The Womanizer: A Man of His Time

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Rick Salutin is an award-winning novelist/playwright and one of
Toronto’s best-known journalists. As the title suggests, his latest
novel is a tale of self-discovery through libidinous conquests. However,
its protagonist, a leftist freelance economist named Max, does not
exactly fit the cliché of a dazzling Casanova. Max is a plainly clad,
somewhat hapless, unwitting, and self-deprecating sort of a lover. His
foray into the world of lascivious pleasures begins at the ripe age of
eight with the ill-fated kiss of a neighbour’s daughter—an event so
momentous that it keeps him away from sex until university.

His subsequent promiscuity can thus be seen either as a function of
deprived adolescence or, more to the point, as an analogue of his
promiscuous mind. Max is a wondering, critical lefty rather than a
dogmatic one and, appropriately enough, so are his partners. In exchange
for their willingness to take Marxist discourse as legitimate mode of
pre- and post-coital decorum, Max sees his women as complicit comrades
rather than trophies. The frame of his adventures—spanning from the
1950s to the 1990s in places as diverse as Toronto, London, and
Paris—renders an accurate catalogue of changing sexual customs across
history and latitudes. Yet, the “womanizing” here is
quintessentially Torontonian in character, without much drama or flair
for visible passions.

Since some reviews have objected to Salutin’s approach as decidedly
unemotional, it is perhaps worth noting that such a choice just may be
the point of this narrative: it is a quotidian, day-to-day dialectic
(sexual and otherwise) rather than quasi-epiphanies that makes up the
journey of self-discovery.