It's not easy being a 21st-century male. The silent, hardworking breadwinning dad of the past still lurks, but his sons have to find their way in a new world of open communication and shared responsibility.
Author Kevin Grauke examines this change in the 13 stories that make up his tautly written, thoughtful debut collection, “Shadows of Men,” which recently won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for best first published book of fiction.
“The definition of masculinity has changed in the last several decades,” said Grauke, who received a master's degree in creative writing from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “We have households with two incomes, households with women earning more than men. There's a sharing of domestic duties, of parenting duties, a flattening of gender roles. That's very good, but it also creates stress.”
Grauke's men band together to drink beer and lament their low sperm counts. They grapple for a sense of identity after losing their jobs. They sometimes live with their mothers.
“It's hard to completely disengage from the myth of the man and what that means,” Grauke said, “especially in Texas, where there are those other layers of machismo — ranchers, cowboys. Whether you have those in your personal family history, it's there in the culture.”
The stories are set in a Texas that reflects Grauke's childhood in Garland. Arguably the collection's strongest piece is “The New Father,” in which a stay-at-home dad roams his North Texas subdivision fantasizing that behind each closed door a mother both admires and lusts after him. He walks streets named for Texas heroes such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, but his world would prove alien to those icons. Then a real-life mom recklessly speeds past his baby carriage and isn't pleased when he calls her on it. He later plots a clumsy form of revenge, but the minor guilt twists like a knife inside of him.
“He wants to do something that asserts the role he relinquished when he wasn't paying attention,” Grauke said. “He has a desire to be heroic, but there's an impotence that goes along with it.”
In “With the Snow,” a haunting story that channels Richard Ford, a young man caught up in a world of drugs and desperation attempts to save a girl who may or may not be in a drug coma, but he instead leaves her behind.
“There's a continuing notion of wanting to fulfill that mythic masculinity, that heroism,” Grauke said, “but the opportunities to do that are limited. He almost does the heroic, but those rescuing moments are rare. Yet we still desire them.”
Grauke leaned on an older story of masculinity in the suburbs — John Cheever's “The Housebreakers of Shady Hill” — for inspiration when he settled on the theme for his work.
“It seemed to bring the stories together to be something a little larger than they were on their own,” he said.
The author left his native Texas a decade ago, but it clearly has not left him. He's at work on a collection of linked stories set in small-town West Texas, the home of his parents.
“I don't think if I stayed in Texas I'd be writing about it,” Grauke said. “There's certainly a truth to that cliché that you don't know what you have until you no longer have it. I feel artistically connected to Texas in a way I never did when I lived there.”
Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.
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