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Rating: 
Summary: ...And Beyond His Full Comprehension or Control?
Review: Well, a 65-year-old distinguished social scientist at Harvard loses his male lover of 40 years, and also retires. And for the next five years, to cope, he pursues young men, specifically "escorts," a.k.a. hustlers or male prostitutes or callboys. Pursues them with money, and with love, but also for their love or companionship. The book is his candid memoir of that turbulent interlude "with" the three "boys" Grant, Skip, and Patrick..You can imagine the dismal results. Especially because underlying his five-year pursuit seems to be his life-long volatile personality structure. (Should the social psychologist, have undergone psychoanalysis earlier? A graduate of same, I think so-I fear so.) Anyhow the resulting book is both case-study, and possibly "literature," as in dynamic truthtelling, even perhaps the genre of tragedy. Brown seems driven by an unresolved neediness garnished with a Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome. Saccharine lovingness toward the boys, and then the sour sauce of hatred from their inevitable joltings and jiltings of the professor. Who at the end sees himself as "an old fool irrelevant to their young lives." Specifically, Brown's style of relating to these young panthers is not heroic at all but tragicomic. A combination of attempted bear hug... ritual mating fire-dance... co-dependent orbiting... pugilistic hatred when rebuffed... and operatic laments by the "maiden" ever spurned... Better he wrote it than not. At the end he stops with boys because his five-year foray was inconclusive. He had hoped that ambiguities would be resolved, meaning clarified. "That never happened." He stopped learning anything new. He found no satisfying closure toward enlightenment. "The obscurity all remained and new ones were added but I saw that that was the way it would always be." Perhaps we the readers can learn more. That the unanalyzed, or unexamined, life is unworthy to live. That to "know thyself" truly-one's motivations, goals, identity-is as vital as the Greeks said it was twenty centuries ago. Brown says this on the next to the last page: "It is a lonely universe, one of many it seems, and in passing through it one needs close company, a Primary Other." Well, first, if one possesses one's own true Self, one is less lonely. And second, neither his problematic, troubled 40-year "marriage" nor his hopeless liaisons with the boys, show him as consonant with his true Self. And so I can feel that there in Brown's fantastic footsteps, but for the grace of Psyche, go we. Myself, anyhow...
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