Loneliness as a Way of Life

Are we always either lonely or not lonely? Or does loneliness ebb and flow, increasing sharply at times like this - at least for the bereaved - just before Christmas?

It's confusing how we use the word and its cognates.

"One man alone" can suggest something positive - intrepid independence, an Ayn Rand hero. "Loner" can go either way, depending on whether it describes a beguilingly romantic rock star or a neighborhood creep.

"Lonesome" makes you feel like comforting the unfortunate party. "Solitude" sounds inviting, but "solitary" - especially when you add a capital "S" - does not.

To be sure, loneliness is worth thinking about at holiday time. For Thomas Dumm, who teaches politics at Amherst College, it's no abstraction. A widower, he lost both his wife and mother in recent years, and his daughter has moved out. He seems an ideal guide to the topic.

Yet Loneliness as a Way of Life arrives as a bizarre, fascinating book, more a document than a coherent study. In its inadvertent portrait of its tortured-soul author, an angry writer imprisoned in the hot air of academic discourse, it makes the point Dumm thinks he's making overtly: that our greatest loneliness is a failure to connect to our true selves.

At the outset of Loneliness, Dumm declares himself most interested in the "political dimension" of loneliness. For the first two-thirds of the book he operates as a typical expositor of high-toned cultural material. He expatiates on King Lear. He ponders Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism seeks loneliness among citizens as a way of controlling them. He interminably annotates Death of a Salesman, Moby Dick, and the film Paris, Texas - not much of that commentary illuminates loneliness.

Meanwhile, an unacademic anger shoots from the book's pages at odd points: blunt contempt for salesmen in general and their "complete insubstantiality," vituperative hatred for George W. Bush, "his sovereign madness, his stupidity."

Only on Page 95, when Dumm surprisingly leaps into discussion of his marital wars with his wife, Brenda, before lung cancer struck her down, does the book come almost frighteningly alive as Dumm's bland, theoretical vocabulary disappears. Indeed, he plunges us into his upbringing with a speed that induces vertigo. The seventh of nine children of - yes - an insurance salesman, Dumm admits to having been "a difficult child, prone to screaming fits, angry, bored, sharp-tongued, sometimes mean." He writes that his mother, "who could not love me and whom I learned not to love in return," would lock him away "in a cubbyhole closet under the staircase in the dining room." From his mother, writes Dumm, "I first gained my sense of loneliness as a way of life."

For the full review, go to The Philadelphia Inquirer.