An Absolute Gentleman: A Novel by R.M. Kinder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I came across this book in the library one day when I was searching for Geocaching for Dummies. I was in one of the situations where I felt like the drive to the library needed more justification than just one book that I was only going to flip through anyway. I found R.M. Kinder’s novel, opened it, read a few pages to get a sense of the prose style, liked it, read the front flap to see what the plot was about, liked that too, and added the book to my “to-read” list. Then, last week, on vacation, having finished two other novels in just a few days, I started in on An Absolute Gentleman, and finished it in about 24 hours.
It was that engaging. R.M. Kinder’s style is as gentle and stoic as her main character, choosing to titillate and horrify with what isn’t written, only pulling out the stops and giving you the gory details in a few choice places. And although Arthur Blume is a serial killer, you can’t help but root for him, a little.
I’m not going to give away the plot, because there isn’t much of one, but what follows are spoilers of a sort, so stop reading if you want. Arthur Blume is a misogynist, less in the sense of hating women than in the sense that he simply has no respect for them. And while I was reading this, I know this was fictional misogyny… but then, only after I was done with the book, did I realize that R.M. Kinder, the author, is a woman. Which changes the tenor of that fictional misogyny. When a man writes about misogyny, he may be expressing his own opinions, or he may be asking you to judge what he feels is a horrible point of view. But when a woman does it, surely she can’t be expressing her own opinion—is she describing her own experiences at the hand of a misogynist? Is she misinterpreting the experience, taking it more personally than it should have been taken?
I wish to cast no aspersion on Kinder, nor her intent, because it’s all mere speculation on my part and truly I detest this kind of analysis. But I bring it up because, for me, the book changed when I found out the sex of the writer. And I find this unsettling, and I am not a little ashamed of myself. But what can I do. I thought this was a man writing about a horrible man, and now I find myself, unfairly I admit, wondering if this a woman writing about horrible men.
Why say as much? This is my plea, to myself and to you, to find a way to ignore who or what the author is at all times, when reading any novel. An impossible task– I will read books just because they’re written by authors I’ve read before. After all, there’s so many books out there, how can we choose which one to read if we don’t, to some degree, judge them by their covers?
Nevertheless, we should try to ignore the author. I need to swallow my shame and recall what I thought of the book when I didn’t know who the writer was at all. Still a bit sexist of me (I thought it was a man) but at least I’m not trying to compliment Kinder by saying “she writes like a man!” She doesn’t. She writes like a writer. And a damned fine one at that.