A thoughtful musing on midlife self-isolation and corporate frustration set in the early days of COVID-19
Gregory Venters’ Destiny and Other Follies is a successful meditation on how a middle-aged man’s emotional withdrawal alters his career and marriage. Calder Brandt, an industry consultant for a company called Scientific Management, is perpetually undermined in his attempts at promotion, while, in his private life, he struggles to maintain a meaningful connection with his Bosnian wife Hana.
Calder Brandt is an everyman hero, a middle-aged drone struggling to distinguish himself in a corporate hierarchy full of younger, savvier coworkers. Brandt’s primary stumbling block is the long-term effect of his treatments for throat cancer eleven years before. Radiation and chemotherapy ravaged him physically, compromising his ability to speak and even swallow with confidence.
“A quick slug of water raised a raspy cough. He tried to join the ongoing conversation, but his first words scratched like an old phonograph needle and passed unnoticed.”
Rather than transparency, Brandt opts to hide his condition from his colleagues, giving them little context for his moments of difficulty. “He tested his voice, tried to apologize, but emitted only a thin garble. The others nearest him shifted uneasily in their seats.” These moments, which Venters effectively renders, make Calder at once sympathetic and mildly frustrating. He tells Hana that he does not want coworkers to pity him, while subjecting himself to the limiting factor of their not understanding why he struggles to connect.
The specter of office politics underpins Brandt’s physical insecurity. At the start of the novel, Brandt is jockeying for a promotion while being convinced of a colleague’s duplicity. A last-minute roundtable is so far beyond his comfort zone that he wonders if his participation is a form of sabotage. “Roundtable discussions… Introducing myself. You know I don’t do that stuff well. It’s the kind of thing I’d hoped to avoid.” He started to say, “It almost feels like a setup—” As expected, the round table goes poorly.
Venters does an effective job of establishing Brandt’s situation subtly. The novel opens with Calder’s meeting with a doctor prior to the dreaded roundtable. There, we learn that he survived throat cancer eleven years before but is now experiencing the adverse effects of his treatments. “The reality is, you’re stuck with the consequences of the treatment.” The doctor is bluff and dismissive of Brandt’s concerns, again underscoring Brandt’s sense of alienation in the wake of the cancer. We are not given much context or specificity in the moment to fully understand what we are being told.
The appointment serves two purposes—to put a gun on the mantle regarding Calder’s inability to speak with confidence—a cue that Venters picks up in various professional and social interactions. The appointment also establishes that he chooses to isolate. He chooses to go to the appointment alone, even though his wife accompanied him to the city. Much later, when Hana asks him how it went, he brushes it and his poor performance at the roundtable aside, leaving her in her own tenuous situation. “His brevity instilled zero confidence. […] If he became immobile, she would be the one nursing him. If he went away, she would be left stranded in a country not her own.”
Calder’s habit of turning inward is one of the novel’s primary threads. It’s an effective character beat, establishing clearly that Calder is deeply entrenched in his dissatisfaction. However, it becomes a bit repetitive as structural idiosyncrasies undermine Calder’s natural character arc. We’ll often lead with the event and save critical context for a later asynchronous flashback. The result makes the narrative feel disjointed at times, perhaps mirroring Calder’s disconnection in his own life.
On the sentence level, Venters’ descriptions are lovely, as is his subtlety in showing the interplay between characters. This is especially notable with Calder’s wife Hana, whom he portrays with warmth and sympathy. We repeatedly see her reaching out to her husband only to be rebuffed. We also see her willingness to form connection, as with a homeless man on a bus. Hana’s open-heartedness makes a leavening foil for Calder’s grimly determined resignation.
Calder Brandt is at once sympathetic and not entirely likable, but Venters succeeds in showing us why he is the way he is: regularly withdrawing but capable of connection and change. Calder’s is a melancholy triumph, but a triumph all the same.
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