There are such high barriers to entry now for the straight white male Zoomer and I don't think the incentives are really there anymore. You are writing for an elite blue tribe world that hates you for your demographic categories. Publishing is still super-woke. Even if you got something published to some acclaim the backlash would negate it all. Maybe if the heterodox liberal world keeps getting bigger that will change again.
Thank you for this. I think reading for ‘difference’ is most underrated. I don’t want to be validated in my views. I want to be challenged. It’s so depressing to think of literature as a marketplace where more women read, so let’s sell women writers to them. Someone comes at me with a novel by a person of my gender, race, class and nationality, I’ll run screaming into the night. If I were a younger male writer today, I’d be terrified of being cancelled or simply never published if I evoked a compelling account of male subjectivity. Roth and Bellow (and others) were fearless in their day. Feted - yes. But with heaping serves of opprobrium, some deserved, some not. They did not apologise for men but they also had no illusions. (BTW I am female, feminist and neither Jewish nor American). It takes not only talent but conviction to write something that will last and the marketplace cannot be your guide.
>I’d be terrified of being cancelled or simply never published if I evoked a compelling account of male subjectivity.
People used to have these things called diaries where they'd write and write for no one but themselves. Now we have this thing called the internet where anyone can publish anything under any name & everyone can see it.
I don't believe for a second that anyone is hesitating to put pen to paper (finger to key) out of "fear." It is called sloth and vanity. "Why write if no one will like it and no one will pay me?" Why live?
I think it’s about a case of the more things change the more they stay the same. Sure, female writers are arguably enjoying a well earned, long overdue moment in the sun but the writing itself seems as repressed and angry as the male writing it means to counter. Rooney especially strikes me as deeply repressed and angry and unable to in anyway attach to those emotions without fading away into the alien. What’s interesting about this wave of success with female writers certainly isn’t the writing. Most of it is above average but nobodies really slaying it nowadays. You can tell most fiction writers haven’t even seriously touched Shakespeare and so their talent can’t do anything to overcome their narrow worldview, imo. It’s not the writing that keeps us watching and paying attention, it’s the utter lack of self awareness. It’s like most female writers read the first half of The Sun Also Rises and then said, “Oh, I know how this book ends” and set it down. We keep waiting for them to grow up and laugh at their own joke they are telling but instead they are looking at us deadpanned and serious and you’re not certain if it’s ok to laugh.
We will know we are getting somewhere when certain male writers are re-engaged and finally correctly read. Writers who have been long disparaged for being “masculine” even tho their writing isn’t the least bit masculine. For example, Wallace was well aware of the joke at all times and made sure that the absurdity was present in everything he wrote. It wasn’t arrogance. It was humility. Philip Roth is another amazingly sensitive writer who dressed his books up to please the New York scene but that always attacked the premises they claimed to praise. The Ghost Writer was Roth disclosing his secret identity to the world. That Zimmerman was a character and the ghost writer was his true self. That to make it in publishing he had had to invent a fake persona to protect himself and to get past the censors he had to bury the true message of his work.
Women have done little with their newly acquired power to challenge the hierarchy of repression and censorship. They just spread the wealth. Now gay people get repressed literature. Now trans people do. The same daily serving of anger, estrangement and disconnection. They are exactly what they came here to destroy, and like the men of yesteryear, are totally blind to the actual undercurrent of their thoughts, feelings and actions. You couldn’t write it better if you tried. It’s the dull blade of human ego and ambition masquerading as social justice and “opportunity.”
This is brilliant Ross, and I basically agree, although I dislike many of the women writers that you mention, and I find some of the finest writers working in the mystery and speculative fiction genres… but the need for men to read is pressing… The writer I studied, Upton Sinclair, change the lives of thousands of men and women alike long past the jungle.
I bet men are still writing, but they aren't getting read by editors or anyone else in a position to sell them. It's why the quality of our entertainment is complete trash right now.
This is incredible, Ross, so thoughtful and interesting. A lot of these questions have been on my mind as well, and there were a number of details I could personally relate to (I too was in college at the height of Foer's wunderkind legend, and I felt completely overwhelmed - oddly tormented - by his reputation, and this nagging discomfort that I just wasn't getting it and couldn't match up). Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.")
Excellent article, which I very much agree with. Not only is the modern male voice absent in our contemporary literature, it’s also missing from our most prestigious cultural outlets, magazines like the New Yorker or NYRB. Even suggesting that young men are suffering feels like a politically incendiary topic, a claim to be avoided if you don’t want to be pariah among other cultural elites. The result is that the places where men can find anything resembling sympathy also happen to be spaces that peddle the worst species of misogyny and gendered resentment, and I think that will be ruinous, culturally and politically.
If you were going to see the period from 1950-2000 as one in which more women than men wrote novels it seems you'd have to exclude certain genres, especially science fiction: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Pournelle down to Walter Moseley and William Gibson (or even Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Neil Gaiman).
I don't think it's just marketing to women because they read more novels (a joke and even a story arc from "Sex and the City" when Carrie Bradshaw publishes her first book and meets a male novelist with no sales) and because they now make up a majority of college graduates. I don't think current culture is comfortable portraying male heroes: https://brucemajors.substack.com/p/its-not-reigning-men
That a man may not find as much to admire in even excellent prose by a woman as another woman might find, is not surprising. Most writers and critics have been men and it is not surprising , either, that of all historic literature, men are the most prominent. From sample size, this is exactly what would be expected. Shakespeare's sister never owned a typewriter, to put it anachronistically. Today's readers are no longer the cream of the educated intellectual crop and the literature designed to please them is no longer by the best minds writing for the best minds.The gems of history have been sifted continuously for 2000 years and only the most valuable have survived. With more choices, there is also more chaff. And finally, there is not a good economic model for being an historically significant writer.
When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas published his book, Amazon refused to distribute it. That appears to have changed. However, if a black Supreme Court justice is denied access to the market, what chance does other white conservative men have?
You're welcome, Bruce. I especially recommend the new Odyssey. The language is lean, muscular and modern, propelling you along.
Your list of great women writers is certainly proof that men have "NOT held the stage to themselves.". I don't think I have ever said they did, i.e., there were no women writers. My point is only that men have, for millennia taken up most of the oxygen in the room as literary and cultural forces. I think that's irrefutable. Their presence crowded out (or purposely excluded) others.
The last 25 years have been a brake allowing many new voices on the literary and cultural stage. I think that's good. Even great. It is long overdue. It does, of necessity mean more familiar "types" are heard from less. I'm okay with it--there's a trove of literary treasures to reference for the male voice. I don't mind building one for the sort people I referenced.
Furthermore, I obviously think Ross Barkan is a fine writer, or I wouldn't subscribe to read his essays. I also understand why writers like him feel frustrated, even aggrieved by current circumstances. My point was there is a reason for it, even a benefit if you believe the human condition is universal which I do. Black/female/queer is just a vehicle to convey a saga you can identify with even if you haven't personally experienced it.
Hopefully Mr. Barkan will keep plugging away and be around to see the pendulum swing the other way. Pendulums always do you know. I think talent is usually acknowledged but never as quickly or as lavishly as it deserves. For that I think we can all agree--blame the Kardashians. Thank you for an interesting discussion. LB
Politely, Ross - are you sure you're not talking out of your ass with the stuff about video games? Back in 2014, at the height of (the gruesomely overrated) Gamergate, I remember seeing a lot of data saying that the audience for home video games was pretty much 50-50 between men and women. (I say "home" video games to differentiate from mobile gaming, because if you added e.g. Candy Crush to that data that'd skew the numbers way towards women.) Certainly marketing material for video games skews ultra-male, but I've never seen real evidence of a gender skew beyond the vibes/stereotypes that video games are a "guy" thing.
And even if they *were* a guy thing... look, I'm willing to buy that Fortnite has made it harder for adolescent boys to develop the interiority they'd need to write fiction. But *everyone* is having their time for "wandering and imaginative growth" eaten by phones and Netflix, not just boys. There's no way in hell that's an explanation for the yawning gender gap in 21st century fiction.
There's the Statista page, but my sense is, from talking to gamers, the most immersive and addicting are geared toward men. But no doubt women are losing their attention spans too, or simply walking away from reading.
"Immersive" and "addicting" aren't synonyms, I guess would be my retort here. Something like Elden Ring is immersive, but it's definitely driven by LORE! in a way that seems way more conducive to sparking the imagination than the craven dopamine drip of Candy Crush or June's Journey or whatever mobile free-to-play crap is being marketed to women these days.
I do wonder if gamers will ever get their Kwisatz Haderach - the novelist who actually gets the interior world of the gamer. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" got a lot of positive reviews (and apparently every single person I know who works in gaming has been asked OMG HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK).
I mean, Ready Player One was the closest parallel to a male version of that “video game novel”, and while it certainly was commercially successful (enough to garner a big budget film adaptation), but it was a critical failure because—let’s face it—it was so extremely *bad*, on a technical level.
Ross is right, and your definition of "immersive" is industry-derived rather than reality-derived. Ross is using "immersive" - like a normal person - to mean "engaging to the point where people immerse themselves in it." You are using "immersive" to mean "has certain characteristics such as an open world and some degree of player choice, such that the player feels 'immersed' in the narrative."
These definitions aren't inherently in conflict, but they are when you assert that something like Elden Ring is anywhere near as "immersive" in either sense as, say, League of Legends, which has been around for over a decade and has sucked up a number of man-hours that would be truly frightful to tot up. And it is right to say "sucked up" because playing League of Legends solo for 12 hours is not a comparable activity to playing a few games with friends, which could be described as "recreating." It's unthinking, agitated, distracted suck.
You'd likely say that League of Legends isn't "immersive" because it doesn't have a "world" or a "story" and the players aren't assuming any "role" in which they could "lose themselves." What you're missing is that the "story" of League of Legends is "I, the player, become a pro gamer or something and get money and acclaim, or at least prove that I'm in the top 1% of players or whatever" - this is a far more effective carrot than some artificial "story," as most people will never get anywhere close, but there is occasionally illusory progress. And it's rather inarguable that people "lose themselves" in such games.
"Gamers" today are not what "gamers" used to be.. When I was playing World of Warcraft in 2007, there were a heck of a lot of people who didn't take it that seriously and just liked to be a troll or a dwarf and hang out in a tavern getting their character drunk. When I'm playing World of Warcraft now, most everyone is duly efficientizing their play-work according to the finest reddit guides and youtube videos. People use game add-ons to direct them from point to point rather than engaging with the story. (They do this for every game, by the way - why waste time "losing" when you could use a guide and get it right the first time?) And this is in a rolled-back version of the game for old folks like me. Today's "gamers" can't even play games and you expect them to read novels?
"Gamers," in the sense of people who play games for the narrative fantasy, have an interior world. "Clickers," in the sense of people who play games merely as a statistical exercise, have no internal life, at least not while they're clicking.
World of Warcraft, unlike pretty much any other game, has the distinct advantage of enforcing downtime in several ways. One is that you must fly - not teleport, but physically fly on a flying bat or hippogryph or what have you - from city to city within the world, and you have to do it fairly frequently. A long-haul flight can be ten or even fifteen minutes. I hope you brought a book! (It's just like real life! So immersive!) Then there's the inherent downtime involved in putting together any activity involving more than one person - and some things in good old WoW still involve groups of 40 players organizing together. (And sometimes multiple 40-man groups).
Solo games lack this. The clicking is unrestricted aside from the odd minute of queue time or respawn time. The treadmill keeps turning without even time for a breath.
So while I've sunken quite a few hours into the temple of WoW, it's been at least to some extent social, and interspersed with alt-tabbing to wikipedia pages or slowly working through some thrifted book or another. Not an incredible resume, I'm aware, but it's like fitness - 15 minutes a day keeps you in play. Plus I recently wrote this in those little gaps: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55269472/chapters/140199916
I don't know about Haderach but one guy on reddit really liked it, and my esteemed girlfriend called it "profound." Content warning: not prose.
I have been seeing this argument--masculine fiction isn't published anymore--a lot recently, and I don't really know what to think about it. At first I thought it seemed false, but then I examined my reading habits and realized that I don't actually read much contemporary American fiction. Some authors I've read recently are: Knausgaard, Mishima, Alberto Moravia, Emmanuel Carrère, Thomas Bernhard, and Coetzee (I also recently finished books by Rachel Kushner and Stephanie Danler). The men on that list publish exactly the kind of fiction that is said to not exist anymore, but to your point, they are all in English via translation and some of them are dead. I understand why the situation described is problematic (if it's true), but as a reader, it's tough to get too worked up about it because there's so much good stuff out there to read that I haven't got to yet. If anyone out there is looking for a book to read that deals with "the rage, lusts, and resentments of the straight male" let me recommend "Contempt" by Alberto Moravia.
There are such high barriers to entry now for the straight white male Zoomer and I don't think the incentives are really there anymore. You are writing for an elite blue tribe world that hates you for your demographic categories. Publishing is still super-woke. Even if you got something published to some acclaim the backlash would negate it all. Maybe if the heterodox liberal world keeps getting bigger that will change again.
>There are such high barriers to entry now for the straight white male Zoomer and I don't think the incentives are really there anymore.
I don't need incentives. Why do other people?
Becaause not everyone is the same?
Who said they were? I'm aware I'm unusual. The previous question wasn't rhetorical. What's the difference between they & I?
Why do some people like chocolate and others vanilla? I think it is just that unanswerable except to chalk it up to human variety.
People who don't like both are wrong. He's no artist who withholds song.
Thank you for this. I think reading for ‘difference’ is most underrated. I don’t want to be validated in my views. I want to be challenged. It’s so depressing to think of literature as a marketplace where more women read, so let’s sell women writers to them. Someone comes at me with a novel by a person of my gender, race, class and nationality, I’ll run screaming into the night. If I were a younger male writer today, I’d be terrified of being cancelled or simply never published if I evoked a compelling account of male subjectivity. Roth and Bellow (and others) were fearless in their day. Feted - yes. But with heaping serves of opprobrium, some deserved, some not. They did not apologise for men but they also had no illusions. (BTW I am female, feminist and neither Jewish nor American). It takes not only talent but conviction to write something that will last and the marketplace cannot be your guide.
>I’d be terrified of being cancelled or simply never published if I evoked a compelling account of male subjectivity.
People used to have these things called diaries where they'd write and write for no one but themselves. Now we have this thing called the internet where anyone can publish anything under any name & everyone can see it.
I don't believe for a second that anyone is hesitating to put pen to paper (finger to key) out of "fear." It is called sloth and vanity. "Why write if no one will like it and no one will pay me?" Why live?
Great read, Ross! And many thanks for the shout out. I'm trying out here.
I think it’s about a case of the more things change the more they stay the same. Sure, female writers are arguably enjoying a well earned, long overdue moment in the sun but the writing itself seems as repressed and angry as the male writing it means to counter. Rooney especially strikes me as deeply repressed and angry and unable to in anyway attach to those emotions without fading away into the alien. What’s interesting about this wave of success with female writers certainly isn’t the writing. Most of it is above average but nobodies really slaying it nowadays. You can tell most fiction writers haven’t even seriously touched Shakespeare and so their talent can’t do anything to overcome their narrow worldview, imo. It’s not the writing that keeps us watching and paying attention, it’s the utter lack of self awareness. It’s like most female writers read the first half of The Sun Also Rises and then said, “Oh, I know how this book ends” and set it down. We keep waiting for them to grow up and laugh at their own joke they are telling but instead they are looking at us deadpanned and serious and you’re not certain if it’s ok to laugh.
We will know we are getting somewhere when certain male writers are re-engaged and finally correctly read. Writers who have been long disparaged for being “masculine” even tho their writing isn’t the least bit masculine. For example, Wallace was well aware of the joke at all times and made sure that the absurdity was present in everything he wrote. It wasn’t arrogance. It was humility. Philip Roth is another amazingly sensitive writer who dressed his books up to please the New York scene but that always attacked the premises they claimed to praise. The Ghost Writer was Roth disclosing his secret identity to the world. That Zimmerman was a character and the ghost writer was his true self. That to make it in publishing he had had to invent a fake persona to protect himself and to get past the censors he had to bury the true message of his work.
Women have done little with their newly acquired power to challenge the hierarchy of repression and censorship. They just spread the wealth. Now gay people get repressed literature. Now trans people do. The same daily serving of anger, estrangement and disconnection. They are exactly what they came here to destroy, and like the men of yesteryear, are totally blind to the actual undercurrent of their thoughts, feelings and actions. You couldn’t write it better if you tried. It’s the dull blade of human ego and ambition masquerading as social justice and “opportunity.”
This is brilliant Ross, and I basically agree, although I dislike many of the women writers that you mention, and I find some of the finest writers working in the mystery and speculative fiction genres… but the need for men to read is pressing… The writer I studied, Upton Sinclair, change the lives of thousands of men and women alike long past the jungle.
>the need for men to read is pressing
hi
Ross, this is a super good piece, wide in scope, generous in attribution, smart in summary.
thank you I appreciate that!
I bet men are still writing, but they aren't getting read by editors or anyone else in a position to sell them. It's why the quality of our entertainment is complete trash right now.
This is incredible, Ross, so thoughtful and interesting. A lot of these questions have been on my mind as well, and there were a number of details I could personally relate to (I too was in college at the height of Foer's wunderkind legend, and I felt completely overwhelmed - oddly tormented - by his reputation, and this nagging discomfort that I just wasn't getting it and couldn't match up). Thanks!
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
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.
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.
Excellent article, which I very much agree with. Not only is the modern male voice absent in our contemporary literature, it’s also missing from our most prestigious cultural outlets, magazines like the New Yorker or NYRB. Even suggesting that young men are suffering feels like a politically incendiary topic, a claim to be avoided if you don’t want to be pariah among other cultural elites. The result is that the places where men can find anything resembling sympathy also happen to be spaces that peddle the worst species of misogyny and gendered resentment, and I think that will be ruinous, culturally and politically.
If you were going to see the period from 1950-2000 as one in which more women than men wrote novels it seems you'd have to exclude certain genres, especially science fiction: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Pournelle down to Walter Moseley and William Gibson (or even Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Neil Gaiman).
I don't think it's just marketing to women because they read more novels (a joke and even a story arc from "Sex and the City" when Carrie Bradshaw publishes her first book and meets a male novelist with no sales) and because they now make up a majority of college graduates. I don't think current culture is comfortable portraying male heroes: https://brucemajors.substack.com/p/its-not-reigning-men
That a man may not find as much to admire in even excellent prose by a woman as another woman might find, is not surprising. Most writers and critics have been men and it is not surprising , either, that of all historic literature, men are the most prominent. From sample size, this is exactly what would be expected. Shakespeare's sister never owned a typewriter, to put it anachronistically. Today's readers are no longer the cream of the educated intellectual crop and the literature designed to please them is no longer by the best minds writing for the best minds.The gems of history have been sifted continuously for 2000 years and only the most valuable have survived. With more choices, there is also more chaff. And finally, there is not a good economic model for being an historically significant writer.
When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas published his book, Amazon refused to distribute it. That appears to have changed. However, if a black Supreme Court justice is denied access to the market, what chance does other white conservative men have?
You're welcome, Bruce. I especially recommend the new Odyssey. The language is lean, muscular and modern, propelling you along.
Your list of great women writers is certainly proof that men have "NOT held the stage to themselves.". I don't think I have ever said they did, i.e., there were no women writers. My point is only that men have, for millennia taken up most of the oxygen in the room as literary and cultural forces. I think that's irrefutable. Their presence crowded out (or purposely excluded) others.
The last 25 years have been a brake allowing many new voices on the literary and cultural stage. I think that's good. Even great. It is long overdue. It does, of necessity mean more familiar "types" are heard from less. I'm okay with it--there's a trove of literary treasures to reference for the male voice. I don't mind building one for the sort people I referenced.
Furthermore, I obviously think Ross Barkan is a fine writer, or I wouldn't subscribe to read his essays. I also understand why writers like him feel frustrated, even aggrieved by current circumstances. My point was there is a reason for it, even a benefit if you believe the human condition is universal which I do. Black/female/queer is just a vehicle to convey a saga you can identify with even if you haven't personally experienced it.
Hopefully Mr. Barkan will keep plugging away and be around to see the pendulum swing the other way. Pendulums always do you know. I think talent is usually acknowledged but never as quickly or as lavishly as it deserves. For that I think we can all agree--blame the Kardashians. Thank you for an interesting discussion. LB
Politely, Ross - are you sure you're not talking out of your ass with the stuff about video games? Back in 2014, at the height of (the gruesomely overrated) Gamergate, I remember seeing a lot of data saying that the audience for home video games was pretty much 50-50 between men and women. (I say "home" video games to differentiate from mobile gaming, because if you added e.g. Candy Crush to that data that'd skew the numbers way towards women.) Certainly marketing material for video games skews ultra-male, but I've never seen real evidence of a gender skew beyond the vibes/stereotypes that video games are a "guy" thing.
And even if they *were* a guy thing... look, I'm willing to buy that Fortnite has made it harder for adolescent boys to develop the interiority they'd need to write fiction. But *everyone* is having their time for "wandering and imaginative growth" eaten by phones and Netflix, not just boys. There's no way in hell that's an explanation for the yawning gender gap in 21st century fiction.
There's the Statista page, but my sense is, from talking to gamers, the most immersive and addicting are geared toward men. But no doubt women are losing their attention spans too, or simply walking away from reading.
"Immersive" and "addicting" aren't synonyms, I guess would be my retort here. Something like Elden Ring is immersive, but it's definitely driven by LORE! in a way that seems way more conducive to sparking the imagination than the craven dopamine drip of Candy Crush or June's Journey or whatever mobile free-to-play crap is being marketed to women these days.
I do wonder if gamers will ever get their Kwisatz Haderach - the novelist who actually gets the interior world of the gamer. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" got a lot of positive reviews (and apparently every single person I know who works in gaming has been asked OMG HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK).
Does LitRPG as a genre count? With books like Dungeon Crawler Carl selling quite well?
I mean, Ready Player One was the closest parallel to a male version of that “video game novel”, and while it certainly was commercially successful (enough to garner a big budget film adaptation), but it was a critical failure because—let’s face it—it was so extremely *bad*, on a technical level.
Ross is right, and your definition of "immersive" is industry-derived rather than reality-derived. Ross is using "immersive" - like a normal person - to mean "engaging to the point where people immerse themselves in it." You are using "immersive" to mean "has certain characteristics such as an open world and some degree of player choice, such that the player feels 'immersed' in the narrative."
These definitions aren't inherently in conflict, but they are when you assert that something like Elden Ring is anywhere near as "immersive" in either sense as, say, League of Legends, which has been around for over a decade and has sucked up a number of man-hours that would be truly frightful to tot up. And it is right to say "sucked up" because playing League of Legends solo for 12 hours is not a comparable activity to playing a few games with friends, which could be described as "recreating." It's unthinking, agitated, distracted suck.
You'd likely say that League of Legends isn't "immersive" because it doesn't have a "world" or a "story" and the players aren't assuming any "role" in which they could "lose themselves." What you're missing is that the "story" of League of Legends is "I, the player, become a pro gamer or something and get money and acclaim, or at least prove that I'm in the top 1% of players or whatever" - this is a far more effective carrot than some artificial "story," as most people will never get anywhere close, but there is occasionally illusory progress. And it's rather inarguable that people "lose themselves" in such games.
"Gamers" today are not what "gamers" used to be.. When I was playing World of Warcraft in 2007, there were a heck of a lot of people who didn't take it that seriously and just liked to be a troll or a dwarf and hang out in a tavern getting their character drunk. When I'm playing World of Warcraft now, most everyone is duly efficientizing their play-work according to the finest reddit guides and youtube videos. People use game add-ons to direct them from point to point rather than engaging with the story. (They do this for every game, by the way - why waste time "losing" when you could use a guide and get it right the first time?) And this is in a rolled-back version of the game for old folks like me. Today's "gamers" can't even play games and you expect them to read novels?
"Gamers," in the sense of people who play games for the narrative fantasy, have an interior world. "Clickers," in the sense of people who play games merely as a statistical exercise, have no internal life, at least not while they're clicking.
World of Warcraft, unlike pretty much any other game, has the distinct advantage of enforcing downtime in several ways. One is that you must fly - not teleport, but physically fly on a flying bat or hippogryph or what have you - from city to city within the world, and you have to do it fairly frequently. A long-haul flight can be ten or even fifteen minutes. I hope you brought a book! (It's just like real life! So immersive!) Then there's the inherent downtime involved in putting together any activity involving more than one person - and some things in good old WoW still involve groups of 40 players organizing together. (And sometimes multiple 40-man groups).
Solo games lack this. The clicking is unrestricted aside from the odd minute of queue time or respawn time. The treadmill keeps turning without even time for a breath.
So while I've sunken quite a few hours into the temple of WoW, it's been at least to some extent social, and interspersed with alt-tabbing to wikipedia pages or slowly working through some thrifted book or another. Not an incredible resume, I'm aware, but it's like fitness - 15 minutes a day keeps you in play. Plus I recently wrote this in those little gaps: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55269472/chapters/140199916
I don't know about Haderach but one guy on reddit really liked it, and my esteemed girlfriend called it "profound." Content warning: not prose.
I have been seeing this argument--masculine fiction isn't published anymore--a lot recently, and I don't really know what to think about it. At first I thought it seemed false, but then I examined my reading habits and realized that I don't actually read much contemporary American fiction. Some authors I've read recently are: Knausgaard, Mishima, Alberto Moravia, Emmanuel Carrère, Thomas Bernhard, and Coetzee (I also recently finished books by Rachel Kushner and Stephanie Danler). The men on that list publish exactly the kind of fiction that is said to not exist anymore, but to your point, they are all in English via translation and some of them are dead. I understand why the situation described is problematic (if it's true), but as a reader, it's tough to get too worked up about it because there's so much good stuff out there to read that I haven't got to yet. If anyone out there is looking for a book to read that deals with "the rage, lusts, and resentments of the straight male" let me recommend "Contempt" by Alberto Moravia.