The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel

New York Times

03-07-2025

A Los Angeles father, once an aspiring screenwriter and now a professional ticket-scalper, spends his spare hours calculating the extent to which younger straight white male novelists have been frozen out of the literary world. He pens a jeremiad against both publishers and critics who, he avers, no longer value great writing and a cadre of writers who are no longer interested in telling the truth about society.
It sounds like the premise for, well, a literary novel. Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog, who wrote defiant letters to personages living and dead, meets the 21st century. Watch the advance money, sales and recognition roll in.
Or not. It is the contention of a polemic published in March in the online magazine Compact by the writer Jacob Savage — dad, ticket-scalper, former screenwriter — that today, such a novel would not receive acclaim commensurate with its quality, a claim he backed up by showing a dearth of such authors from lists of prominent literary honors. Moreover, Savage argued that what he saw as these novelists' self-censorship, whether provoked by timidity or rational self-interest, meant that such a novel would not even be written.
'Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,' Savage, who is 41, wrote. What they do write, he added, avoids 'grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.'
Savage's essay has attracted both derision and amens in newspapers and journals, on social media and Substacks, over drinks and in group chats.
'I think the nerve I hit is fairly obvious,' Savage said in an interview, adding, 'being able to put numbers behind it was cathartic to some people and triggering to others.'
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