When the protagonist of The Hairdresser’s Son, Simon Weiman, cuts his own hair, he finds it much trickier than cutting clients’ hair: “With someone else you have the mirror and the real head. He only has the head in the mirror.” Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker prefers to work with both, while keeping us aware that he is the one with the scissors. The barber’s mirrors, with their doublings and removals, recur at crucial moments in the narrative and facilitate Bakker’s metafictional trickiness, drawing attention to the paradoxical construction of the novel.
As with the English title of his 2006 novel The Twin, the novel’s title is ambiguous, potentially referring either to a character who has died in a tragic accident or to the surviving protagonist. Here, both Simon and his late father Cornelis are the sons of hairdressers. Simon has taken over his grandfather’s barbershop, Chez Jean (named for its French cachet), while Jan is still alive. The novel seems to be about Simon until one of his regular clients, an unnamed writer, asks Simon if he may observe him at work: it will help him with the novel he’s writing about a barber. It won’t be about you, he assures Simon. Later, as their relationship moves beyond the barbershop and Simon meets him at a gay bar, the writer says that he’s writing about Simon’s father, who “seems like a fictional character to me.” When chapters about Cornelis begin to alternate with Simon’s, we assume within the logic of the narrative that these are the writer’s chapters, even as we “know” that Bakker is the writer and that The Hairdresser’s Son is the book he was working on. We are invited to recast the classic Barber Paradox as the Writer’s: “A writer writes about all those, and only those, who don’t write about themselves. Does the writer write about himself?”
It’s a significant formulation, because Bakker takes especial interest in characters who are as emotionally inaccessible to those around them as they are to themselves. Our attention is drawn several times to the sign on the barbershop door: when it says Open out front (in French), it says Closed inside, and vice versa. Simon and Cornelis listen to their clients but speak minimally, if at all; they withdraw into their thoughts when others are around, and we suspect they are in part projections of the author. Bakker’s only way out of the paradox is to write about himself by writing about others (including a writer who writes about others) who also can’t write about themselves.
Like Bakker, I find myself using another one of his novels as a mirror in which to reflect on this one. In The Twin, Bakker sets his protagonist on a small family farm that has escaped the modern age; Helmer communicates by telephone and gets around by bike. He overhears two young men talking about the setting as they paddle past the land, saying it looked like the last thirty years hadn’t passed. Psychologically, they haven’t either. Here, in The Hairdresser’s Son, Simon seems to be a response to Helmer. We watch him bring himself up to speed, catching up to modern times by researching the past online, contrasting public grief and expression then and now; by getting a Twitter account and “strutting his stuff” on it; and by putting himself in “novel” situations, interacting with people with differences he hasn’t thought deeply about. If writing something other than autofiction, how can a writer know enough about what he writes about? Googling, asking to observe, having conversations, hearing others tell their own stories. But there are things that can’t be Googled, remains of loved ones that are never found, people who can’t articulate their emotions. Faced with these mysteries, the writer falls back on his own fantasy.
Is Simon learning things about his father, or is the writer filling in, inventing answers for what he doesn’t know? Whose imagination are we living in—Simon’s or the unnamed writer’s or Bakker’s? These are nonsensical questions when reading a novel, yet Bakker leads us into this fictional space. The characters become real to us even as we are aware that they are constructed. One of the most vivid characters, Simon’s mother, is never met by the writer. The sparks between her and her son, her loving frankness, remind me of the protagonist of The Twin and the mildly intrusive woman neighbor next door; at one point, they catch each other staring at each other with binoculars. The novels come most alive when two characters take a genuine interest in each other.
The narrative of The Hairdresser’s Son is deceptively desultory, proceeding in short chapters that slowly ramp up into a plot. In the first chapter, we observe a group of teens with intellectual disabilities as they play and swim in a pool. Next, we hear someone—Simon’s mother, it turns out—cajole Simon to help her supervise these teens on Saturdays, now that her co-worker and long-term friend has left indefinitely for Tenerife, where her tax-dodging boyfriend has a building project. Then we watch Simon swim laps, pick up a redheaded swimmer in the shower, and return with him to his room above the barbershop, where he has hung three framed posters of male swimmers, including Alexandr Popov. It’s not clear if the posters from his childhood are there as swimming heroes (he used to swim competitively) or sex idols; one of them looks like a seventies’ porn star, he thinks now. Few people ever see them, as Simon has never had a steady boyfriend. As the redheaded man leaves, he makes the sign of a phone with his hand, but they haven’t exchanged numbers, or names. Assuming the barbershop is named for him, he calls Simon “Jean” when he says goodbye. (Much as he plays with mirrors, Bakker plays with names in this novel, with who is named or named only by their profession or misnamed or given a slur for a name or living with an “assumed” name.)
Popov and Tenerife seem incidental, but it’s these seemingly arbitrary details that spark the dual engines for the novel’s plot: the fantasy that Simon might hook up with one of the disabled teens, and the fantasy that Simon’s father might still be alive. While helping his mother in the pool, Simon is caught off-guard by the teens’ own lack of boundaries, their frank curiosity and naivety about private parts. Then Igor, who looks like Popov, clasps him from behind and won’t let go, and Simon gets an erection. After that—though his mother reassures him that the teens won’t have noticed, it’s just a physical response, meaningless—he becomes obsessed with the young man, fantasizing about how to ” …get him to molest me the way he does in the pool, casually and shamelessly.” We’ve already observed Simon’s trespassing of boundaries as a barber, as he caresses a customer’s jugular and reflects on the fact that he can get away with it. Before we are quite aware, the fantasy becomes planning, indistinguishable from a writer’s plotting. One Saturday Simon drives to the pool so that he will have a car there and could, if he chose, abscond with Igor; the next, he arranges to give Igor a ride back to the barbershop for a haircut. It’s significant that Igor looks in his own eyes, during the haircut, not at Simon in the mirror.
Without fantasy, nothing would happen in the novel. Simon would continue to cut hair in his indolent fashion, murmuring ‘Hm’ while clients natter away; he would swim laps in the pool and help his mother out on the weekends. He would accept that his mother never remarried and that he himself had no real claim to the tragedy, because he never met his father. His father would stay dead.
Cornelis died in a plane crash before Simon was born. Not just any plane crash, but the worst airplane disaster in history, when two Boeing 747 passenger jets, one American and one Dutch, collided on a foggy runway in Tenerife on March 27, 1977. We go down the rabbit hole of research with Simon, who watches documentaries and interviews and reads whatever can be found online. But we know that this is “actually” the writer’s research: At one point the writer, while drunk, starts spouting his research about the plane accident to the bartender Oscar, grumbling that his editors will cut it all anyway. This self-effacing humor is one of Bakker’s charms: Oscar tires of the writer’s drunken self-centered monologues. Simon, who hasn’t started or finished any of the four books the writer has given him, tries to remember their drunken sexual encounter: “…it wasn’t the idea that he should do anything else or that there might be room at some stage for him to concentrate on his own body. The writer described, he executed. Or was that just an idea he’d got into his head? He can’t even remember if he came or not.” It’s a sendup, but also a critique of a writer’s power: he can enact any fantasy he wants with his characters. Only his self-restraint, through revision if he doesn’t get it right the first time, can check him. When Oscar later asks if the writer took Simon home, the writer says no, he was too good looking, and he didn’t want to risk rejection. It’s this undercurrent of self-deprecation, shared by Bakker’s characters, that makes them so personable. We feel humor and kindness behind them; they are stuck, and we want to see them move forward.
Simon comes to acknowledge the impact his father’s death had on him, not just on his mother and his grandfather. As in The Twin, a conflict develops over who has the greater claim to grief when a man dies: wife, father, or son (or fiancée, father, or twin). As Jan says when Simon arranges a dinner for them, “What’s the flipping point of us having a who’s-suffered-the-most contest?” The only way out of such a grief triangle seems to be by drawing close to the others who have suffered. Simon learns from Jan that a young male trainee from the barbershop was on the same plane as his father, and from his mother that she had told Cornelis of her pregnancy the night before he left without telling her. We can’t avoid wondering: are these facts “true,” or are they the writer’s invention? And what is the justification for leaving us in this fictional limbo? When we start to read Cornelis’s story, it feels more hypothetical than Simon’s, because it enters the novel belatedly as the presumed work of “the writer”—even as we wonder, will the two strands meet?
The novel’s tension lies less in this potential meeting of father and son, however, than in watching an otherwise likeable character abuse or threaten to abuse his power over someone vulnerable. What if a young disabled man arouses lust in his caretaker? What if a closeted gay or bisexual man expecting a child with his wife walks out and leaves everyone to believe he died? Bakker did the same in The Twin, where we watch a son have power over an abusive, now incapacitated father. Bakker has set himself a tightrope act of walking us and his characters across a moral breach: proceeding slowly enough to make us increasingly uneasy without rejecting Simon (or his father) completely, hoping he is better than he seems, that is it only fantasy, that he won’t do the awful thing he seems about to do. And because of the metafictional nature of the story, we are equally hoping that the author will resolve things in some morally palatable, ethically sound, aesthetically satisfying way. The narrative conundrum is an ethical conundrum. For me this is Bakker’s unique achievement: finding these moral situations—these blind spots of fantasy—and bringing them through confrontation to a conclusion that satisfies.
When Cornelis goes to a 30-year commemoration for the victims of the plane crash, wondering if he will see his father, wife, and above all his son, he looks at the vulnerable heads of the mourners and thinks: “There’s something moving about it, about the crown of a head. Such a guileless part of a person, a part of your body you never see directly. He’d seen thousands and thousands of them in his lifetime. And he was also the one who showed the customers theirs. Slowly moving the mirror from one side of the back of the head to the other. ‘Satisfied?’.” We might remember the writer telling Simon, regarding the novel he’s writing about his father: “I think you’ll be satisfied when I’m finished.”
The barber’s mirror isn’t the mirror of narcissism but one of vulnerability, distancing, and indirect connection. At the crisis moment in his story, Cornelis looks at a familiar face “through one less mirror.” We can use a mirror to see our blind spots or to evade seeing ourselves directly. We can use it to spy on someone else, or to lock eyes with another: two people can see each other in a mirror while neither sees themselves.
Earlier, Simon has asked the writer how he writes sex scenes and is told he employs “a blank line.” This blank line becomes significant for Simon when he tries to erase his mortification over Igor: “this whole bit has to become a blank line. Because then you can, as the writer says, leave it to a reader or whoever to imagine it all, but in fact it won’t say anything at all. You can always fall back on that: it doesn’t say anything. It’s fantasy.” Is he (Bakker, the writer) admitting that he (Simon) isn’t real, as a character—that the events described didn’t “actually” happen? It’s not fantasy, we want to say to Simon: it’s fiction, a fantasy wrecked by reality. Oscar, at first a clowning presence at the bar, becomes real for Simon when he tells the story of following a man to his bedroom in Iran, risking his life for a night of love. They both had to read each other right. Simon, who is still on the brink, undecided whether to act on his obsession with Igor, thinks there’s a lesson here for him, but he’s not sure what it is.
In Simon’s last chapter, a swim coach observes Simon as he’s swimming and, complimenting his form, suggests he enter masters races again. More fantasy, we think–but just the right amount, a harmless refocusing, a way out of the indolence that his mother comments upon. Then the redheaded man reappears out of nowhere, just at the right time, like the farmhand who once kissed Helmer and returns in The Twin. The ending of the earlier novel felt like fantasy, hard to believe in; the relationship seemed like a way into a truer solitude, the solitude of the writer. Here, it seems like just enough of a step forward, a tentative step together.
Without fantasy, in Bakker’s fiction, nothing happens; but with only fantasy, you’d have the same problem. Fantasy must be spun into fiction, which is in fact much closer to reality, with all its constraints, than to fantasy. And then, in certain spots, and especially at the very end, the writer can leave a blank space for the reader’s own fantasy.
What makes fiction something other than fantasy? Bakker’s answer, I take it, is that characters properly imagined become real enough to stop the fantasy in its tracks. Cornelis’s last dog, Pablo, is well-socialized with dogs and people but inexplicably gives a low growl of warning whenever Cornelis pets him while he’s lying in his lap. Cornelis accepts that there is something unknowable about his dog, a boundary he must respect. “Of course, you’re not called Jean at all, are you?” the red-headed man says to Simon when they run into each other again at the pool, and with this recognition that he doesn’t know the first thing about Simon, we suspect their relationship might have a future.
Rebecca Starks
Rebecca Starks is the author of the poetry collections Fetch, Muse (Able Muse Press, 2021) and Time Is Always Now, a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Orca. She has a PhD in English from Stanford University, where her dissertation was on models of memory and Stoic thought in novels by Mary Shelley, Conrad, Joyce, and Proust; and she works as a freelance writing consultant and workshop leader. She grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and lives in Richmond, Vermont.