The Misogynist

The Misogynist, by Piers Paul Read, Bloomsbury RRP£16.99, 257 pages

Ageing male curmudgeons seem to be cropping up all over the place at present. Rose Tremain’s recent novel Trespass featured one. Woody Allen’s new film, Whatever Works, has a sexagenarian misanthrope as its lead character. And now the hero of Piers Paul Read’s latest novel is another of these men in the final lap of life who have barely a good word to say for the world – and especially nothing complimentary on the subject of its female inhabitants.

Granted, Geoffrey Jomier, Read’s creation, is a milder-mannered version of this sub-species. He may live on the wrong side of Shepherd’s Bush, but he is at least socialised, an adornment at the dinner tables of women who have recently divorced and are desperate for a new partner. The Misogynist belongs to the rapidly developing genre of Old Git Lit, and Jomier is in the tradition of Kingsley Amis’s grumpy old men in his 1986 novel The Old Devils .

Jomier, the name is of Huguenot origin, has one major beef: that his wife Tilly left him 20 years ago for a good-looking Swiss-American investment banker with a large house in Kensington. Not only that, but in deserting him, Tilly legally absconded with two-thirds of the value of their family home in Notting Hill, and half of Jomier’s pension fund. Jomier can no longer afford to live in elegant Georgian streets and Regency squares, but finds himself relegated to a smaller residence in Hammersmith. His life has run out of narrative, as Read engagingly explains. “A life like a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and Jomier has now reached those last chapters that drive biographers to their wits’ end. Nothing happens. There is nothing to say.” Instead, Jomier broods about the past, filling the pages of his digital journal, and when he runs out of things to say, he turns to analysing the entries from old notebooks, copying them on to his computer, and wondering, above all, where the real responsibility lies for his marital break-up.

Is Jomier a misogynist – one of the Seven Deadly Sins, as he calls them, which also include racism, homophobia, and obesity? Read convincingly portrays him as a man too consumed with rage and jealousy to reach a conclusion that, in saner moments, he would be prepared to stand by. Nevertheless, Jomier blames the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the liberation of the female sex, for his predicament, though he sees, too, that feminism has in a sense been an own goal for women. Men can now get sex without commitment, while women, once bankrolled by their husbands, are forced to become wage slaves, neglecting their children in the process.

Enter Judith, with whom Jomier tentatively starts an affair. She is warm, earthy, unembittered by her own divorce. They take a Christmas holiday in Venice. But, still Jomier is haunted by his failure with Tilly, while his miserly attempts to persuade Judith to contribute something towards the cost of the trip introduce a new note of awkwardness into their relationship. Finally, when his daughter is afflicted by a mysterious illness, Jomier is forced to reassess his priorities and his treatment of the people he loves.

There is much in The Misogynist to admire. As a portrait of the everyday existence of a member of the ageing, affluent middle classes, the novel is full of intelligence, wit and humorous perception. However, the plot begins to dip badly in its final chapters. In a Piers Paul Read novel, you know there’s a better than odds-on chance that God will come down from on high before the climax. But His appearance here, in an odd little scene in which Jomier, formerly an atheist, makes a deal with God to believe in Him in order to save his daughter, seems strangely out of kilter with all that’s gone before.

Mark Bostridge is the author of ‘Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend’ (Penguin)