The book opens with thirty-nine year old Mike Norton pouring out his heart in an email to his ex-wife, who left him ten years ago: “I’m just going to dump out the contents of my brain here as quickly as possible. I’m going to say things I should’ve said years ago.” He writes about his night of superficial chatter with his former friend, Bain, a horny, married man who is away from his wife and looking for casual encounters. The search for meaningless sex and debauchery leads to Mike examining his life, and revealing his innermost thoughts to the only woman he believes he has ever connected with . Mike’s unrestrained flood of mid life crisis thoughts reveals some pithy and some not so pithy observations about life, relationships and the negative effect that technology has on relationships.
Each chapter is made up of an email, the header being the chapter title, followed by an aptly titled song to close the chapter. For example, following the description of bumping into a woman he slept with on numerous occasions, he is relieved to discover that he is not the father of the baby she is carrying. The closing song is “Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves.”
Steve Bauman writes a quirky, eccentric and often-R rated narrative of a man trying to coming to terms with life. Bauman is effective in conjuring the excruciating shallowness of Norton (the protagonist), and Bain (the supporting character) on their night out together, in addition to the lack of depth in some of Norton’s relationships. Sometimes, these scenes are so painfully effective in being shallow that the reader might be tempted, like the protagonist himself, to give up in despair. However; these scenes serve to contrast a deeper, more meaningful, thoughtful, passionate and humorous aspect of Norton’s personality, revealed in his emails to his ex-wife. Some of Norton’s idiosyncratic observations include arguments that technology has actually worked against really connecting people: “It just seems like these tools have done nothing to bring us close together; if anything, they’ve made all of us even more socially retarded, unable to translate all of that virtual connectivity into something more tangible and real.” Also, he points out the failures of Facebook: “The moment we adults create an account, we start acting like prepubescent teens again. We over-share, we get catty, we create drama.” Some of the other funnier gems of observations on relationships include: “This is why I don’t take vacations. Fish die, and girlfriends go back to their exes.” In addition, there are beautifully descriptive observations: “There was no one around, but it didn’t really matter; I was muted. I lacked the vocabulary to handle the kind of Real Loss that doesn’t go away.” And, “But it’s been long enough that I can’t always tell whether or not these vivid and concrete memories of you are real . . . or merely echoes, memories of memories intermixing with movies or books or TV shoes or other bits of pop culture . . .”
Matadors is an offbeat story that is filled with poignant and amusingly pathetic observations about life’s connections.
Reviewed by Maya Fleischmann for IndieReader