Book review

Loner . . . or paranoiac?

In a world in which the herd always seems to be stampeding from one fad to another, a defense of solitude, a celebration of individuality sounds likes a compelling idea for a book.

Sounds like. But in the hands of Anneli Rufus, a good idea has gone terribly wrong.

For some reason Rufus has predicated her book on an almost paranoiac notion that the nonloner world is out to get loners like herself.

"Anything done alone is discredited, demeaned, devalued, or at best, simply undiscussed," she writes in the introduction. Funny, but I can't remember the last time I looked at a runner and thought: "Crazy freak."

"What bothers (nonloners) about being alone? What are they so afraid of? Why can't they be more like us?" she asks.

Speaking as a person whose job demands extroversion but whose private life includes a lot of "me time," my answers to those three questions are: "Nothing," "Nothing" and "Who exactly is 'us?' "

It might have helped Rufus' case if she had found some consistent definition of loner for the reader to hang on to.

A loner is not a hermit, she insists. But a loner can be reclusive. A loner can be sociable and charming, though he doesn't like to. Loners are creative, but not all of them. They have friends, just not a lot of them. Loners like sex, but they masturbate, too, but not to excess like everyone says.

Maybe it's me, but I'm far too interested in my own sex life to care whether or not somebody else is masturbating too much.

In the end the loner she describes is so frustratingly vague that at various times she is referring to most of society, with the exception perhaps of pathologically gregarious politicians such as Bill Clinton. Her nonloner enemy, the malevolent mob that she accuses of hectoring her people, is just a straw man.

"DaVinci. Michelangelo. Isaac Newton, who as a boy would rather have tinkered and solved math problems than play. Rene Descartes, the pioneering mathematician and philosopher who did his best work at home in bed . . .," reads her list of admirable loners.

Okay, they were loners, but did Newton's classmates pick on him? Rufus doesn't say. I'd venture that she has no idea. As far as Descartes is concerned, I think his enemies were more concerned that his rationalism undermined church doctrine than where he did his cogitating.

The book is full of canards such as these. When she isn't misleading readers, she's offering up an infuriating succession of glib and slippery generalizations that pack all the insight of a daily horoscope.

In a chapter about why technology has been such a boon for loners, Rufus leads with a couple of pages about Mollie Fancher, a young woman who in 1865 had a mishap getting off a street car. Her skirt caught in the machinery and she was dragged down the street.

Fancher's accident became famous for, despite her doctor's assurance she would recover fully, she instead retreated to her bedroom, complaining of terrible maladies, blindness, paralysis and stupors. She didn't emerge for 50 years.

Fascinating story, and totally irrelevant. As Rufus points out, Fancher, though a so-called "bed case," was no loner. She entertained visitors by the score. Presumably none of her guests thought of her as loner. Psychosomatic, perhaps, but not a loner. This does not get in the way of Rufus declaring that "To call bed cases loners, as seems customary now, is to insult loners. It misses the point entirely."

Again, what custom is she referring to?

Here's another perplexing anecdote, this one from her own life:

"On a visit to Las Vegas, I once ate breakfast alone at the Circus Circus buffet. I just wanted to see if it was possible, how it might be done."

The idea that this act would somehow raise an eyebrow in Las Vegas, of all places, is almost laughable. The fact that no one did care, but that Rufus still felt she was "bucking a tide" seems almost pathetically self-conscious, or egocentric.

"Loners need popular culture and need it badly." I ask, is this any less true of nonloners? "Loners need information." Same question.

And what are we to make of her curious assertion that loners like her share a common identity with the code-talking members of the French Resistance?

"Like Resistance fighters we can prick up our ears for codes the mob does not know are there. Tricked out with coonskin caps and spider feet, the codes say Hey, I'm here and This is possible and Watch what we can do."

Rufus makes exactly one legitimate point, by my count. It comes, sadly, in Chapter 12 when she takes on the media's propensity for tagging criminals as loners. Her example is the treatment of Charles Bishop, the 15-year-old who flew a stolen Cessna into the side of a Tampa office building.

The first official description of Bishop came from Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder, who called him "very much a loner." Of course, that quote ran prominently in every story the next day. Bad enough, says Rufus, but even worse was the about-face the media did when further reporting revealed Bishop wasn't such a loner after all.

"So we are told," Rufus writes, "it's baffling when someone who pilots a plane into an office building isn't a loner."

Rufus' complaint has some legitimacy; it's lazy reporting to stick to some official's misperception. But that's exactly what didn't happen with the Bishop story. I know, because I was one of the reporters who spent time that week exploring what might have driven a seemingly well-adjusted teenager to commit suicide in such a shocking and public way.

If anything, reporters were struggling to avoid the pat version. Even when Rufus is right, she's wrong.

That's the fundamental problem with this book. It's an argument for no good reason.

It depends on an us-against-them version of life that ignores some of the more fascinating questions about the nature of individuality in modern society. Modern society permits us great latitude to opt out, even as it makes increasing incursions into our private lives.

I'd argue that in an increasingly complex society, we're all loners, if only out of self-preservation. We feel the need to safeguard our identity against the chaos of the crowd. Rufus wants to keep the mantle for herself and shut everyone else out. That just seems juvenile.

So what exactly is the point of this 286-page manifesto? I'm not sure.

I will bet, though, that Rufus will get a fair bit of attention for it. It has the appropriate contrarian stance that makes for a good segment in the last hour of the Today show. But any author who thinks enough of her work to include a bibliography ought to be prepared for some tougher scrutiny.

Rufus' manifesto is nearly three times as long as the Communist Manifesto. And it's just as wrong.

-- "Party of One -- The Loner's Manifesto," by Anneli Rufus, 320 pages, $14.95, is published by Marlow & Co.

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