For years now, the ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been a hot-button talking point, as antifeminist forces grow in influence across politics and media and – if you believe the five million trend pieces about Manhattan’s infamous Dimes Square – the world of culture as well. Young men, in particular, have provoked serious anxiety: they no longer read, they lack media literacy, they only listen to Joe Rogan and go on bodybuilding forums. In the literary world – admittedly not the most urgent terrain for these developments – there have been debates about the apparent paucity of young men in contemporary fiction.
Is this a problem? Well: as a reader and a critic, I think the more important question is less ‘where are the good male novelists?’ and more ‘where are the good male characters?’ – characters that may, of course, be written by an author of any gender.
For whatever reason, there is an insistence that men in contemporary literature be real men doing real men stuff. I recently attended a trendy book launch where the young (male!!) author was asked about gender in his book, which had a pink cover but also featured men who riled each other up and used homophobic slurs. The author responded, to general merriment, that this book was “for the boys, for the girls”. It was directed at a primarily female audience, of course, but it offered them some real male material – bigotry, violence, you know. Man stuff.
The male character problem seems to perpetuate an essentialised vision of manhood. Some of the more hollow men in literature appear in politically-minded autofiction that briefly use male minor characters as figures of ridicule – or else as mindless instruments of patriarchal hegemony who enter stage left, say or do symbolically shitty things, and then leave the author’s alter ego to sift through the mess. Intersubjectivity, here, is not the name of the game.
As New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal recently implied in her review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, should not a book about a relationship – millennial divorce memoir or otherwise – at least attempt to have two minds in it, even (or especially) if one of them is irredeemably hetero-masculinely fucked up? There is also a growing bookshelf of works that are interested in men but only insofar as they reflect the tough, brutal extremes that surely define genuine male experience: think the inevitable macho violence in books by Fernanda Melchor and Clemens Meyer, or the ultra-suffering in books like Hana Yanagihara’s A Little Life and in books fixated on male working-class strife, or else the half-processed authentic-brohemian vibe of Sean Thor Conroe’s fuccboi.
None of this is so bad on its own, but what it collectively implies is an idea of masculinity that seems, well, conservative. If men in literature are defined by violence, intolerance and a lack of reflection – and if the books we read seem to confirm that this is just inevitably how men are – then what way forward is there for men to think and act better?
Thankfully, not all the man-writing of our moment is quite so simplistic. Fatma Aydemir could easily have made the men in her novel Djinns into caricatures, but didn’t. When the men of Audrey Magee’s The Colony do bad things (no spoilers), it hits all the harder on account of us already having really got to know them, and maybe almost like them. The Wahlberliner Vijay Khurana, whose debut novel comes out this spring, writes men in all their states – brutal, melancholic, even erotic. And the new year will see new novels by two other local authors, Adrian Duncan and Gabriel Flynn, who each write beautifully and incisively about the lives of modern men, both inside and outside of conventionally male milieux like construction and football.
Sometimes I think I might like to read more books that feature the men that I know personally: politically well-meaning, thoughtful yet confused, and nevertheless not entirely cured of many of the attitudes of patriarchy. There is no problem with men being condemned in fiction – we certainly deserve at least that. But the best of literary writing keeps its characters alive. Men today are complicated! Like all people: good ones do bad things, well-intentioned ones do bad things, and bad ones occasionally do good things. If there’s anything of men worth putting in a book, it’s surely that.
