, story. The greatest joy in turning these pages is having your eyes awakened to the beautiful ways the author describes and paints everyday life. He captures prosaic moments with such poetically wrought prose. Witness the