Where have all the men gone?

It’s all doom and gloom out there in the world. But it’s finally warm in New York, I went to stay with one of my closest friends over Easter, my sister got engaged, and my gel nails are still perfect after 3 full weeks. So I am largely thriving.

Who is not thriving apparently is men. Specifically, male novelists. Granta announced their “Best Young Novelists under 40” this week and of the twenty selected, only a few were men. The New Statesman ran a slightly salty, slightly tongue in cheek article about how it isn’t cool to be a literary man anymore. Gone are the days of alcoholism, glamorous poverty, and womanizing to produce the next great novel. This is not me editorializing; the article is all about vibes. It is also clickbait, I’m pretty sure. It juxtaposes David Foster Wallace (allegedly made terminally uncool by a spate of DFW bro type articles) with John Green, the new brand of male novelist, condemned to write unthreatening feel-good bestsellers.

Obviously, the juxtaposition here is more about literary vs. commercial fiction than anything else. With the gutting of social services, the runaway financialization of the housing market, and the state’s marked decrease of interest in funding the arts with the end of the Cold War and decades of neoliberalism, the life of the starving artist has become less realistic and less appealing even for the well off. Add to this Amazon, celebrity book clubs, the emergence of streaming services with an inexhaustible appetite for IP, the stagnation of publishing wages. It’s a bad time to make money in literary fiction.

This is a fairly obvious point. The publishing industry and its authors are still overwhelmingly white (in the US, the figure is around 90% for both and I suspect it’s similar in the UK). There’s not much data about authors’ class backgrounds that I could find but I am well enough versed in mainstream publishing to be able to say with reasonable certainty, it tends to be very middle class. According to data research by Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, prize winners in the US tend to have prestigious MFA’s and often to have attended Ivy League universities. If women have gained traction on mainstream literary fiction lists, it is largely middle-class white women. This shift has also coincided with a drop in book advances.

The New Statesman isn’t the only publication concerned about the ascendance of women in book publishing. NPR’s “Planet Money” ran an article about this shift last month titled “Women now dominate the book business. Why there and not other creative industries?” Although the piece is by an economist, it attributes the success of women novelists to writing being largely a solitary endeavor, whereas, say, directing a film requires more hierarchical and collaborative work. Directing a film also requires significant amounts of funding right from the start, something the piece does not touch upon. A more thoughtful 2021 Guardian article also asks the same question, wondering whether publishing has become an industry solely oriented towards middle-class white women. The editors and writers quoted variously express dismay about the industry’s narrowness, a desire to find books that explore masculinity more openly, a general disgust with the state of literary fiction, a theory that men are afraid to write about sex because of cancel culture.

The Guardian article is quoted in the New Statesman piece with the formidable Megan Nolan suggesting that male writers just aren’t cool anymore. But in the original piece, Nolan also says that she thinks the dramatic uptick of women in literary writing largely stems from shifting genre boundaries: “it’s only relatively recent that you could have fiction written by a woman about intimate subjects like sex – and for it to be classed as literary fiction.”

In other words, it used to be that there was literary fiction, the domain of men, and then there was women’s writing. Now the two seem to have merged. I think the extent to which literary fiction feels dull, formulaic, and timid is partly a result of writers assimilating to the standards of literary fiction rather than it really changing much. However you may feel about Roth, Updike, Mailer, and the other postwar realist male novelists, their concerns were not particularly different from the broad scope of literary fiction published now. David Foster Wallace called Updike “the voice of perhaps the single most self-absorbed generation” (a criticism often echoed in reviews of millennial novels) and described his narrators as “incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause.”

Somehow literary fiction has become synonymous with solipsism. And many of the women writers on today’s prize lists have come to aspire to solipsism as their cultural inheritance, to being “art monsters”, and to describing middle-class life exactly as it is. In a very good piece for Lux Magazine, Kameel Mir wonders why all the recent novels about alienation at work seem to feel so disempowered and hopeless, why there is no gesture of solidarity in any of them. “The powerlessness at the core of these narratives is what proves that these novels are not exactly “critiques” of labor — instead, they run on what philosopher Paolo Virno calls “sentiments of disenchantment,” which can integrate discontented workers further into capitalism. Their anxiety is channeled into productivity, paranoia into need to please, despondency into acceptance. All the more telling, then, that these novels tend to use women workers to animate their arcs of submission.”

A lot of this obviously has to do with the vantage point of writers (in a similar way to the “eat the rich” filmmakers). When I read En Salle by Claire Baglin, a French novel about a young woman who works at a drive-thru fast food restaurant, I was struck by how much more work seemed integrated into her life than in the other disaffected woman at work novels I’ve read. Work is similarly an alienating and exhausting space for the narrator of En Salle and there’s no particular redemption coming for her. But it’s also a story about growing up working class, about her relationship with her father, about eating at that same fast food chain as a child and how her life has been prescribed and restricted by her class status. Work has a different function in En Salle than it does in any of the office novels that Kameel mentions. It’s not a metaphor for the hopelessness and alienation of middle class life. It’s an active space of negotiation, resistance, despair.

The writing I’ve liked the most recently by male novelists has tried to break out of the realist literary fiction mold. It’s not so much fiction about men (although much of it interrogates models of masculinity) as it is fiction that attempts to subvert genre and form. In Simeon Marsalis’s brilliant and non-linear To Lie is to Grin, the narrator, struggling to write after a painful breakup, reflects “I was becoming upset with the propensity my fiction had of seeming as if a white man had written it.” Time skips around in Marsalis’s writing, lies and truth blend together uneasily, resurrecting buried history. In Brother Alive by Zain Khalid, a ghostly, mind-bending speculative novel, the protagonist has an unreal sibling, a hallucinatory or magical realist presence he calls “Brother,” with whom he forges lifelong intimacy. In SterlingHolyWhiteMountain’s New Yorker short story, “Featherweight”, he writes disparagingly and tenderly about sex: “What a wonder the young are. The world is a conflagration and they find nothing to do but play grab-ass.” In Gabriel Smith’s Drift short story, “The Complete,” a young man goes on “nowhere” dates and battles addiction while trying to write non-starter novel projects about growing up, growing old, falling in love. Eventually, he gives up on plot and the writing gets easier.

These days “novels can swerve one of two ways,” writes Jonah Howell in an essay about Brother Alive. “They can root themselves in the ideologically overcoded realm of “lived experience.” This is by far the easier route; hence the dominance, at least in the mainstream fiction market, of autofiction. Or they can engage in extensive world-building, to endow their narratives, in the absence of a stable standard, with proprietary realities.” It is the second, Howell argues, that literary fiction has struggled or been reluctant to do. World building is often understood as escapist, as ideological, as the less serious realm of science fiction and fantasy. But in a profoundly hegemonic culture, trying to use strictly realist writing to unsettle the boundaries of our reality is a bit like using standard math to describe the strangest corners of physics. It gets you nowhere. It’s that Audre Lorde quote everyone uses about the master’s tools and the master’s house, but in a serious way. If you write conventional fiction, you may well end up producing conventional thoughts.

What is male fiction anyway? It is a symptom of a deeply impoverished literary culture to cling to an ideal of rugged and troubled heterosexual masculinity, to the ubiquity of anorexic and disaffected sad girl heroines, perhaps to cling to realism all together. If we are not allowed to be imaginative in the realm of fiction, to strain the limits and possibilities of the lives we lead, what is really the point of making up stories anyway?

Speaking of men, the cultural production I’m most excited for right now is “I’m a Virgo,” the new TV series by Boots Riley which will be released later this year (not during Virgo season strangely). In the trailer, the 13 foot tall gentle giant protagonist shatters stereotypes about Virgos everywhere, declaring “Well, I’m a Virgo and Virgos love adventure!” If only that were true. (I too am a Virgo).

If any of you love books by men that break out of this mold, please send me recommendations.