Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Marin's lack of understanding of women rears its head in comical if disconcerting ways. He's shocked to learn, for instance, that "Carnal Knowledge" is not a good date movie; ditto for "In the Company Of Men." In his mid-30s, he seems surprised to realize that dating Tabitha, who is just out of college, brings him into a world he ultimately finds boring. Perhaps because so much of his 20s was spent spinning his wheels in that disastrous marriage to Elisabeth, he's coming to these lessons a bit late.
The sensitive man on the make was fleshed out better by Ethan Hawke in the 1995 Richard Linklater film "Before Sunrise." "You know what's the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you?" Hawke's Jesse asks Julie Delpy's Celine. "It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with, and you realize that that is how little they're thinking about you. You know, you'd like to think that you're both in all this pain, but really, they're just, 'Hey, I'm glad you're gone.'" Jesse's wound -- his girlfriend just dumped him -- is all the more painful because of his past callousness.
Marin, conversely, never really puts his hurt together with the hurt he inflicts. We never learn exactly why his failed marriage wreaked such psychological havoc on him and sent him into a decade-long bachelor party for himself. There are hints of emotional trauma, but there's no real analysis of his psyche. Perhaps he feared that such exploration would seem self-indulgent, or detract from his breezy writing. Ultimately, however, all it does is make you tired, the same way your 30-something bachelor friend who still barfs up trite college-era complaints like "Chicks dig jerks" (something Marin actually says) is exhausting to be around. In the end, the only interesting aspect of Marin's character -- I call him that since I assume he's much less horrible in reality, that he's billed himself as a cad partly as a marketing ploy -- is that he's a cute writer.
These days, Marin is busy adapting his memoir for Miramax, so one knows "Cad" must include an Act 3 character arc where Marin will grow. In Hornby's "About a Boy," for example, Will becomes a bigger man because Marcus -- the little boy he has met by feigning single-dadhood so as to better troll for hot single moms -- grows to need him. In this genre, no one ever grows just because the clock is ticking; something has to happen.
I won't spoil the rest of the book and reveal Marin's own particular epiphany. Suffice it to say, he meets a woman who changes the way he looks at relationships and through that, combined with a major family crisis, he morphs into a good guy. But unlike Rob Fleming -- the protagonist of Hornby's "High Fidelity" -- who comes to appreciate the value of valuing someone else, the reader isn't clear what lessons Marin has learned and therefore is left to guess whether his impending marriage to former New York Times Styles deputy editor Ilene Rosenzweig will last. Yes, she makes him "wanna be a better man" -- as Jack Nicholson so tritely drawled in "As Good As It Gets" -- but what else?
In April 1999, a former stripper wrote an angry letter to the Times protesting a story Marin had written about bachelor parties. "Marin's assumption that a bachelor needs a final night of sophomoric 'wisdom' to make the final commitment to matrimony is outdated, shortsighted and misogynistic," she wrote. "As a former stripper, I know only too well that a bachelor who seeks to entertain his friends at a strip club on that one night is surely the same face I'd see by himself, clutching a dollar bill in one hand and a drink in the other, only a short week later."
Men tend not to buy books like "Cad"; the Candace Bushnell blurb on the back reveals its true audience -- single women trying to understand why they've fallen into the trap of so many jerks. I doubt, however, that many will find within it any real explanation for why men behave caddishly other than for the sex -- which Marin doesn't make much mention of. I fear instead Marin's prose will only further exacerbate their confusion and misandry. While an engaging read, "Cad" ultimately falls short because of Marin's embrace of the superficial in his writing and cruelty in his dating life. Without knowing him or Rosenzweig, you will be forgiven for wondering if in a few months Marin himself might end up clutching a dollar bill in one hand and a drink in the other.
