One of my favorite things to do when I have an evening all to myself is to sit with a book at the bar at my favorite restaurant. It’s an old-fashioned, low-key kind of pleasure — the very best kind, in my experience — and when I was younger, it’s exactly what I imagined being a grown-up in the big city would be like.
The complication, of course, is that when you sit at a bar, there are always people on either side of you, and if it’s a crowded night, you get that slightly unnerving sensation of knowing that people are reading over your shoulder, which is a problem (or not) depending on what you’re reading.
Two days ago, at the bar at Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village, I was fully occupied by three things: a perfectly cooked steak, a glass of red wine, and a copy of Royal Flash, the second of the famous Flashman series of comic novels written by George MacDonald Fraser. The Flashman novels are hilarious accounts of a rakish, cowardly, and deeply amoral British soldier who cuts a swath through 19th-century world historical events. He’s there at the Charge of the Light Brigade, at the Alamo, and in Royal Flash, he finds himself trapped in Bavaria as the prisoner of Otto von Bismarck. As a result of some act of rudeness or lewdness, Flashman manages to affect the course of familiar scenes from the past. Even better: There’s lots of sex and drunkenness and a gleeful ethnic slur on every page. The book is a delight.
I’ve been meaning to read a Flashman novel for years, but it wasn’t until a few college friends and I started a book club that I got the chance. We are all men in what we might euphemistically call “high middle age,” and most of us have the unpleasant sense that we’re out of step with contemporary culture.
We get together in monthly Zoom meetings to talk about the book we assigned, but often the conversation drifts into a kind of group therapy pressure release. Did you guys see this? One of us will ask, putting a link in the chat. So, my kid comes home from college and … another one of us will say, launching into a mostly good-natured eye-rolling retelling of a particularly idiotic dinner table debate.
Over the years, we’ve read potboilers and social science books, bestsellers, and science fiction thrillers. But by far the most popular selections have been the retro-vibe, cranky-old-guy choices — Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and this month’s Royal Flash.
Which is, as I’ve said, funny on every page. But on one or two pages in particular, there’s a cascade of racial and ethnic insults that you’re not legally permitted to enjoy — let alone laugh at, especially when you’re close enough to someone who might peer at the page you’re reading to see what’s so funny. The person sitting to my left at Minetta Tavern was a young woman waiting for her friends to arrive, nursing a glass of Sancerre and busying herself with her phone. But after one or two involuntary barks of laughter from me, I felt her looking with curiosity at my copy of Royal Flash.
The problem with slurs — well, one of the problems with slurs — is that they seem to jump off the page. She had no trouble identifying the problem areas of the text, and I could feel disapproving energy radiating from her side. I spent the next few minutes with my head frozen in place, eyes locked forward — I didn’t want to give her the opening to start the struggle session — praying for the immediate arrival of her dinner companions.
I had read the same sentence over and over at least 20 times before her party arrived and they were led to their table. But before I could relax and keep reading, she tapped me on the shoulder.
“Is that a Flashman novel?” She asked.
I nodded.
“My grandfather loves those too,” she said and hurried to join her friends.
Grandfather? Honestly, I would have preferred a lecture. Which I suspect she knew, which is why she went a different, crueler, way to make her point.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
