Restorative Justice Lite: A Review of Francine Prose, A Changed Man
By Rob Howse
Vincent, the hero of Francine Prose’s new novel, decides one day that he’s had it with being a neo-Nazi. How to make amends and reintegrate into society? There don’t appear to be any recovery programs for members of extreme right-wing organizations, so Vincent throws himself on the mercy of Meyer Maslow, Holocaust survivor and revered leader of a major human rights NGO. Maslow gives Vincent a job and insists that the NGO’s fundraiser provide Vincent with shelter at her home (he claims to be in danger from members of his former cell none to happy about his defection). Maslow uses Vincent as an example, to prove a point, not just about people being able to change for the better, but also about the need to reach out to those who seem to be beyond the pale. Maslow believes that human rights advocates need not only to find a way of helping victims, but to reach perpetrators, or potential perpetrators, as well.
There are doubts from the beginning about Vincent’s motives for leaving the neo-Nazis; when he decamped, he stole drugs and money from Raymond, his uncle, who was responsible for getting Vincent involved in the right wing cell in the first place. Vincent is neither forthcoming nor particularly consistent on the occasions where he’s required to give an explanation of his change of heart. Could it all be a publicity stunt, or a way of getting out of what is a dead end from the strictly self-interested point of view?
These are the kind of doubts that fuel skepticism about the possibility of restorative justice—has any perpetrator really made amends and changed their ways, except on account of carrots or sticks? What really matters, Prose seems to suggest, is that Vincent has changed in his actions and attitudes: we see him gain in self-respect and at the same time treat others more respectfully. He doesn’t become pure or perfect, but when he does something wrong—like stealing a joint of marijuana from the son of the woman who has given him shelter on Maslow’s orders—he now accepts responsibility for his actions, rather than blaming them on a scapegoat (Jews, gays, African-Americans, etc.)
As Maslow explains in a speech at a fundraising dinner where Vincent is featured, the idea of human rights doesn’t make sense unless we make a leap of faith—a gamble on human goodness. But it is a real gamble: “even we sometimes wonder if such change can really occur.” Maslow’s well-healed society audience applauds wildly his endorsement of hope in human goodness; but they somehow don’t hear the disclaimer that this hope is accompanied by the shadow of doubt and the sense of a moral wager.
There is a persistent theme of gender politics in A Changed Man, which Prose weaves into the story about Vincent’s transformation. Vincent is sexually attractive, strongly so to Bonnie Kalen, the NGO fundraiser who provides him with shelter. Bonnie is a divorcee raising two sons. She is not alone in finding Vincent sexy; other women in the novel expect that Bonnie is sleeping with Vincent (she isn’t; he refuses her advances at one point) and envy her for it. At first, when the theme of Vincent’s sexiness was introduced, I thought Prose was going to be exploring the relation between fascism and eroticism, a rather dangerous and difficult theme. But the source of the spark between Bonne and Vincent turns out to be rather different. Vincent, like many others, joined the neo-Nazis from a sense of disempowerment: his father shoots himself due to tax troubles; later on, as a result of the anger that this episode almost hardwired into him, Vincent bursts out (he throws a difficult customer in the swimming pool he is servicing for her) and loses his job and wife. Bonnie and the other women in A Changed Man experience a similar cycle of anger and disempowerment in their own lives, in relation to men. Their husbands or ex-husbands or employers (Maslow) are high-performers taken seriously in the real world; in the presence of such men women like Bonnie feel a combination of inferiority on the one hand and resentment on the other. In the case of Bonnie’s relationship to Maslow, the resentment is at least blunted by a sense of Maslow’s genuine idealism and the obstacles he has overcome in his own life. But one gets the sense that Bonnie connects to Vincent because he’s been there, felt what it is like to think you are nothing in a world where others appear to have all the power. In refusing Bonnie’s advances, Vincent may have an inkling of just this—now that things have changed for him, he doesn’t want to join Bonnie in (self-)disempowerment.
The novel’s ending begins with a parody of the public confrontation between victim and perpetrator that occurs in truth commissions: on a popular TV talk show, Maslow and Vincent are both to appear, the Holocaust survivor and the ex-neo-Nazi. The show’s host will encourage them each to show their tattoos, Vincent’s SS tattoos, and Maslow’s Auschwitz
After this, Vincent disappears. But he soon shows up again, to make a planned appearance at an event at Bonnie’s sons’ school, where he is supposed to be the center of attention. Does Vincent’s return signify that he is now responsible, and willing and able to face the music for the incident on the show (partly self-defense, but partly gratuitous use of force)? Or does it mean that he is now ready to start a relationship with Bonnie, to accept an alliance in ordinary disempowerment? To me at least, the answers to these questions are less than clear. But throughout the novel Prose is honest about the complexities, avoids moral simplifications, and rightly gives us a sense that we are in a realm where those who always want clear answers will necessarily end up either as useless cynics or useless dreamers. She can be faulted, I believe, for only one distortion: there are no powerful, self-confident, non-neurotic women in A Changed Man (there’s a young journalist who is confident enough but that comes from her sense of her—real—sex appeal). If Prose were a male author, she could—and probably would—be charged with misogyny.
Robert Howse’s first novel, Mozart, is available at Amazon.Com and Barnes and Noble online.
Posted by Administrators on April 26, 2005 at 12:23 AM