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Laura Miller from Slate had an interesting take on this topic 6 months ago--white males are still telling stories but not in the same numbers and not idolized as they were in the past. They're just another veg in the vegetable soup. A status many would argue they should have had all along. Frankly, that's fine with me. slate.com/culture/2023/…
Laura Miller from Slate had an interesting take on this topic 6 months ago--white males are still telling stories but not in the same numbers and not idolized as they were in the past. They're just another veg in the vegetable soup. A status many would argue they should have had all along. Frankly, that's fine with me. https://slate.com/culture/2023/11/white-guy-novels-franzen-nathan-hill-ben-fountain.html
Males--most particularly the white European ones-- have been front and center in literature and art for millennia. Since the Iliad and the cave drawings at Lascaux. Is it problematic if somebody else pre-empts some of their books being published for a few decades? I don't think it is. Isn't literature supposed to reveal a human condition as much a male POV? If it's the latter you want the 20th is a banquet to whet the most male-centric appetite.
Literature today is genuinely, authentically diverse. But it is only beginning to build a diverse catalog of stories about Africans, Asians, women, South Americans, queers, Indians, etc. People whose stories and histories were long neglected but are just as valid, just as worthwhile. If the scales are tipped briefly in another direction this white guy can live with it.
There are indeed fewer stories written by/about us but we're hardly an endangered species.
Ross isn't just talking about young straight white male authors, though. Young straight male authors, regardless of race, are low in numbers, visibility, and promotion. I'm Asian, so I have a special interest in Asian American literature. Besides Tony Tulathimutte, there's no young(ish) straight Asian American male writer who writes fearlessly from his own perspective. And it's not as if there was ever a thriving movement of such Asian American male writers that once dominated but is now, in the name of equality, taking a backseat.
Right. I wanted to make the point that straight men, in general, are vanishing, and the link to your essay at the end on Asian males was a nod in that direction. The Asian male writer is in a special bind because, unlike we Jewish men, there was no golden era of American letters for the Asian male. He was marginalized for the entirety of the 20th century. Now, in the 21st, certain, polite narratives are permitted from upper middle class PMCs but no one else, really.
I feel like the only literary genre where straight Asian-American men have really “broken through” is sci-fi/fantasy. Ted Chiang, Charles Yu, and Ken Liu are the OGs, but you also have younger writers like Tom Lin and Mike Chen. And often the subject matter is fairly literary (Interior Chinatown stands out as a book that got more litfic acclaim but really isn’t that different from the rest of Yu’s work). It’s really interesting how different genres have developed in terms of representation and the stories that are deemed “marketable”.
Yes, that's something I've definitely noticed for a while too. I'm betting it's because these Asian American male writers perceive that there's no cultural, political, or social value placed on their real-life experiences, so the only way to make it is to write allegorically about their perspectives (if they even do that at all).
Anton Hur has a novel coming out, and you guessed it, it's a sci-fi one. Interestingly, he tweeted earlier in the year that "Asian women are sexualized, Asian men are erased. Tale as old as time." No doubt he has a lot he wants to say and write about this matter, but I'm guessing he will (or has) received no interest from mainstream publishing. If anything, he'll probably have experienced harsh pushback because a lot of various groups and sub-groups benefit from the status quo he mentioned.
https://x.com/AntonHur/status/1767140243898245396
Glad to see someone in this comment section mention (albeit indirectly) Nathan Hill, who I think stands out in the contemporary literary scene for being so ambitious, in ways obviously comparable to DFW in an era where that's critical poison. But that "throwback" quality is a double-edged sword: much as I liked "The Nix," Hill seemed incapable of writing about the gamer character in terms beyond "Fatty McFatFuck obesed his sebaceous mass all over the Alienware Tri-Mode Wireless Gaming Keyboard." It was kind of jarring, given the book is quite good at everything else, that it had so little to say about the 21st century psyche beyond stereotypes. (IMO anyway. Maybe someone else here has a nicer take on Hill than I do. I still need to read "Wellness.")
Hill is interesting - to me, he was a bit worse than Hallberg, and I couldn't get drawn into The Nix. I haven't read Wellness yet.
1) What argument do you have for "all stories" being equally worthwhile?
2) The Odyssey is rather heavy on females who are either very clever (Penelope), or powerful and central to the plot (Circe, Calypso, Athena).
3) Cave drawings at Lascaux seem to be a Rorschach test. Marx thought they showed how art served material needs, teaching people how to hunt. You think they show a male POV. It seems at least as likely that they were drawn by the women who stayed home with the toddlers, and perhaps they were celebrations of good paternal providers who brought back meat. Or that they even expressed erotic longing, and that the linear stick figure bodies were not simply just simple, but were a depiction of a longer leaner body that was missed and the object of yearning.
I don't think all stories are equally worthwhile. That's rubbish. I do though believe that all types of people are capable of telling worthwhile stories and should be given the chance to do so. Not just the usual suspects who have had a monopoly on the art of storytelling and the industry of publishing for centuries.
Furthermore, putting females in a story (the Odyssey is your citation) is not the same thing as telling a story from a women's perspective. If you are genuinely interested in one try Emily Watson's recent translation of the Odyssey. Her translation and her foot notes reveal the misogyny and the bias of both translators and ancient Greeks. Or read the trilogy of novels by Pat Barker focused on the Iliad. They're illuminating and riveting.
I certainly believe men are capable of great storytelling. My point was that men have had the stage to themselves for centuries. Now that they don't or are crowded out they feel aggrieved and voiceless. Rather like all those other groups who had no voice for so long. That is no consolation to people like Mr. Barkan, but I think he's intelligent enough to see the irony and mature enough to understand life isn't always fair.
Good night. LB
Thanks for the suggestions, sincerely. Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Josephine Leslie, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton have been working away for almost three centuries now. I'd say the novel is one of the places that the men have NOT held the stage to themselves for a long time.