The revenge of the young male novelist

New Statesman​

5 hours ago

Photo by Larry Ellis/Express/Getty Images
Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James Hatcher. All Google searches led to Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James Hatcher. It was the only book I could find, but it was not the book I wanted. It was a book 'about men, about sex, and about himself'; I wanted a book about myself. At the time that meant young, male, and at least provisionally straight.
Finer search terms than 'young male sex novel', of course, would have turned up much smarter matches. The canon itself largely comprises young male sex novels. Even our most revered critic James Wood remembers his Penguin Modern Classics 'seething like porn'. With hindsight, names like Byron, Lawrence, and Roth are obvious.
Less obvious, however, are the equivalent contemporary names. Critics have been scratching their heads about where the literary dude went for some time now, and all the while the numbers seem to show a declining pool of reading dudes. In 2021, Megan Nolan wondered if men lacked the 'cool, sexy, gunslinger' figure that once lured them to fiction. 'Lots of agonising' went into Johanna Thomas-Corr's June 2022 New Statesman piece on this subject, which concluded that we should 'make room for genuine mischief and mess, experimentation and individuality'.
As well as the straightforwardly literary, these pieces detect something sociological at stake too: a sense that young men are not being given the cultural mirror they need to inspect, understand and organise themselves. Lately the itch has gotten hotter. In March, Compact magazine published an article titled 'The Vanishing White Male Writer'. For that cohort, Jacob Savage wrote, 'the doors shut' in the 2010s, and never reopened. In April, novelist and critic Jude Cook announced his founding of new press that would look for young male voices.
As Cook told me: 'If you go to your Foyle's or Waterstone's fiction table it's a sort of 80-20 split, and the men that do appear got published 30 or 40 years ago.' There's no deliberate plot against men, but there is an 'affinity bias', since publishing is 'a female-dominated business'. As it sometimes can, 'the discourse,' following the announcement, 'got slightly out of hand'. An agent named a Rising Star by Bookseller wrote that 'publishing truly trolls itself'. Cook pointed out to me that Bookseller's 10 fiction picks for the same month included zero male authors.
However greatly exaggerated the death (or murder, or suicide) of literary man has been, for two months at least it seems all the young dudes are back in town. My teen self would have thrilled at the Spring-Summer 25 collection. Six new novels are out in May and June, mostly debuts, by authors in and around their thirties. So: if there is a crisis of literary masculinity – or, indeed, a crisis of masculinity itself – are these novels any salvation?
The writers in question hail from both flanks of the pond, and come with some amusingly familiar Atlantic differences. The stateside authors have penned thinkpieces on the state of publishing, have been compared by their peers to Woolf, Tolstoy and Hemingway, and have arrived enterprisingly at an unambitious term for the movement they now represent: 'The New Romanticism'. One wrote his novel explicitly to reverse civilisational decline explicitly by restoring the Novel of Ideas. By contrast, one of the British authors told me he 'had absolutely no ideas' and warned 'there's a lot of guff in there'. The other agreed: 'No, I've not yet stitched together a civilisational project with which to justify my literary efforts.'
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But it's not like you can dodge the culture wars either way. Cancel culture drives half the plots. In different books, students are 'pronoun people… with hair the colour of toilet cleanser', hold placards 'loudly disavowing their parents, or their relationship to the means of production, or their genitals', and hound a professor to suicide for sleeping with one he taught. How, formally, have the novels responded to this keenly felt political presence?
Two of the six exhibit mid-century mannish conventions. Noah Kumin (otherwise best known as the founder of the Mars Review of Books, an iconoclastic and self-consciously countercultural New York literary magazine) has written Stop All the Clocks, a pulpish mystery thriller with AI and Elizabethan poetry thrown in. And Oxford academic Thomas Peermohamed Lambert's Shibboleth delivers an English comic campus novel. The latter, perhaps tellingly in a band of green authors, is at once the most obedient and the most finished of these books. If it seeks comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis quite knowingly, it seeks them quite successfully too.
Then we have two books resembling late-20th-century American 'everything novels', of near-Victorian scale. English teacher John Pistelli's Major Arcana is a well-told ricochet that starts with a vibrant suicide. Three-pieces-a-week political columnist Ross Barkan's unflaggingly bright New York saga Glass Century involves three generations of a family, five decades of world events, and 600 pages. These two contains the half-dozen's highest descriptive and emotional moments – and not just because they are the only ones unabashed about trying for them.
Lastly, there are two brief, tentative novels that you could imagine poised shyly at the edge of an otherwise all-female contemporary shelf. Despite their smaller descriptive milieus, Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda's daringly delicate The Sleepers and critic Leo Robson's delicately daring The Boys feel the most timely. Where the beefy works flaunt canonically angry ids – there are ravenous iPad fetish porn binges in Major Arcana and more than one ankle-trousered couch quickie in Glass Century – the slim novels offer something meeker. The central romance of The Boys never repeats or surpasses a chaste first kiss. The Sleepers is bleaker still: a loveless boyfriend loses erections as his girlfriend turns away from him and to her phone, and apologises 'like a little boy' after confessing his porn habit. 'What do you want me to say?' he asks. 'I watch porn and am sad and repressed and depressed.'
Characters are also nervous to lose themselves in aesthetic experience. The Boys justifies a moment of poetic rapture on both sides: before, the character explicitly reminds himself to notice a moment of profundity; after, 'I was soon shaken out of my reverie.' Literate characters who airily cite names like Plato, Wilde, and Shakespeare now come with disclaimers acknowledging their hopeless eccentricity. You sense some anxiety that literary man is unwelcome even at the peripheries of culture.
Last time this issue flared up, the New Statesman's correspondent suggested that the 'financial, reputational or sexual' dividends of literary stardom had dried up. And it is true that these books are out on small presses after their writers made their names through other channels; they achieved eminence as political columnists, academics, playwrights, scenesters, salonnieres, and editors. It is also true that only a rare young penman will find intelligent and ambitious young Tina Browns 'swept off [their] feet' by a 'literary lothario' (the fortune of the young Amis, whose ghost shadows all these debates). Actually, a likely candidate for genuine literary status is BookTokker and Tuber Jack Edwards, who told me how posting one short video to his hundreds of thousands of followers moved an obscure Dostoevsky novella, White Nights, from the back rooms to the shop windows of bookshops.
But laments for literary lad don't just mourn individual glory. Flick through the catalogue of a writer who has asked where literary man went, and you are quite likely to find he has also asked where bohemia went. Today's sensitive souls know well that they missed a life where their odd passion was a normal hobby by just a few decades. As Bertrand Russell said, discussing youths or artistic natures, 'Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the scepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world.'
American novelist John Updike claimed not to write for ego: 'I think of it more as innocence. A writer must be in some way innocent.' We might raise an eyebrow at this, from the highly successful and famously intrusive chronicler of human closeness. Even David Foster Wallace, the totem effigy of literary chauvinism, denounced Updike as a 'phallocrat'. But if we doubt such innocence of Updike, pronouncing as he was at the flushest height of fiction's postwar heyday, we might believe it of these new novelists, writing as they are and when they are. Without a promise of glory, and facing general scepticism, they have written from pure motives. They are novelists as Updike defined them: 'only a reader who was so excited that he tried to imitate and give back the bliss that he enjoyed'.
So it may be no bad thing if none of these novels quite fetches the reviews Wallace's masterpiece Infinite Jest did ('the plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. … it's as though Wittgenstein has gone on Jeopardy!'). These guys want to start a moment, not end one. They more want to write novels than be novelists. It is hard to say what relief these books might bring to a societal masculinity crisis, but in composing them their authors have displayed at least the two simple virtues Updike wanted to claim for himself: 'a love of what is, and a wish to make a thing'.
[See also: The decline of the Literary Bloke]
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