The Last American Man

This morning I finished a book. It's a big event for me, not that I'm semi-literate or anything so drastic, just that I am much better at acquiring and starting books than I am at finishing them. At any given time I'll have bookmarks in 10 or 15 books strewn around the house. There's something wonderfully various about having so many choices, so many voices at your fingertips. Conversations begun weeks, months or years earlier, a journey and adventure to be continued as if we never parted, never detoured into other novels or ventured into other non fiction landscapes. At the flip of a bookmark, there's my old friend, right were we left off. I have books half read back in LA, and unfinished books in boxes from 10 years ago. When it comes to books, I'm a devout polygamist. I don't think the books mind, they're allowed to reveal their secrets slowly. Books are, among other things, very patient.

Of course, this whole running from the start of one book to the next, acquiring books way faster than I can ever read them, probably says a lot about me that I won't get into just yet. Yes, I've thought about it, and I have theories, but ease up. There's plenty of time for psychoanalyzing later.

So, this morning I removed a bookmark. (Of course, it should be noted that yesterday I bought two new books that I'm excited to dive in to, so the pile is no smaller.) The travelling companion this time was The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert, and it's one of the few books that came to London with me last year.

What a great book. It tells the true story of Eustace Conway, a guy who for the last 20 years has lived off the land in the Appalachian Mountains. He wears clothes that he's made from animals that he's trapped for food, lives in homes he's built himself, makes fire with sticks, and lectures to school children on the wonders of nature and self reliance. It's pretty inspirational stuff. Eustace "wanted to alert people to the woeful beating that the modern consumer-driven life delivers to the earth. Teach people how to achieve freedom from the softening and vision-curbing influence of the city. Train them to pay attention to their choices."

Along the way the author delves into the nature of masculinity and what it means to be a man in modern American society. "We Americans have the only major culture in the known world that never held romantic love to be a sacred precept. The rest of the world gets Don Juan; we get Paul Bunyan. There's no love story in Moby-Dick; Huckleberry Finn doesn't get the girl in the end; John Wayne never dreamed of giving up his horse for the constraints of a wife; and Davy Fuckin' Crockett doesn't date!"

Ours is a masculinity based on the ideal of the rugged individual, the frontier life. It's grand stuff, but it comes at a price. We can build a nation, tame nature, but we tend to lose our humanity in the bargain.

The book raises some interesting questions about the relationships in our lives – between fathers and sons, mentors and students, lovers, and of course where we sit with the natural world and all its inhabitants. It paints a picture of masculinity that's inspiring, troubling, complex, rough, grand and a little lost. Kind of like America. If, like me, you were entranced by John Krakauer's Into the Wild, check this one out too.