From Misogyny to No Man's Land

The vanishing male in contemporary literature

In 1963, Mary McCarthy published The Group. A ranging social novel that follows eight female friends after their graduation from Vassar College in 1933, The Group was a smashing success, soaring to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and becoming, in the way few works of literary fiction are, a social phenomenon. Revolutionary for its attention to a sort of modern female interiority that was otherwise absent from popular fiction—characters discuss birth control, particularly the use of a diaphragm—The Group was, in the words of McCarthy herself, bereft of male consciousness. For young women, especially those grappling with unsatisfying marriages and unfulfilled professional ambitions, the novel was a touchstone, and it won, initially at least, rave reviews from literary critics. But among her own cohort—the left-leaning novelists, essayists, and critics who made up the New York Intellectuals—The Group was an embarrassment. Norman Podhoretz, the young editor of Commentary and not yet an avowed neoconservative, savaged the novel in strikingly personal terms, dismissing McCarthy as an “intellectual on the surface, a furniture-describer at heart.” She was, to Podhoretz, no more than one more member of the “tribe of contemporary lady novelists.” Norman Mailer, in his own review, went even further—McCarthy, he charged, had “failed and even failed miserably to do more than write the best novel the editors of the women’s magazines ever conceived in their secret ambitions.” Her reputation, he fumed, was overstated because she had never been able to “get tough enough to go with the boys.” The literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, one of McCarthy’s closest friends, was no kinder. Writing under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne, Hardwick produced a short, scathing parody of The Group in the New York Review of Books. mocking a scene in the novel in which one of the characters loses her virginity.

All of this is recounted in Ronnie A. Grinberg’s incisive new analysis of these midcentury intellects, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. Hardwick and McCarthy were the rare goys of the bunch, which included both Jewish Normans, both Jewish Irvings (Kristol and Howe), Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Midge Decter, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, and Daniel Bell. Many, but not all, had begun their careers as socialists who opposed Stalin and later evolved into staunch Cold Warriors, anti-Communist liberals committed to a strong national defense and opposition to anything Soviet-inflected. Podhoretz, his wife Decter, and Kristol all swerved right and became anti-feminist, anti-gay Reaganites. Most others remained, to varying degrees, on the left, if they all shared a skepticism of student radicals, Black Power, and second wave feminism. What Grinberg captures in her study, beginning in the 1930s with the founding of the Partisan Review, the great literary organ of the New York intellectuals, was how consciously masculine this world was, how men and women alike conceived of literature and debate in starkly gendered terms. They were, in a range of approaches, striving to reclaim the novel from its perceived nineteenth century feminization in the West, when, in Grinberg’s telling, “ladies were the main audience of literature,” with Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and George Eliot regarded as masters of the form. Women were, at the same time, taking over the teaching profession. Men taught at the university level, but a vast majority of working men and women did not attend college; to encounter literature at all, in the 1800s and early 1900s, meant learning from women. While women would remain in the teaching profession, the novel, according to Grinberg, shed some of its feminine associations in the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation masculinized, along with a distinctly Jewish intelligentsia, the conception of a writer and literature broadly. The great women of the New York set—Arendt, Hardwick, and even McCarthy—were all wary of what would come to be called female empowerment. Biological and Freudian arguments for distinct differences between the sexes held great sway. “It is not suggested that muscles write books, but there is a certain sense in which talent and experience being equal, they may be considered a bit of an advantage,” Hardwick once wrote. Vigor, she argued, was a more masculine quality, and it was needed to write well. “Of course the best literature by women is superior to most of the work done by men,” she added, yet “it is only the whimsical, cantankerous, the eccentric critic, or those who refuse the occasion for such distinctions, who would say that any literary work by a woman, marvelous as these may be, is on a level with the very greatest accomplishments of men.”

Hardwick, rightfully, has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years—she wrote as well on literature as any American who has ever lived—but this kind of argumentation would be understandably decried today. No literary critic, at least, would strain to elevate any novel on the strength of its author’s maleness. Takedowns of the like aimed at The Group—embittered and furiously gendered—would never be published in prominent outlets. There is no talk of “lady” writers, little phallocentric swashbuckling from neo-Mailers, and no critics who would bemoan female interiority. We live in, comparatively, an enlightened age. The contemporary American literary scene is constricted by class—too many of the affluent writing and editing, too few of the working and poor doing the same—and a wearying ideological homogeny, but it has largely slayed the demon of misogyny. If men still sit at the top of the publishing conglomerates, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note. We have come quite far from 1963. So far, in fact, that when literary types seek to mock a certain kind of young, very gauche, and very white male, they reach for the dead: David Foster Wallace and J.D. Salinger. Wallace, in particular, remains a fixation, despite a suicide that occurred when George W. Bush was still president. Tragically, Salinger managed to outlive him by more than a year.

How many prominent, celebrated male novelists, Westerners in particular, can you name who are under the age of forty? The women are easy to tick off: Sally Rooney, Emma Cline, Brit Bennett, Catherine Lacey, Yaa Gyasi, Raven Leilani, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Alexandra Kleeman, Tess Gunty, and Téa Obreht. This list is in no way exhaustive. Buzzy literary figures like Lauren Oyler, Jia Tolentino, and Honor Levy, just twenty-six, are all women. The prominent male novelists of the same generation—the award-winners, the best-sellers, the acclaimed—are in shorter supply. Their ranks include Real Life author Brandon Taylor and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, whose Chain Gang All-Stars was shortlisted for the National Book Award and praised on The Today Show. Mateo Askaripour, with Black Buck, cracked the Times best-seller list. Zain Khalid and Andrew Boryga are rising stars. Sean Thor Conroe briefly attracted attention with Fuccboi, an autofictive novel in “bro-speak” which polarized reviewers. Jordan Castro has won strong reviews for The Novelist. Édouard Louis might be the biggest of all, though he’s most famous in France. Placing the cutoff at forty disadvantages the men much more. Pulitzer Prize-winner Joshua Cohen is out, as is Ben Lerner. Justin Torres, recent winner of the National Book Award for Blackouts, is older than forty, as are Tommy Orange, Justin Taylor, and Teddy Wayne, who is one of the few prestige, mainstream novelists tackling the alienation and anger of the contemporary male.

There are many successful male novelists working today, but they are typically deeper into their careers, like the aforementioned Lerner or Jonathan Franzen, who embodies a late twentieth and early twentieth century archetype that is fast receding: the very prominent, quasi-swaggering, and openly cerebral white male (and usually heterosexual) novelist. Franzen was a contemporary and rival of Wallace, who attracts lingering scorn for Infinite Jest, a 1,000-page postmodern, systems novel that no corporate publisher would release today but sold more than 40,000 copies in 1996, the year Wallace turned thirty-four. There is nothing inherently masculine about the postmodern novel, but since the most famed practitioners were men—Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and William Gaddis—it has been coded as such. The form, at its best, blew literature wide open, and at its worst—at its most straining and clumsy, its inadvertent kitsch—it resembled the work of Jonathan Safran Foer, one of the last white male wunderkinds modern literature has produced. Foer’s novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, were crammed with literary pyrotechnics that haven’t aged particularly well and struck discerning readers as pale imitations of more talented predecessors, though contemporary reviews offered lavish praise for his style. Foer publishes less these days, and lingers on in meme form as the thirsty, bespectacled writer who swapped emails with Natalie Portman.

I spent a period, in my late teens and early twenties, fearing the rise of another Foer, a Foer who wasn’t me. Like Foer, I am a white, male, heterosexual Jew; like Foer, I have pretentions. When I started to seriously read literature in the late 2000s, I was well aware of Foer-mania and waited, warily, for someone twelve years younger than him—my own age—to storm the citadel of literature and do very much what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a sensation, anointed and thoroughly prodigal, everything he was at that moment; I had disdain for his writing, but not for his worldly success. I was of Brooklyn, not Washington D.C., and I was knocking out furious drafts of novels no one would read while attending an unfashionable state school on eastern Long Island, not Princeton University. I was ready, after I graduated college, to forge my own path as a writer, to battle forward in my unconsciously masculine manner—I had no regard for Hemingway, but I conceived of literature in the terms of athletics or even war, contest and competition, triumphs and destruction—and ascend, somehow, in a world of literature and the arts I only dimly understood, despite my best efforts. In the meantime, the wunderkinds like me—the white men—seemed to be aging. Keith Gessen, co-founder of N+1, was profiled in the Times in advance of the publication of his first novel, when he was thirty-three. Chad Harbach, another N+1 co-founder, was around thirty-six when The Art of Fielding, his Melville-flavored baseball novel, was published to great praise; this novel had, I was keenly aware, secured him an advance north of $600,000. And finally, there was Garth Risk Hallberg, not yet forty, arriving with his 1970s New York novel City on Fire, which Christian Lorentzen rightly pegged as overstuffed and underwhelming upon its 2015 publication. If Foer was the last true white male (and Jewish) wunderkind, Hallberg was the last of something else: the debut male novelist transmogrified into an event, with a $2 million book contract, profiles in Vogue and New York, and film rights scooped up posthaste. City on Fire never quite delivered, and would-be Hallbergs didn’t emerge in the rest of the decade. Hurrying through my twenties, I did not achieve any wild literary success, but I was surprised to find few like me—young white male novelists, possibly Jewish—attaining anything much better. There would be no new Foers. In a strange way, this came as a relief. Those most like ourselves stoke resentment and envy.

Just as there is nothing inherently masculine about the systems novel, there is no gendered component to the panoramic social novel, which writers like Nell Zink and Jennifer Egan can execute with panache. There is no need, certainly, for event novels—novels can just be novels, without hype machines grafted on—or men, like Wallace, to attain cultic status. The most anticipated novels today are, with few exceptions, not being written by men. Publishing has, luckily, paid far more attention to the LGBTQ experience than it ever had in the twentieth century, and gay male stories, once left to a few novelists like James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, are explored far more widely, as are trans stories—it is no longer merely straight cis men, like Hubert Selby Jr., imagining male characters who want to be women. It can be argued, given how dominant heteronormative narratives were in the last hundred years, there is no further need to publish novels that grapple with the rage, lusts, and resentments of the straight male, especially in the United States. No need, certainly, for whites—Jews and Christians in particular—or those who might hold noxious views on race, politics, and empire. No novels are readily being pumped out from the perspectives of the men who voted for Donald Trump in the last two elections.

Novels exist in a marketplace, and women read more than men. Women, today, graduate college at higher rates. The college-educated dominate the ranks of publishing. And it is in college where an individual, unless she or he is a particularly motivated autodidact, is exposed to literature. Why should a publishing house try to nurture the career of a young man when a young woman may prove more lucrative? Factor in the historical misogyny of the literary world and a publisher is able to simultaneously feel virtuous and fulfill a capitalist imperative. A more uncomfortable question, for men, can also be asked: if more books were published by men with explicitly male themes—if there were male versions of Ottessa Moshfegh who wrote on inceldom or how young men do bond—would there actually be a wider male readership? It’s the old chicken and egg dilemma. The audience won’t emerge because the product isn’t there and the product isn’t there because the audience is elsewhere. Men, of course, can read and enjoy books by women—Zink, along with Virginia Woolf, are two of my favorite novelists—but there is the sticky biological reality that, on balance, women will probably prefer reading women and men will prefer reading men. Boys, in particular, seem to crave male teachers and role models in the classroom. As they age, and if they want to read, they might be drawn to the fiction of writers like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. They might want literature that, at the bare minimum, codes masculine.

None of this might be of pressing national import. The people who read will read, and those who won’t read won’t. The shrinking male in modern literary fiction matters more, rather, for what is getting left out: the interiority of men, nearly half the population, and particularly those who are failing. What I wonder about is what has replaced literature for most men. I wanted to be a Major League baseball player and when I could not do that—when my talent was evidently in short supply—I decided I would be a writer. One, it seemed, could bleed well enough into the other, one arena of achievement swapped for another. A career in letters was, implicitly, masculine enough. What was missing, in my late adolescence, were the seductions that rob the time of most younger men today, and I am not referring to online pornography, mostly because I am not convinced men can’t lust alone and then attempt to write literature. Rather, it’s video gaming and online sports gambling, the two great 2020s addictions, that probably keep men most thoroughly away from books. To become a reader and writer, one must take solace in empty time. The mind must have moments for wandering and imaginative growth. Gaming, which still remains a mostly male pastime, absorbs whatever idle hours the twentieth century male might have had at home, when instead of plugging away for hours on Call of Duty he thumbed through a Vonnegut paperback or a back issue of Esquire. We have undoubtedly left the golden era of male readership, when a generation of World War II vets, propped up by the GI bill, enrolled in college, read men’s magazines, and turned to literary fiction to make sense of their own world. Military veterans still publish novels, but they tend to be the Ivy League-educated, like Phil Klay and Elliot Ackerman; if men arrive at all to literature today, they are not working class, not poor, not the sort who’ve known humiliation and deprivation.

There are women who game and gamble; there are just many more men who do it, who cannot sit idle without checking the line on the Knicks game or launching new missions on Fortnite. What can a novel offer against a video game? Text on a page struggles to compete with the worlds already unspooled before you, in beautiful graphics, and there might be some camaraderie too, if you’re chatting with a friend through a headset. Other forms of entertainment, like film and television, existed in stasis with the novel because they could only be so immersive. A film is seen in theaters and left behind. Television can be watched for hours, but before the rise of the smartphone it sat in a fixed box and offered programming at a particular time. In Write Like a Man, Grinberg argues the male New York intellectuals viewed writing as an activity that could be synonymous with masculinity. A well-executed essay or novel of some sweep might get a woman into bed. Do men today think this way? There are all kinds of reported gripes from educated women on the state of the American male, how he’s just not measuring up, how he’s drifted. The modern male, perhaps, is not capable of wooing through literature. Or, just as unsettling, he does not want to. He has no interest. For him, there is no link any longer between literature and the aspirational—status, sex, or a better way to live.

The novel matters because there is still no artform that more thoroughly plumbs human consciousness. Artificial intelligence can write lousy novels or plagiarized novels, but not those that speak to what it means, in a passing moment, to be alive. Novels offer ambition on a range not plausible in the land of screens because there is no budget required, no gimmick or technological mastery—it is raw imagination, the greatest achievement of humankind, and it’s the print books that will outlast us, not an internet vulnerable to revision, corrosion, and collapse. It might be time to know, again, the interiority of men, American men, in all of their joys, lusts, indignities, mundanities, and horrors. What is ticking inside the American male of the mid-2020s and what can novelists tell us about that? What is today’s Rabbit Angstrom or Frank Bascombe like? What might the Patrick Bateman born in 1997 be up to? And what of those far below, fully denied wealth and status, the men barely working or not working at all? The incels, the volcels, the MGTOWs? The gambling addicts and the gamers? Those who, instead of Hemingway, wish to be Rogan? The Latino and Black men drawn to Trump? The Asian men who do not, in fact, want to master the SAT? There’s a strange, teeming world out there. Literature can’t—and shouldn’t—be blind to it. If it’s going to be complete and speak to this era of tumult, it must find a way to those who aren’t near books at all. It must expand.