A Single Man

Spanning the course of a single day and, in the process, a character's entire life, Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man captures the tortured consciousness of grieving and the struggles to carry on despite it. George, the single man with a single name, is a British transplant teaching in the English department at a school in Southern California. The banal stuff of his daily life—breakfast, the drive to work, work itself, mundane interactions with his colleagues—make up much of the "plot." But the real story here is George's inner voice, expressed in Isherwood's fluid, unflagging style. From cover to cover, the book ripples with textured prose, ranging from tart, pitiless observations of the culture, politics, and mores of the so-called straight world circa mid-1960s America to achingly sympathetic, yet unsentimental, insights into those select few that George occasionally allows into his close-fitting existence. As his day progresses, George is drawn further and further outside of himself and his defenses, prompted as much by other people's dilemmas as by the increasingly unbearable burden of his loneliness and isolation, and his need to free himself of the memory of his lost lover, Jim. Though the ending—an unforeseen and questionable development—feels abrupt and disappointingly slight, Isherwood manages to pack enough material into this slim volume for a few books, making A Single Man a moving and singular reading experience.