The Novel of Men

I recently read David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, a novel published in 2011, and was struck by how distinctly not of the Internet it is despite the fact that the protagonists meet through an online dating site. It put me in mind of books like Prep, The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The History of Love, Everything is Illuminated, A Gate at the Stairs, and so on, though most of these were published 5+ years before. I also found that it has something in common with the book I began reading just after, Nick Flynn’s 2009 memoir The Ticking is the Bomb.

That something is earnestness. Authors of the aforementioned titles traffic in pathos. They want their readers to be moved and emotionally invested, so much so that they (the books and the writers) sometimes tip into present-day cringe. The result is uniformly free from irony poisoning. Not just purged of it but wholly untouched by.

In 2025, this quality reads like innocence, though my impression is that during the Bush Jr. and Obama years, everyone was convinced 9/11 had radically remade American imagination—that, in fact, innocence had been obliterated. As Homer says in every other line of The Iliad, poor fools! They had no idea how much there was left to lose. For me, as a reader, any bifurcation of before and after the towers fell is not nearly as stark as before and after smartphones. (And I have realized in writing this that what’s called “the internet novel,” might be more accurately described as “the smartphone novel.”) In The Lover’s Dictionary, the internet is there, but it is outside of the characters. It’s something they go to, interact with, then leave. Now, it’s inside of us, psychically speaking. We don’t interact “with it” any more than we interact with our own nervous systems. It’s colonized us and in doing so unleashed a deluge of disaffected writing concerning characters with no desires or beliefs or curiosity.

I think of the smartphone/internet novel as having two different modes, brainrot and aesthete, the latter of which is far more pervasive. This writing is sophisticated on a prose level yet none of the sentences matter. It is resistant to plot because it concerns people who are “void of wills and wants.” Dialogue is in short supply and, when it occurs, manages to be both implausible and featureless. Everything’s set in New York though the city (coyly) may not be mentioned by name. The main characters are usually writers, which makes me want to kill myself. Sometimes sex gets thrown in like that’s going to make the situation meaningful or substitute for a story, but it doesn’t. No one cares what these ciphers do, including the ciphers themselves.¹⁰  

I’ve come to see this work as primarily a class performance meant to signal institutional imprimatur to people who receive that signal and give a conspiratorial tip of the head (and the right bylines and/or a book deal and/or an award nomination.) The pleasure it provides is mutual confirmation of superiority, occasional elegance, and sometimes the ghost of a chuckle. The tastemaker consensus implied by the persistence of this fiction is: isn’t it humiliating to like plot and vivid descriptions? To desire passionate characters, or for an entire conversation to play out, line by line, instead of being condensed into a cool, Cuskian¹ review? Someone who wants those things is probably stupid and also generationally poor.

Genre fiction is appealing in and of itself, but even more so when the alternative is something so joyless and enervating. Romance and romantasy, famously, are the Clydesdales of publishing right now² because they generate and sustain ardent, obsessively active female fandoms that maintain momentum for specific titles as well as the genre as a whole. Their readers churn out enthusiastic content—videos, reviews, IG posts, Reddit threads—and they talk to each other, a lot. It helps that the books can be read quickly and have the addictive quality of anything that’s easy to obtain and extremely stimulating.

Most BookTok readers seem unlikely to ever pick up anything contemporary other than romance but books like Sally Rooney’s or Madeline Miller’s³ scratch the same itch without being classified as genre, and then those crossover authors get the boost of big readership without sacrificing their prestige. This path to literary virality isn’t categorically closed to men. I think it’s difficult to pull off for anyone, and only women have managed it so far because men aren’t trying. Miller and Rooney probably weren’t trying either! But because they centered romantic love, it happened.

Both men and women write and read smartphone fiction. Both men and women write and read SFF and horror, self-help and memoirs and cookbooks. But it is almost exclusively women who write and read romance. My theory is that the success of romance has contributed to the embitterment of aspiring male authors and fueled this discourse that publishing on the whole is biased against the male perspective. This is stupid, but it’s 2025. What isn’t?

I’m not going to rehash the whole men in fiction discourse because it’s so obnoxious but I need to address a few points. First, I was grateful for the Compact piece that came out and said it: the alleged problem pertains to a lack of white men in literary fiction right now, not a lack of men full stop.⁴ That was very clearly the subtext (or, in JCO’s case, the supertext) at play, and we can go ahead and tack on straight and young, too.⁵ As Naomi Kanakia wrote, “demands for representation get finer- and finer-grained, because ultimately the demand isn't about masculinity, it's about literary spoils—getting book deals for people like yourself.” She goes on to spike the ball again: “white men don’t particularly like to read literary fiction, and that’s the major reason white male representation is relatively low amongst the ranks of the most successful literary writers. […] a call for white male representation is, fundamentally, a demand on the attention of female readers.”⁸ This is exactly it: white men aren’t big readers and this is cast as the fault of women.

Second, the men making this complaint are especially resentful, it seems, because they want to write misogynists as heroes but already know that women (who they need for sales) aren’t receptive to that. So the pivot from an absence of male to white male to straight white male writers morphed into an issue with the narrative that the denied white straight men in question need in order to express their truth, which is that feminism has ruined their life or women are fickle bitches or whatever. Here’s more from the Lyta Gold piece linked above: “The narrative about the lack of literary men, per Boryga, is that some men find it impossible to write about men in this world, this real world, or impossible to have that writing taken seriously by women gatekeepers who will only judge it as misogynist.” It’s kind of funny (“funny”) that actually, a man or woman can center a textbook controlling misogynist, a real pre-suicide family annihilator, and find a subset of women desperate to read about him. If he’s hot and possessive in the right ways, that’s dark romance, baby.

The question of why anyone in any category would want to read about a bigoted white guy who isn’t sexy (or funny—kind of the same thing) is an open question. We do, after all, get an abundance of exposure to them by simply being alive. Kanakia addresses this directly in a dishy paragraph⁶ that concludes as follows: “White men often get published. And when the books come out, they’re often reviewed well! But…readers don't actually get excited about them.”

She goes on to say that women don’t feel the need to inform themselves about the “inner life of white men” and maybe there’s truth to that. If so, I can’t see it as a failure of curiosity; it’s just that we are already informed, a lot, usually to great detriment. And no one’s inner life is inherently interesting. The inner life of a woman who couldn’t stop thinking about how hot she is, for instance, would also be unreadable (unless it were sexy/funny.) I think a lot of women would love to know more about the inner life of (white, young, straight) men who are struggling with themselves and the shit state of everything, as are we all. Sorrow about climate change, hatred of the state, those sorts of things. I’d lap it up. Or even just detailed studies of sex and intimacy, which gay men write the hell out of. Without struggle or sensitivity, without humor to fill the gaps of introspection—if the interiority begins with “slurs I’d like to use” and ends with “tits” and stays bitter throughout—it is indeed a tough sell.

A few weeks ago I woke up and finished Brewster (2013) by Mark Slouka. I was alone in the house and very much in that novel-altered state, kind of raw and bereft, and I began to feel overwhelmingly angry. Brewster is well-written. I’m glad I read it. But I don’t know how many people I’d recommend it to because it is bleak, riven with moments of extreme violence, scenes I think I won’t get out of my head for a long time. One of its primary interests is what happens to children who grow up with an abusive parent. How does the child endure, if they do? What forms does abuse take? How does the child try and fail to escape it, to make their parent love them? Relatedly, what is it like to be a boy during the draft? How do (male) children process nationwide acceptance that they were born only to kill and die in war?

I was angry because I’d had an intense reading experience and the resultant emotions needed to make themselves known in a recognizable way, and what they coagulated around, weirdly or not so weirdly, was how unforgivable it is to boil the contemporary male condition down to white straight guy against the world, white guy who can only live a full life if he’s openly, unrepentantly sexist and never has to confront white supremacy or capitalism or patriarchy or anything uglier from his past than hooking up with a 5. Men, including white, straight men, suffer tremendously but not because they convince themselves their rightful admission to an Ivy was stolen by an Asian. I’m talking about real agonies that no one wants to admit to themselves because it makes the wounds fresh. That their fathers treated them like garbage. That they’ve failed as fathers, too. That the babysitter who took their virginity raped them.⁷ That they went on to rape someone themselves. That they hate themselves and don’t know how to stop.

This is not the only material that’s acceptable to me as a reader. I don’t need men to suffer to redeem their masculinity; I love men, especially when they’re happy, and unconflicted about being a guy. But in the wake of Brewster, I felt acutely how evil is it to ignore the true pain that belongs to men. The men in fiction discourse has done this, as has the male loneliness discourse, and it’s done so by scapegoating women.

I’m anomalous, perhaps, because I am obsessed with men. But I think it’s a verifiable fallacy to say publishing is “hostile to masculine expression.” I can believe this is true for a certain type of man’s story—or author’s behavior(!)—one that redirects self-hatred through misogyny and racism and blames everything bad in his life, tacitly and explicitly, on wokeness and/or his mom. How do you market this? Meaning who do you market this to? I can’t shake my sense that even the men who want to write these sorts of books don’t want to read them.⁹ 

1  I love Rachel Cusk and I’m not saying she invented summarization (although, do we know for sure she didn’t?) but I think it’s an obvious crutch for a lot of contemporary novelists who cannot write dialogue.

2  I’m just kind of talking my shit here, not trying to make claims that would hold up in a court of law, but I’m aware there’s dissension regarding the data of romances’ sales performance. Its outsized popularity on the whole does not seem disputable.

3  I have so much to say about The Song of Achilles and trust me, it will be said in due time, though possibly on my blog instead of sent as a newsletter.

4  If you want me to list massive books in recent years, I’d probably name a bunch by women (like Sarah J Maas) but in terms of respected, lauded, and popular non-genre work, I think I’d be more likely to think of Percival Everett, Kaveh Akbar, Hernan Diaz, the currently-having-his-ass-handed-to-him-but-still-huge Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor, Rumaan Alam, Hanif Abdurraqib, and of course the whicketdly talented Tony Tulathimutte.

5  Otherwise why don’t Ben Lerner, Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Cohen, Garth Greenwell, Karl Ove, etc. etc. count?

6  Here is the paragraph in full: “With white men, the problem is that white men do get published, but the resulting books tend not to succeed with readers. One graduate of my MFA program got a six-figure deal for his story collection, which flopped. I know about another guy who got more than $500,000 for his novel, which also flopped (and then got turned into a Netflix movie that also flopped!) Right at this very moment, a former professor of mine has a novel out that’s an Oprah pick! You have not heard of any of these writers or their books, most likely, because…their work just didn’t arouse any excitement. My professor’s novel literally hit the NYT bestseller list in the same month as the Vanishing White Male Writer article, but it didn’t even merit a mention in the article. And rightfully so, because…yes, the publisher invested a lot in it. But it doesn’t really seem to be having a cultural impact.”

7  I think the number of men who were taken advantage of by older women when they were boys would really blow our minds, if such a number could in fact be obtained. I’ve met a lot of them.

8  Editor Sean deLone, who states categorically that authorship by men is not down, shared a similar sentiment: “The reason relatively less energy goes into capturing male readers as an audience, especially for fiction, is that they are a highly unreliable reading demographic—demand, not supply. Given the number of successful male authors, it does not appear that men reading is a top-down problem.”

9  Please send me your recommendations for good books on men/masculinity!

10  I know it’s a little bit of a cop out not to name some of the smartphone-infected novels/short story collections I’ve read and found completely pointless but I just don’t want to do that right now. I hope you will accept this consolation of criticism (here, here, and here) that raises issue what I called the aesthete style’s hallmarks: vagueness, passivity, absence of visual description, and so on. P.S. in case you’re curious Beehiiv’s footnotes populate in order they’re added to the document, not as they appear chronologically in the piece (great feature, gorgeous feature) which is why this is 10 instead of 1.