The Men's Club is Leonard Michaels' version of a Walpurgis Night, of a Freudian male herd reborn in a group of California men, at least two of whom are aware in the hip, consciousness-raised Berkeley tradition of "feeling your own feelings." But despite the occasional use of such cliches, The Men's Club is not satire because there is more sadness than mockery in the author's treatment of such awareness, and because Michaels is too desperate and despairing a writer….

Michaels uses the psychological jargon the way he uses different ways of eating and screwing to describe, to try and reach the raw edge of being human, to examine the emotions on which human behavior turns….

Michaels is the opposite of the graceful, accomplished observer in the manner of the New Yorker's John Updike. He is, rather, a precisionist of painful emotions. He aims, as his narrator says...