BOOK REVIEW: Any Man by Amber Tamblyn
Any Man looks and feels like a thriller. It’s a multiperspectival novel told mainly from the points of view of 4 men — all victims of a serial rapist. The character work here is excellent. The men author Amber Tamblyn gives voice to are distinct with their own psychologies, their own personal reactions to their experienced trauma. Significantly, their perpetrator is a woman. The crimes she commits, the things she does to these men are heinous (I strongly urge readers to check their trigger warnings).
I am in awe of Tamblyn’s talent as a storyteller, as a satirist, as a poet. This will not be for everyone. I have some friends who read it and did not care for its mixed media approach (there are pages of detailed tweets, radio program transcripts, television transcripts, emails, first person perspectives, some sections which border on stream of consciousness and poetry). It is also not subtle in its approach. It feels downright pulpy at times. This book is a scream, beneath its precision there is rage. But it’s all so well-considered.
When I say Any Man feels like a thriller, it does so in the most superficial sense: there are of course the crimes, there is an investigation and there is a detective. There are even chapters that feel like something out of a Brian De Palma film where we act as voyeurs through the perpetrator’s eyes as she spies on her prey, researching, preparing traps. There is media attention, the crimes become sensationalized. At times it feels like a thriller in the vein of Gone Girl. The ingredients are there, but this is filet mignon dressed up as a hamburger. This is no shade at Gone Girl, which I think is brilliant, in particular the way it throws the genre on its head, satirizing our culture. But once you really sink your teeth into Any Man, you realize Tamblyn is taking it all a step further. While the satire in Gone Girl is a finely tuned layer in an otherwise absorbing and entertaining slice of noir, in Tamblyn’s book it’s the meat of it.
Get andre rivas’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Any Man is blistering — furious — in its examination of our how our culture treats victims, and how we are all complicit. For example, it taps into our (presumably) heartfelt social media displays of support for victims of sexual assault, revealing how shallow and mechanical they truly are; the callousness in the way we discuss and cheapen horrors through our good — but performative — intentions. And in a brutal twist, even the victims themselves, so desperate to be heard, determined not to be lost in all the sensationalist noise, not to be drowned out by celebrity or political appropriators of their suffering… they too fall victim to the damaging social conventions of our times, because we live in an age where the waters of empowerment cannot help but be muddied. And everything can be branded, even trauma.
This not a yarn about crimes, this is a book about victims of the worst offenses amid a cynical and desensitized, mechanized world. And by making the perpetrator a woman and the victim men, Tamblyn achieves two things: Firstly, she brings attention to male victims and the many incidents that often go unreported because of the way masculinity is defined and viewed societally. Secondly, it acts as a mirror for the scores of women who have been victims of sexual assault or rape, only to mocked, met with skepticism or silence. The harsh truth of this brilliant novel is that it knows by making its victims men and by showing what these men deal with, its cries for justice (not just legally but culturally) may yet have further reach.
I truly believe this is a book that should be read by every young man in this country because it is more than an exercise of intellectualized sympathy. She really makes you feel the violations. Not simply of the act, the crime, but all the cultural quiet evils that follow in the aftermath.
Any Man is significant, and it deserves more love.
If you can, I highly recommend immersion reading this (reading the text and listening to the audiobook). if possible, don’t just use your eyeballs and if possible, don’t just use your earballs. There was a lot of intention in the visual formatting of the book and a lot of attention in the production of the audiobook and the way the two marry is absolutely fantastic (as a side note, one of the characters is a New England comedian who reads as if Tamblyn had Marc Maron in mind so how perfect is it that Maron voices him on the audiobook?)
