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Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. ~ The
University of Oklahoma
Robert Murray Davis. Mid-Life
Mojo: A Guide for the Newly
Single Male. Springfield,
IL. Oak Tree Books. 175
pages. $11.95.
ISBN: 1-892343-17-7.
Despite all the media hoopla surrounding online
dating services and the quest for child-consorts, legitimate success
stories of love and marriage between adults far outnumber the highly
publicized accounts of 14-year-olds running off with 60-year-old convicted
murderers, thieves, and pedophiles.
In an age of hyper-self-reliance, thanks to the
collapse of social welfare safety nets and the oligopolization of business
landscape, it has become increasingly difficult to find ways to meet a
person with which you may eventually wish to forge a long-lasting
relationship. The old
tried-and-true techniques of bar-crawling, joining a church outreach
group, or feigning an addiction to worm into well-attended 12-step group
meetings often yield more frustration, heartache, or ennui than fulfilling
companionship.
Thus, it is into this landscape - highly altered since his
last foray - that Robert Murray Davis appears, fully adult and fully ready
to right the wrongs of his old style of human interaction, hoping not to
repeat whatever led his being rejected, divorced, left with emotional
equilibrium a bit out of kilter. Being
a newly single male is a Rip Van Winkle experience, and Davis finds that
the rules of engagement for courtship have changed in after 20 years of
lying fallow.
It is a story that resonates, sometimes painfully, with the
experiences of the majority of American adults these days.
Davis never bashes his ex-wife, nor does he whine about the
injustices of divorce. Instead,
he goes about industriously making the best of what is a rough patch of
readjustment to single life.
His journey - still ongoing at the end of the book - to
find the best method for encountering a person with whom you might have
something in common, is not only instructive, it is intriguing, perhaps
because the reader unconsciously becomes a voyeur of another’s life,
stripped bare. In theory,
this is a self-help book. However,
to relegate it to the self-help genre would be to criminally undersell its
wry humor, the wise asides, its edgy introspection.
Davis comes across as a decent guy - just the type to be toyed with
by women with a hankering for schadenfreude.
It is sometimes an uncomfortable read as one realizes that nice
guys are often victims of their own virtues.
Although the statistics, the sociodemographic insights, the
recommendations and advice are presented in the guise of a “recovery”
book, Davis has created a depthful memoir and extended personal essay
which provides as much illumination on our current contemporary culture as
on the condition of being a “newly single male.”
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Extensive Field Experience
Mid-Life Mojo: A Guide for the Newly Single Male, by Robert
Murray Davis. Springfield, IL: Oak Tree Press, 2003. 178 pp.
$11.95. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University of
Pennsylvania.
In case you ever wondered what
a scholar of Evelyn Waugh does in his spare time, Robert Murray Davis has
provided at least part of the answer in Mid-Life Mojo. Recently
retired from teaching at the University of Oklahoma, Davis has
"shifted his writing emphasis from modern literature to broader
aspects of contemporary culture." He has also been divorced for
twenty years and has acquired "what social scientists call 'extensive
field experience' in a number of . . . relationships" (14).
Mid-Life Mojo is the fruit of Davis's research.
The book is a "survival manual" for the
"recently divorced heterosexual male somewhere around fifty"
(9-10), or for "the man who wants to get back in the game" (13).
Aside from his own experience, Davis also draws on "statistical
research by sociologists and psychologists and on personal testimony given
to and by journalists" (14). Interesting as the research is,
it's refreshing to reach Davis's pithy conclusions. He advises us
never to "sleep with someone who has more problems than you do"
(26), and "to get your diet under control so that . . . your ex will
not see what a mess you've become" (27).
Mid-Life Mojo is written crisply, and the
book can be read in a few hours. Davis leads us through the various
stages of seeking a new relationship, from "Picking Up the
Pieces" to "Merger Talks." In one of his field
reports, Davis even provides three examples of personal ads written by
himself, along with the quantity and quality of responses each attracted.
Davis doesn't take himself too seriously, and his frankness helps to make
the book both compelling and valuable.
All that research on Waugh did not go to waste,
though it is kept to a minimum in Mid-Life Mojo. Regarding
personal ads, Davis quotes The Loved One, where Dennis Barlow
presents Aimee "with an irresistible picture not so much of her own
merits or even of his, as of the enormous gratification he was
offering" (69-70). More than fifty years have passed since that
novel was written, but Waugh still seems relevant in surprising ways.
Waugh was himself divorced, and he might have been amused by Davis's
chapter on "False Starts," including "Something Cheap and
Superficial," "Back Street Affairs," "Feeling the
Young Again," and "Cloning Your Ex." Waugh tried all
of those in the early 1930s, before his second marriage, which lasted.
Maybe there is hope for the rest of us, and maybe Mid-Life Mojo can
help.
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