The title and distressed black and white cover of Michelle Winters’ second novel, Hair for Men, are as deceptively straightforward as the story itself. Simultaneously a grimy bildungsroman and evolving philosophical treatise, Hair for Men follows a girl forced, like every single one of us, to figure out what type of woman she should become in a world full of badly behaved men. However, instead of positioning the men as villains with a capital V, the story starts to prod at the reasons and circumstances behind individual behavior, and gives its male characters some room to both consider themselves and be considered.
Louise spends her youngest years as a frequent sidekick to her father, a shampoo salesman who charms the patrons of every hair salon he visits. After telling her father that she “loves men” the way Burt Reynolds loves women, he tells her that isn’t “something [she] can just say.” He warns Louise that most of the men she’ll encounter in life won’t be easy to love. He then embarks on what Louise later realizes was a program to harden her against the many injustices he knew she would endure in life. When Louise gets humiliated by a male classmate, she starts taking her cues from Henry Rollins and the guys at her local record shop—skating to school so she can skip the bus, moshing at punk shows to release whatever’s pent up, starting fights with her parents at every opportunity. Louise has hair dressing in her DNA and knows she wants to be a barber, but the men in the shops she visits all laugh at her. While working in a family hair salon reminiscent of Super Cuts, Louise gets scouted by the coolest-looking woman she’s ever seen to work at her shop, Hair for Men.
Each barber employed at Hair for Men gets her own room full of high-end equipment, some antique, in which to see her clients. Some men arrive with the wrong idea that Hair for Men is a place to receive services other than “revolutionary cut, shave, and style” but the regulars know better. Yes, you can receive “more” than that, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable. The Hair for Men barbershop combines luxuriously presented food, drink, and efficiency with other things like a listening ear, a lack of judgment, and compassion. Hair for Men is a place where men can be who they actually are and discuss the things that others in their lives don’t expect, like gardening, or grief. At Hair for Men, men are allowed to like what they like and feel how they feel without the unfair expectation to remain unmoved by the best and worst things happening around them. It also proves helpful to Louise who begins to view men as more complicated and perhaps less deserving of her ire. But then she meets more men, some multiple times, and her opinions change again.
Throughout the novel, Winters grants access to all of Louise’s most lurid fantasies of revenge against the classmate who hurt her. Their violence has the power to suggest you might be reading a different type of book altogether. In fact, the very first chapter feels very much like it belongs in a crime novel. There are moments of grittiness sprinkled here and there, but Winters never drops the story at hand to go full tilt into the grime. The feeling of filth does linger, however, like a film on every scene, keeping you anchored to the harshness of Louise’s experiences even when things in her life improve. Rather than reaching completely carefree levels of happiness, Louise is kept at the mercy of life’s ever-changing tides. The highs don’t make her dizzy and the lows don’t have her coughing up magma. Like most of the folks who’ll read about her, she exists somewhere in the middle more often than not, going with the flow and leaving room for change.
Only a little more than a third of the novel is spent with Louise at the Hair for Men shop, but it is nevertheless a pivotal time for her. Her urge to beat the rage out of herself and into someone else’s face fades as her client roster fills. It would have been great to spend more time at the shop with Louise’s colleagues and clients, learning more about them and how they ended up there. But Hair for Men, the novel, has a mission it sticks to, which is for its protagonist to figure out how she feels about men based on her own experiences of them. Louise learns to meet people where they are and that it’s okay to want others to do the same for you.
It’s so satisfying how open Hair for Men is to characters changing their minds. Louise’s life morphs quite a bit from front cover to back, but you end the story knowing that Louise will be able to deal with each new turn her life takes as it comes. For example, while working at the shop, twenty-something Louise has firm opinions on whether or not she’ll pursue motherhood or even be any good at it, but ends the book in a different place. This story makes it clear that Louise is looking for a defining philosophy, but never gives her one that isn’t eventually dismantled. She changes as her life does, beyond those points that in the moment seem insurmountable.
Hair for Men is a reassuring, funny, sometimes tragic read that reminds us possibilities exist for as long as we do, and they don’t have to be huge to be life-changing. One decision, seen through, is more than enough to turn the things you thought you knew forever on their heads.
FICTION
Hair for Men
by Michelle Winters
House of Anansi Press
Published August 20th, 2024
