The Appearance of a Hero: The Tom Mahoney Stories by Peter Levine (review)

Don Draper—the anti-hero of the cable drama Mad Men—is experiencing a moment. With his chiseled jaw, piercing eyes, and bespoke three-piece suits, the brooding mid-century adman exemplifies an American masculine chill that, we tell ourselves, is now extinct. Don is a suburban father with a revolving door of city mistresses; a brawny Mr. Fix-It who, encountering a drippy sink, takes to an undershirt and wrench; and a professionally ambitious yet secretive executive who above all keeps at a distance.

What has us viewers so fascinated by the oft-sympathetic, oft-chauvinistic Don? Why do viewers of all demographics revere his dominating carnality, his controlling and callous masculinity? Some critics have blamed the emasculating office and family culture of the twenty-first century for Don’s current cultural preeminence. As men today cramp into smaller and smaller cubicles, drive the daily commute home, then scrub their share of dishes and wrangle their share of very-much-awake kids into bed, and complete the same routine day in and day out for the bulk of their lives, what is left to prove their virility, their essential masculine natures?

And thus the surfeit of articles and books: “Are Modern Men Manly Enough?” in The New York Times; “The Masculinity Crisis, Male Malaise, and the Challenge of Becoming a Good Man” in Psychology Today; and Hanna Rosin’s recent work, forebodingly titled The End of Men. From these perspectives, Mad Men is a misty-eyed reprisal of long-gone patriarchy, a retro-hegemony that viewers both revile and cheer. Apparently, the trouble in Don’s soul isn’t the problematic concept of masculinity itself, but the calamitous movements of the sixties—Feminism, Civil Rights—that chip away at the fantasy of a freewheeling, male-centric office culture, complete with a pack of smokes and an Old Fashioned.

As such, Don Draper is a hero for the modern-day, paunched and coffee-stained white-collar folk. Certainly his male coworkers, who yield to shrill wives and nine-to-five drudgery, cast adoring gazes at Don, the high-powered wunderkind with the pretty young (and French-speaking, no less!) second wife.

Similarly, Tom Mahoney, the luminous center of Peter Levine’s collection of finely crafted short stories, The Appearance of a Hero, is a hero for the male friends and acquaintances that largely narrate the tales. Each story touches on Tom, with the narrators’ veneration for this self-assured, boyish darling—with his nonchalance, good looks, and effortless ways with women—threading through the collection. In the first story, “How Does Your Garden Grow?”, Tom is lauded as the “type of man who lives for . . . the big sale, a rush. Four black coffees in the morning for my friend, and four scotch and sodas at night.” The good ol’ boy admiration continues in subsequent stories: he is “a man who can drink himself through winter”; he is “laid back, fun to be around, attractive in all ways”; his presence is described as “a gift,” and his life as “far more interesting” than anyone else’s. Even Tom’s father notes that his son’s childhood peers “adored Tom,” since he “was in possession of distance, which is a form of power.”

This distance is what molds the Don Drapers of the world into our heroes. In truth, if we were to hold a magnifying glass to Don’s soul, we would see the nadirs of his past, the rage and the terror, and, above all, one hell of a backstory. Below his cool exterior, Don is a frantic, troubled creature, pouring a second, third, and fourth whiskey while ruminating over shameful liasons, distant parents, and the one fact of life he will never be able to control: his own immortality.

This darkness, of course, enhances Don’s appeal—there is a reason he keeps at a distance from us. So it’s surprising that, when we get peeks into Tom’s soul...