The Assistant by Robert Walser
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Watching a Train Wreck

Essential reading for the aspiring entrepreneur; even more so for his or her partner. Over a six month period, the protagonist, Joseph, observes the disintegration of a family driven to penury by its obsessive paterfamilias. Joseph watches as all the emotional and financial resources of the family are consumed by a business project. Having recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I am struck by the commonality of experience related in books written a century apart.

In The Assistant, the role of Kingsolver’s fundamentalist African missionary is played by a Swiss German engineer; but the personalities and the sociology in which the action takes place are identical in the two books. Both centre on compulsive, irresponsible males who inflict their personal ‘visions’ on their families. The wives are aware of both the incompetence and neurotic drive of their husbands; yet they choose to continue their loyalty and support. The effects of this complicity in the delusions of male dominance are tragic in both cases.

One can only marvel how deeply ingrained this deference to male desire for whatever it is they think they want - money, power, reputation, redemption - in our culture. It is shameful, not so much because it exists but because it is so persistent despite widespread publicity about its destructiveness. Ever since fiction has been widely available to a literate population, the same theme of the exploitation of families by dominant males is consistently described.

Yet males continue to provide the excuse of ‘doing it for the family’. And females continue to believe the male rhetoric, oblivious to both the selfishness and the risk implied by such a rationale. Men lie. They start by lying to themselves about things like ambition, and personal fulfilment, and making the world a better place. They’re encouraged to do so by other men who want to justify their own lies. And when no one calls their bluff, they lie to everyone else, particularly their families.

Apparently, given a chance, women do the same: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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