Arthur Camden, the protagonist of Michael Dahlie’s book, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, finds that his life has fallen apart. He’s run his family’s import business into the ground and his wife’s left him. He has acquaintances, but no real friends. He finds himself alone among all the characters in his life. His loneliness and sense of loss is deep, but he doesn’t know how to solve it. So, he continues bumbling through the days trying to find meaning in his life.
In that sense, Arthur is an “everyman.” He could be any one of us facing a crucial time in our life and having to make a decision. He is a bit different, though, in that he still has his trust fund and inheritance. So, where one of us common Hoosiers might travel to southern Indiana to spend some time with a childhood friend, he treks to southern France. He rents a Mercedes, but not a showy one. He spends an evening drinking with his friend who then disappears, leaving Arthur on the estate with the friend’s girlfriend and instructions to perjure himself to the police about the evening. This leads to very interesting consequences — none of which match Arthur’s goal in making the trip.
He thinks a lot during his journey out of the morass of his life. Particularly he considers his relationship with his father. He recounts several stories of painful interaction with his father. One involves ordering lobster Newburg in a restaurant. The reader knows immediately where this is going. Arthur has already shown that he doesn’t really care for seafood, and Father wants him to order steak. But Arthur insists that he wants his new favorite dish, lobster Newburg. Of course it arrives and Arthur can’t bring himself to eat the lobster. Although this sad incident shows how Arthur couldn’t please his father, Dahlie uses great wit to mine the humor of adolescent Arthur’s interaction with his father.
Dahlie writes the novel in a spare style reminiscent of Hemingway and Philip Roth. The narrator reveals the events and Arthur’s introspections without making any judgments. The audience wants to know what happens to this bumbling protagonist next and cheers him along his journey of self discovery. The low key delivery of the narrator keeps the incidents from becoming slapstick humor and instead instills them with wit and wisdom. Dahlie tells a fascinating and very readable story of a man who must rebuild his life within the milieu of upper class New York society.
Michael Dahlie, a creative writing professor at Butler University, will lead a discussion of this book on Wednesday, September 11 at Bookmamas, 9 South Johnson Ave. He will also speak at the Irvington library on Tuesday, November 19 at 6:30 p.m. along with other local creative writing professors who have published books recently.
