Chris Knutsen, David Kuhn: Committed

Committed - men tell stories of love, commitment, and marriage


Marriage has a way of making even the sunniest men go sour. It inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's great avatar of romanticism, to gripe that "a man's wife has more power over him than the state has".

With such scepticism about, readers will be surprised by what's inside Committed, Chris Knutsen and David Kuhn's lively anthology of essays by 18 men writing about love, commitment and marriage. Although the book arrives so redolent with manliness you almost expect the pages to smell like cologne ads, what's on the pages turns out smelling like roses and chocolates. Men, those freedom-loving buggers, want romance after all.

It's hardly surprising most of the contributors should be so unafraid of commitment. After all, in the past decade men have been roped into Jack and Jill showers, Boys' Nights Out, consultation on letter-pressing of their wedding invitations, low-rise jeans, and stag parties devoid of naked women. This is not to say the old way was a good way, just that we now live in a world where it's just as likely the woman is the one who wears her college baseball cap into her late 20s while her man knows Sex And the City episodes by heart.

Committed is refreshingly devoid of much hand-wringing over this obscuring of gender roles. In fact, given that many contributors here are nearing middle age or smack in its not-so-sweet spot, the book shows how fluid these roles were in the first place.

Kuhn and Knutsen, both ex-New Yorker writers must have pulled out the stops for this book. All of the work collected here is original, and it's by terrific writers, too. David Sedaris contributes an hilarious piece about how true love is having your lover lance a boil. (This earns Sedaris' boyfriend the nickname Sir Lance a Lot.)

Geoff Dyer tells the possibly-not-entirely-true story of how a marriage that began with a trip to the Burning Man festival in Nevada is going strong. Finally, in what might be the book's most elegant piece, John Seabrook recounts the story of how his parents met on a ship cruising to Monaco for Grace Kelly's wedding.

Like the Seabrook, Dyer and Sedaris pieces, the best work in Committed has a kind of lived-in feel. Men's magazines encourage readers' regression while giving lip service to new sexual dynamics.

But knowledge about the heart can so rarely be written to word-count on deadline. What's nice about anthologies like this is they give writers the chance to roam free and try on conceits that are a little more elaborate than a magazine might allow, or slightly more personal than a writer might want circulated to 1.2 million news-stands.

If there is any theme uniting these essays it is not freedom, but indeed arrival. Time and again, these writers greet a new relationship like it is a docking ship which they hadn't realised was ever at sea.

* John Freeman is a writer in New York.
* Bloomsbury, $49.99