A catalyst for soul-searching
STEPPING OUT
STEVEN Boykey Sidley’s first novel, Entanglement, created a stir in South African publishing circles last year because it was an intellectual, literary triumph that had been created by a fresh newcomer.
Sidley’s voice was heard on many platforms as he was greedily swept up by seemingly everyone in the country who had anything to do with books.
We have hardly done digesting Entanglement when hot on its heels comes this speedy author’s second book, Stepping Out.
It is a vigorous tale about a 60something baby boomer who, typical of his generation, has no intention of winding down his life quietly. Indeed, retired plumbing engineer Harold Cummings’s problem is that he has been too quiet all his life, too neatlycombed-hair, too nine-to-five-ish.
He needs to create a revolution in his boring life, something akin to the one that his age cohorts created back in the Swinging Sixties, when it was appropriate.
His opportunity comes when his devoted wife, Millie, goes off for a few days to look after her ill sister, not just around the corner, but a considerable trip away from their suburban US home.
When the coast is clear, he takes their dog, Dufus, for a walk. This is what sensible middle-aged men tend to do. Only on this walk, when he steps into the local shop, he sees a skinny kid stealing a chocolate bar.
He does something uncharacteristic when, later on, he sees the kid eating it in a nearby park. He remonstrates with him. Unsuccessfully. He is called “an old perv”. His pride is wounded. A few steps later on, he finds himself peeping through a hole in a fence at a young and naked woman lying in the sun, reading. When she sits up to smooth more suntan lotion over her body, she seems to be looking straight at him. His heart pounds and he races home. He is thrilled there is nothing wrong with his libido.
From then on it is downhill, and downtown, all the way.
He spends thousands of dollars on a new guitar, with a sound system, and an outfit that would have made Elvis Presley proud and then twangs chords in the family home’s basement.
He emerges from a tattoo parlour with a heart on his buttock — with Millie’s name in it.
There is still some hope at this stage that the middle-aged bloke will snap out of his mode of selfdestruction. But no.
He ends up taking drugs and making friends with a prostitute who is young, pretty and has a little girl.
The woman accepts her difficult path for what it is, a means to look after and educate her child. She warns Cummings to keep out of her life.
A good reason for doing so is to avoid any contact at all with her pimp, whose mean mind is in inverse proportion to his huge muscles. Naturally, Cummings does not heed her sincerely dished-out advice, and he quickly spirals downward into the seamy underworld of the city that he calls home. Speaking of which, he calls Millie at her sister’s home, and they have gentle, comfortable, boring little chats.
That is, until she starts questioning him about his behaviour at a dinner he had attended at the home of their close friends.
There, he had imbibed copiously for a man who was always the soul of moderation, and had used foul language, which shocked and stunned all of their moderate friends.
He interacts, negatively, with his adult children, who had long since left home, alienated and rebelling against his conservative, polite niceness.
The subject matter of Sidley’s book is predictable, even mundane — prostitutes, drugs and guitars — but he belts out sharp dialogue that is witty, pertinent and reads like a film script. It is often laugh-out-loud funny.
At times, when I was reading the novel, I felt I was listening to the author having a dialogue with himself on the advisability of living the middle-class dream.
He philosophises, argues, alienates and then pacifies us.
In the process, he achieves what I suspect he set out to do: have an intellectual conversation that will stimulate some soulsearching in readers.
If that is too much of a challenge at your stage in life, don’t go there.
Sue Grant-Marshall