Are Men Okay?
There's been a lot of fiction exploring gender recently. It's long overdue, of course, and we have really just begun. But I've been thinking, where are the men?
I think this a lot. Ever since the beginning of #metoo, even since I gained a kind of feminist consciousness, I have found it odd how women do all the talking and men just... don't. (Obviously not all men, I shall be speaking in generalities in this newsletter, k?) It's strange to me. Men are the ones who see much of the worst of this behavior when they are all safely hidden in the locker room where allegedly all this talk goes down. And yet even the ones who don't join in don't do anything to stop it, not in the moment and not in the bigger conversation. It's strange to me that men don't lead that conversation, since they're the ones most likely to be listened to. It remains strange.
Likewise, while women and queer folks have been writing all kinds of interesting explorations of gender and patriarchy in fiction, men are... not. Not all men once again, but the examples that sprang to my mind were all from queer men or men of color. Not a cishet white dude in the bunch. I thought after a few years of all this wonderful writing grappling with gender issues that they would have big ideas and things to say but... no. At least, not that I was seeing.
Even in horror, my favorite genre, I've seen a lot more novels by men willing to consider the plight of women... written by men. They love a final girl (more and more these final girls written by straight men are lesbians) and they love to show how well they understand the threat of patriarchy but I keep wondering, why aren't you showing us male characters dealing with the same threat? What are YOU scared of, my bro?
Literary fiction is where you would expect this to be, since that's where the cishetwhitemen have the biggest stronghold but not much there, either. I was thinking about this even more while I was reading the new Sally Rooney, Intermezzo. Because while men may not be exploring masculinity, Rooney is.
It's not the first time, there's some interrogation of masculinity in Normal People. But it's arguably the central theme of Intermezzo. Alternate title: men will have inappropriate age gap relationships instead of going to therapy. It's about two brothers, Peter and Ivan. Peter is 32, a human rights lawyer, handsome and successful, the kind of guy who can get women. And does. Peter is still in love with Sylvia, his high school girlfriend who broke his heart. But he's been dating Naomi for nearly a year, which would be great except that Naomi is 23, a cam girl who lives in a squat, and he can barely tolerate her company.
Ivan is 10 years younger, a socially awkward washed up chess prodigy, who spent his teenage years spending too much time online surrounded by incel rhetoric. He is pulled out of his shell by Margaret, 36 and freshly divorced from her alcoholic ex. It's a relationship that makes no sense for either of them, but especially for Margaret, who still lives in the same small town as her family, her ex, and all the people who know them who are still mad at Margaret for ending it.
Peter and Ivan are not the kind of men who have been good to women. Or to each other, they barely talk and are hung up on old grudges. Gradually through these romantic relationships they're not supposed to have (age gap and class difference and monogamy expectations) the two men end up being better. To women, to each other, to themselves. They start to understand that they do not have to conform to expectations, a thing marginalized folks figure out much quicker, but they do get there. Honestly my biggest criticism of the novel is how optimistic it is.
I was really struck by one particular scene where Ivan recalled being a teenager on a bus, seeing a pregnant woman board, and refusing to offer her his seat. In his head he has all the incel arguments, libertarian misogyny nonsense pretending to be egalitarianism, but in this moment in the present he realizes that pregnant woman was a person. A person who needed the seat more than he did. It clicks. I am not sure a man can "wake up" that quickly, but at least it was considering a man who had been very stuck in that particular point of view. I have seen so little of it in fiction.
I asked around and while I am not as active on the socials these days and the socials are not as active in return, hardly anyone had a recommendation for me of a recent novel written by a straight white man that interrogates masculinity. (See below: two new releases, both excellent, both written by queer men, that do.) But one person said The Topeka School by Ben Lerner.
As soon as someone pointed it out, I realized I had to read it. I remember in detail the fall of 2019 when this book came out and I saw it EVERYWHERE and I deliberately refused to read it. "Who cares about this MAN writing about MEN?" I thought. Irony!
In the end, though, it is a very good novel and I'm glad I came back to it. It is not quite what I was looking for, as it is considering the suburban masculinity of the 90's (Lerner appears to be the same age as me) and the pre-internet era. But I loved the way Lerner approached his protagonist Adam's anxieties through the lens of forensics. Adam is a champion extemp speaker and debater, and there is a reason the worst men love to reply to people they don't agree with by saying DEBATE ME. The rules of these formats mean that in the end, what is important is not the strength of your argument but your ability to find every possible point and loophole in the system. Even in the Lincoln-Douglas debate format Adam is trying out, which is supposed to emphasize "morality," in the end it is just posturing. Posturing, telling the judges what they want to hear, appealing to the system that will reward you above all else. Yeah, there's a lot to dive into there, Lerner doesn't have to explain it to you, it's quite evident how much this has to do with the way men exist in the world.
There was a lot of other stuff, some of it successful (loved Adam's mom who gets famous after writing a self help book) and some of it not so much (a cringey moralizing anecdote in the final pages, an unbalanced plot for Adam's foil, Darren) but overall at least it was moving in the right direction. At least Lerner was grappling with these questions of masculinity.
I am really curious about this, after all we know that the Great Male Novelists always have Something To Say so why have they not spoken up? It's strange for them not to try to dominate a topic where they have expertise. When will they start to mansplain masculinity to us? If there's further reading out there, I would be curious to hear your recommendations.
Anyway, as for the Rooney, I am crossing my fingers we do not enter yet another Discourse Cycle. A great piece by Andrea Long Chu in Vulture had me feeling good that we could just all agree not to do it. She reads Rooney with her unflinching and very intelligent critic's eye--the word "Marxist" appears 11 times--but ultimately she is appeased. A new profile in the NYT today that I have not read makes me more concerned given its headline "Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated." I think her publicity team likes the discourse, as nothing starts it better than a NYT profile, but can we not? Rooney's novel is nice. It was mostly enjoyable to read, though Peter's chapters have a very choppy stream of consciousness style that requires some effort. It has that emotional thing she is able to wrap you up in that is so enticing. I would say it is better than Beautiful World but not as good as Normal People. If you like her novels you may well like it and if you don't you should probably skip it and can't we all just move on without having to make some grand declaration??? Perhaps not, as only 3 of the top 10 reviews on Goodreads actually have a review so apparently people are not gonna be normal about it.
It is Big Book Season. Big Book Season makes me nervous because I am such an impatient reader lately. But turns out I read and really enjoyed 4 of the Big Books. Odds are you will like at least 1. After Intermezzo, here are the other three:
After taking some time to think I have decided this is Greenwell's best novel, that each has been better than the last. There are those of us who are decided Garth Greenwell fans and then there is most people who have not heard of him. I don't know how much attention straight people have given him, but he's one of my absolute favorites for writing about sex and queerness. Weirdly his new novel Small Rain has almost no sex at all. But it is even more centered in the body, the story of a poet who finds himself in the ICU in the summer of 2021. A novel very much concerned with our present moment, that does not want to forget exactly what it was like during the pandemic, and the way we all must navigate our own lives and our relationships through it all. A really masterful work, truly.
If you would like to dive much too deeply into the mind of an incel then have I got a book for you! Rejection is a real high wire act of a novel--it's short stories not a novel but whatever--where all the worst people you have ever met make an appearance. The first sentence of my review is "This book is very good and I did not enjoy it at all." I also added "It's like watching a surgery video." Tulathimutte is very very good at this, and it's also constantly wickedly funny. Don't read it with someone else in the room or you will just want to quote it to them all the time. But this is a book that really gets being young and extremely online and knowing how to use therapy words to make horrible points. It's great.
Entitlement may have been my most anticipated of the season given how much I really really loved Alam's last novel, Leave the World Behind. I knew this wasn't a sure thing since I DNF'd Alam's second novel and was only meh on the first. But happily I liked this one a lot, though it's a lot more like his first book--the travails of privileged New Yorkers--than his third--slowly building apocalypse dread. There is slowly building dread, though. The slowly building dread that comes with watching our protagonist, Brooke, get gradually sucked in to the very messed up world view that she deserves a lot more than she has. Brooke is actually pretty privileged but once she starts working for a foundation whose job is to do philanthropy for a billionaire she sees the world through different eyes. It is, in its own way, a horror novel. Because you know the whole time that Brooke is wildly out of line and only getting worse, that she is deeply unaware of just how good she already has it, and that envy is absolutely destroying her for absolutely no reason. It's a short novel (all of these are short, actually) that culminates in a flash bang very quick climax that somehow works. I liked it. And luckily the title comes in handy, whenever someone asks you what it's about, "Entitlement" is the best answer.
And plenty of other good reads of the not-Big-Book variety, thank heavens:
The sixth Jackson Brodie novel is bananas. The last few have been so miserably bleak, sometimes so slow as to be plodding. And then we start this one dropped into what appears to be a cross between Noises Off and Downton Abbey with a dash of Midsomer Murders. Not very Brodie-y. But I think the series needed a little burst of something new, and Atkinson certainly does that. Somehow we still get plenty of our friend Jackson doing lots of pondering amidst all the hijinks. A little tricky to read as a standalone since there's several recurring characters.
I enjoyed this debut a lot. It's very queer and has lots of sex so, you know, right up my alley. It's messy, but parts of it are just so good that I really want to see what Burke does next. One of the main plots follows ex's Edith and Tessa, a trans woman and a lesbian. Which would be no big deal except that they dated before Edith's transition, which made it very confusing for both of them, and that now Tessa is marrying a man, which confuses Edith even more. Like I said, messy.
Oh, and I recommended this one over the summer except they were sneaky and moved the pub date to September. Which may be for the best because it deserves the Big Fall Book treatment! It's fun and ridiculous and sharp and you should read it.