A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

"A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.
I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."

Full disclosure: I saw Tom Ford's film adaptation before reading the novella. In a particularly self indulgent, down in the dumps kind of day - in fact I had just finished reading Hallucinating Foucault as well, deciding that what I needed to get through the day was to envelope myself in impressionistic treatises about loneliness and catharsis. Now, the film is beautiful - in fact at times it feels like a particularly meditative but gorgeous perfume ad. Julianne Moore chain smokes (only) hot pink Fantasia cigarettes, Colin Firth saunters knowingly in a perfectly pressed suit even while in the depths of depression, the colors are saturated and crisp, and the film is littered with moments in which time slows to a standstill and the soundtrack overtakes the dialogue, plunging the viewer into a purely sensory experience that recalls the plodding act of reading. Now...what the film was missing that the novel captures perfectly is frustration, specifically frustration fueled by anger.
The narrative arc of the film puts the protagonist and his loss at the center and (spoilers), takes the viewer through a single day, the day in which he has decided to end his life. Obviously one assumes shifts in tone and focus in an adaptation, but I never expected such a radical departure. The novel never implies suicide, the protagonist is far too engaged and frankly, angry to consider it as an option. While both consider a kind of reexamination of the vitality of life after considerable loss, the novel's vision of George is much more critical and much less maudlin. There is no doubt that George is depressed, his life after the death of his partner is a series of mechanisms with which to get by. Coping mechanisms and familiar but disdainful activities (driving on the freeway, dinner with his best friend who seems to do nothing but annoy him, social niceties with the neighbors) propel him through his life, his awareness acutely punctuated by heightened moments of justifiable anger at the state of the world and his life.
There are also unlikeable moments for George, which typically occur when he feels the most renewed. He defines himself in opposition to a dying acquaintance and his best friend. In these moments, Isherwood becomes almost too delighted to let George revel in his disdain for the female body manifest in his judgement of these two women whose affectations and histories are rendered as almost farcical. George's vitality in the classroom as well as the constantly humming undertone of sexuality in each of his encounters keeps him from becoming the shadow like character represented by the George of Tom Ford's film. Missing too, in Ford's adaptation is the kind of humor that peppers the prose. George's caricatures paint the world in a colorful and ridiculous light; his voice rings through the narrative as somehow the detached observer deigning to comment on the daily lives of those around him. The subtlety of his satire allows Isherwood to never show all of his cards, balancing the reader between political diatribes, tender memorializing, the anger at aging and the frustration of day to day life.

"George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength."