The Society of Others had me laughing hysterically from its first page. The main character invites you to name him yourself. He’s a slacker in the truest sense of the word; one that aspires to be a ‘symbiotic parasite--’ in exchange for his father’s support, he won’t hold his birth against him. At a party he is confronted with a family friend, a psychologist named Emile, whose attitude is ‘all you need is love.’ To which our hero mentally responds: Look at what happened to John Lennon and run that by me again.
That’s one of the identifying features of our protagonist—he mainly lives in his mind and does not verbalize his feelings. His entire family and their friends are pressuring him to do something with his life, but he can’t see the point in doing anything. He would much prefer to remain ensconced in his bedroom, occasionally seeing his girlfriend, who he only wants for sex. A friend of his is headed to Nepal as an aid worker, which our hero finds laughable. He has no such ambitions. Eventually he receives a bizarre message that tells him he must embark on a journey. Our hero decides he will hitch hike across Europe.
His first, and as it turns out last, ride is provided him by a truck driver named Marker. Marker is taking a correspondence course in philosophy. Therefore this is what he wants to discuss with our hero. When he makes this known, by saying, “I don’t want payment in money,” our hero is alarmed. Ah, he thinks, Maybe he is a fucking bum-bandit, after all. This is the first of a few homophobic phrases in the novel.
Our hero and Marker go through some of Western philosophy’s greats, such as Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, Marx and Wittgenstein. All of the above are dismissed, after a far too superficial appraisal of their thought. The most intelligent thing that Marker says about philosophers is that they only read each other’s books and ought to get out more. He ignores St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and Hegel, probably because they can’t be discussed in the sarcastic tone the others are.
Marker ends up taking our hero across an unidentified border into an unidentified Eastern European country, at which they are stopped by customs officials. Marker handles these with expertise. Shortly afterwards, however, the truck is faced with a gang of men holding pistols and dressed in black. Marker tells our hero to drop and roll out of the truck, which he does. From this point on our hero is faced with terrorists and the state police, whose methods, incidentally, are difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Our hero first assists the terrorists, one of who gives him an English translation of a book by Leon Vicino, who strangely enough, has written our hero’s thoughts. (Leon Vicino becomes our hero’s more spiritual alter ego). Then he flees the terrorists and ends up in the home of a peasant family. This family takes care of him, after he nearly dies from hypothermia. At first they annoy him, but eventually he sees past the surface and comes to respect their way of life. At this point he also starts missing his family.
The rest of the novel details our hero’s capture by the state police, by which he is not interrogated but, rather, interviewed on live television. He experiences extremes of emotion, from sheer shock at the stunning beauty of the sites he sees—the kind of stupid beauty we have all seen and been dumbstruck by—and from the understandings he attains. I found myself shedding tears at the author’s description of our hero’s redemption, But by the time he’s in the capital city of the anonymous country and decides to try and steal some high-end clothing from a men’s store, which is tended by ‘a sad old fruit,’ I was angry. I don’t have the space to go into his disturbing attitude towards women.
If William Nicholson expects us to buy into his vision of a spiritual reawakening, he should take care that he’s not excluding somebody. It’s unbelievable that an author whose work has been performed on Broadway and filmed in Hollywood is unaware of gay readers or fans. Yet when he mentions them at all, he does so with undisguised contempt. Since I’m gay, it ruined the book for me. It reminded me of Laura Esquival’s The Law of Love, in which people who have been mean and selfish in a past life come back as homosexuals, and only heterosexual couples can participate in the enlightening Tantra.
In my mind, to be enlightened you have to be aware of your connections to ALL of your fellow human beings (among many other things), not just the ones you like or get along with. If you want to be a guru, make sure that you are inclusive. Nicholson may not want to be a guru exactly, but his novel not so subtly promotes Christianity as the way for all. Evidently, it was this that caused Salon magazine to call the novel ‘a paean to humanism and perhaps faith.’ But humanism and faith, by their very natures, should be all-inclusive.
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