Review: Learning to be a man
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2014
If it’s hard to pinpoint what genre The Purpose of a Man is, maybe this is because there are no witches or vampires in this book, nor super spies or super sleuths. There are also no great revelations about the human condition, or characters having sudden epiphanies about the meaning of life. And nothing blows up!Rather, this well-written book is a small but poignant tale about some very realistic characters living in the market town of Ormskirk, in England; the poignancy coming precisely because the characters in the book could be any twenty or thirty-somethings we might have known, if not ourselves. The main character, Michael Galvin, is a man in his late twenties who still has lots of growing to do, and lots to learn about how to make relationships work. The book follows him, and his friends and family, over a period of several months as he does precisely that: grows up a bit, and works on the various relationships in his life with varying degrees of success.The people he interacts with, whether it’s his too beautiful girlfriend Jessica, or his larger than life, and with an ego to match, brother Robert, are finely drawn, although not always sympathetically. There are few maudlin or saccharine moments in this study of the changing meaning of modern manhood. There are scenes that are difficult to watch, as harsh feelings are revealed at the most surprising times, much like in real life. Michael’s problems are those of many young people today as they try to forge their own paths; they aren’t particularly world-shaking, but the reader can feel how important it is for him to solve them.It’s the kind of book for readers who feel like getting lost in the lives of real people, instead of getting lost in things that will never happen to anyone in the world we live in.When the book ends, the reader knows that Michael’s story goes on. He will get older and hopefully wiser, and the reader is left hoping to run into him again one day, to see how he has made out. If the measure of a book is how much a reader comes to believe in and care about its characters, then this book deserves the highest ratings. Reading about Michael and his clan wasn’t always like a pleasant visit, but when it ended it felt as if old friends had moved away.