Gina Frangello’s A Life in Men doesn’t really have a plot—it has accumulation. Proceeding loosely from incident to incident, the novel seeks to encompass (as its title suggests) the entirety of a life and all the emotional highs and lows therein. It contains so much that you might think no possible ending can bring satisfactory closure. But if you find yourself wondering how it will all end… well, ask yourself: how does any life end?
The novel opens in Greece in the 1980s with two young women on vacation. Frangello wastes no time differentiating between them. Nix is adventurous, experimental in all areas of her life. Mary, however, suffers from cystic fibrosis and, according to doctors, will likely die in her 20s; she is levelheaded, shyer than her friend. Not too long after the trip, Nix dies in an airplane tragedy.
Mary, always certain that Nix would outlive her, takes on her friend’s life, moving to London—where Nix was living at the time of her death—and becoming wilder. She even starts going by “Nicole,” Nix’s full name. She regularly writes letters to Nix, as though living only for her dead friend. But then, as years pass and Mary begins to defy her life expectancy, her letters take a different tone: “I have finally gotten old enough to understand how young you were when you died. If you… were alive today, I would not be telling my secrets to a twenty-year-old college student.”
This is a novel of accumulation, yes, and the title promises men—promises, in fact, a life in them. Frangello writes that “there are bonds in this world created nowhere else but in bed”; for this reason, we best understand Mary through the men she knows and, often, sleeps with. There is a boyfriend, a married lover, and even a husband. Then, there are relatives: her two fathers—biological and adopted—and her brother. With these men, she explores London, Nairobi, Mexico, the Canary Islands, New Hampshire, Amsterdam, Morocco, and her hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
Frangello does an excellent job of never letting Mary’s illness leave the reader’s mind. (When somebody gives Mary diamond earrings, she can think only of how they will look on her corpse.) Illness, Frangello writes, “has wormed its way into [Mary’s] previously ordinary existence, bestowing what passes for character on even the most banal of daily activities.” Mary wants excitement—but as her secrets pile up and her search for freedom becomes more self-destructive, Frangello remains refreshingly unsentimental about her protagonist’s selfishness: “freedom always demands a price and someone else is left footing the bill.”
A Life in Men contains at least 10 different point of view characters, Frangello’s omniscient third-person allowing her access to the inner lives of all the men in Mary’s orbit—some of whom, I must say, are more interesting than others. I’m reminded of Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell, in which the director interviews everyone who had even vague awareness of her mother’s infidelity—even when those voices don’t have much to add to the larger picture. Likewise, A Life of Men sometimes focuses on characters who have very little new to say about Mary; in those moments, Frangello seems to fly too far outward from the novel’s center. But I do admire Frangello’s use of flash-forwards, letting us know the futures of almost every character, major or minor. The novel exhibits a fatalistic streak.
There are two major coincidences: Mary runs into people from her past in unexpected places, making the world feel strangely small. I confess that these moments—the plot suddenly imposed on a much freer-seeming novel—startled me and felt unsatisfying.
Yet, A Life in Men is a very good book, despite a couple hiccups. Frangello is off-kilter in her observations of the world, whether writing that a handsome man “looks like an actor cast to play the role of himself in a film,” or pointing out how “sexy men bring out political opinions in otherwise disinterested girls.” Unlike many novels about illness, A Life in Men avoids pathos (until the end) whenever possible, the narrative voice often conveying Mary’s irreverence in the face of death (“Television shows are all about healthy people; a sick person watches them like a tourist or an alien ambassador”).
At one point, Frangello describes Americans on safari in Kenya, those “presumptuous enough to imagine their lives writ large, to pit their paltry individuality against a land they can never hope to understand or call their own.” This is Mary’s desire too as she travels the world, from country to country, from man to man. The final tragedy in A Life in Men is that the land Mary will never understand or call her own is the land of the healthy—the land of the living..
