Knotty problem of Scout’s honour
THE HEARTS OF MEN by Nickolas Butler Picador, £12.99
AS in his awardwinning debut Shotgun Lovesongs, Nickolas Butler’s new novel explores modern masculinity, this time through the prism of a Scout camp in rural Wisconsin.
The novel opens in 1962 where we meet Butler’s central character, 13-year-old Nelson Doughty. The youngest member of a Scout troop at Camp Chippewa, Nelson is friendless, bullied and homesick. He prefers school, he is bad at sport and he is resigned to his situation: “He can’t pinpoint it, that one thing about his personality, his being that, if changed, might win him more friends. But he dearly wishes he could.”
Nelson does in fact make a friend, albeit almost by accident. Jonathan Quick is a more popular boy who goads him into taking part in a game of “capture the flag” with another Scout troop.
A bet is laid, Nelson’s team loses and he ends up taking the brunt of the punishment through a particularly visceral scene involving a latrine.
Although Nelson earns new respect by undergoing the grisly trial-by-latrine, he is keenly aware that he was always going to be the troop’s sacrificial lamb.
The novel then jumps forward in time to 1997 when we meet Nelson and Jonathan as adults. Nelson has previously served in Vietnam, “his Boy Scout experience considered a boon by his superiors”, where his “relatively short stature... made him an excellent tunnel rat, able to be sent down into the Viet Cong’s subterranean tunnel system, the poor son of a bitch, with only a flashlight and pistol”.
By now Nelson has become Scoutmaster at Camp Chippewa and he meets his old friend Jonathan as the latter drives his teenage son Trevor to the camp.
Jonathan is a successful businessman but he is an alcoholic in a doomed marriage, trying – and failing – to re-establish his relationship with his son. Jonathan is perhaps not a bad person but he is a bad father, wilfully denigrating his son’s first romance, getting him drunk and bringing him to a strip club en route to camp.
The final section of the novel takes us to summer 2019 when Jonathan’s daughter-in-law Rachel is taking his grandson to camp as part of the family’s Scouting tradition.
This shifting chronology enables Butler to emphasise his themes of what he believes society is in the process of losing. Now in his 70s, Nelson mourns the pre-digital world and having “fought the onslaught of technology” as best he could is resigned to the fact that “the boys these days come to the camp with their laptops and tablets, their telephones, their gaming systems, their earbuds and it is a miracle if they ever hear the cry of a loon, or watch a star fall to earth.”
Where Butler’s novel falls down is in his black-and-white characterisation. Nelson, the putative hero, is everything a “man” should be, gaining this macho status through overcoming bullying, applying the “Scouting code” and above all through his experience of combat.
Jonathan, who virtually disappears from the final third of the novel, is a cardboard cut-out of a midlife crisis. Rachel, like the other female characters in the book, is reduced to a mere victim in the novel’s overly rushed denouement while all the incidental characters are overwhelmingly good or irredeemably bad.
The Hearts Of Men is an elegy to a lost masculinity but it is a one-dimensional masculinity that has almost certainly never existed outside of the Boy Scout Handbook.