Cut and shave, eat and drink, swim. Dead, unknown father, slightly hysterical mother. Never had a steady boyfriend. It was too easy, maybe, having an occupation thrown on his lap. He’d gone to hairdressing school, of course, but that didn’t mean it was something he wanted to do.
That, in a nutshell, is Simon Weiman. The protagonist of Dutch writer Gerhard Bakker’s novel The Hairdresser’s Son, now available in a meticulous English translation by his long-time translator, David Colmer. He is a middle-aged gay man living in an apartment above the shop he inherited from his grandfather, a once-bustling hair salon that is now a barbershop even though it’s “fancy” name—Chez Jean— and 70s décor have not changed. Simon runs his business at a relaxed pace, focusing on almost exclusively male clientele with no more than a few scheduled appointments per day. He values his privacy and free time, but seems to do little with it.
His comfortable routine begins to change when his mother asks him to help out with a weekly swim for intellectually disabled adults. It seems that her friend and co-worker has suddenly run off to the Canary Islands with her new beau, a somewhat discomfiting echo of Simon’s father’s own sudden mysterious disappearance before he was born. One morning in 1977, Cornelus Weiman had slipped off without a word to anyone, to board the ill-fated KLM flight that would crash on the island of Tenerife later the same day. His death was a strange silent space in Simon’s life, one that had left him to ultimately assume his father’s place in the family business, an obligation he had accepted with the quiet reluctance that seems to underlie so much of his existence.
So, if he would rather not give up his Saturday mornings to some sort of poolside babysitting task, his mother’s request is one that he cannot turn down—not that she gives him the option—because he is more than qualified to assist. Swimming is the one personal passion he has. Once a competitive swimmer, he continues to work out in the pool three times a week, savouring a solid hour of laps in the quiet of the early morning, sometimes even hooking up with a fellow swimmer afterwards. But he’s not quite prepared for the group of young people he meets when he arrives for is first disabled swim session. For one thing, only one girl swims while the rest splash about or huddle in a corner. And then there’s Igor. He’s the spitting image of Simon’s favourite Olympic swimmer, Alexander Popov, an athlete whose framed poster still graces the wall of his bedroom. However, inside the fully grown man’s handsome body, is a non-verbal adult with the cognitive development of a child. It’s a contradiction Simon cannot square as, week after week, his obsession with Igor grows until this inappropriate attraction starts to slide toward seriously questionable territory.
Meanwhile, the other challenge to Simon’s settled order of being comes from one of his regular customers, a writer who asks if he can observe some of the typical activities and interactions in the shop because he is thinking of bringing a character who is a barber into his next novel. Lucky for him, he happens to stop by on a day when Simon’s gregarious grandfather Jan is in for his monthly haircut, and he is able to acquire far more enthusiastic detail about the profession than he would have gained otherwise. But it is the writer’s expansive curiosity that starts to trigger in Simon a deeper interest in the famous plane crash that apparently claimed his father’s life. This gradually becomes an obsession that begins to consume more of his free time. There are so many unanswered questions, including the absence of any identifiable remains from the accident site. Against this search for some kind of closure, a secondary thread is introduced that reveals the truth about Cornelus’ actual fate. The fiery crash in Tenerife was his official death, but not the end of his life. Rather it offered an unexpected new beginning, and Cornelus’ secret story forms a counterpoint to Simon’s.
Bakker is a slow, precise storyteller and this novel unfolds at a slow simmer. But it simmers for nearly 300 pages. One might argue that this is intentionally a book that focuses on slowly and deliberately bringing a character to life, but one might also question just how much life actually burns inside Bakker’s central protagonist. Almost everyone else in his life—his mother, his grandfather, the writer, the disabled swimmers—appears more vibrant and alive through vivid passages of description and dialogue in which Simon is typically the passive participant. There are moments where the energy and momentum rises, including the integration of the factual details of Tenerife accident and the stories of the victims and survivors. But the tedium, routine, and internalization of Simon’s days only serve to make him feel even flatter and more repressed. He has difficulty allowing himself to be receptive to others, even men he has slept with. Then wonders why he is alone. His sensuality is primarily channelled into his touching and handing of the heads and necks of his clients, a safer contact perhaps, but one that preserves emotional distance. By contrast, what we come to know of his absent father’s life, its striking similarities and differences, only complicates one’s empathy for the solitary barber, or rather the “hairdresser’s son,” that lingers after the book closes.
The Hairdresser’s Son by Gerbrand Bakker is translated from the Dutch by David Colmer and published by Archipelago Books.
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