Solid State Books, an independent bookstore in the H Street Corridor, is photographed in Washington DC in February 2019. | Calla Kessler for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Every generation has a small group of young fiction writers who make it: They top bestseller lists, win prizes, and become household names. And for decades — well, nearly every decade — they have all been straight white men.
Philip Roth. Norman Mailer. John Updike. Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Safran Foer. You get the picture.
But in the last decade or so, that’s changed: The up-and-coming writers capturing buzz and dominating critics’ lists have largely been women. Think Sally Rooney or Emma Cline or Ottessa Moshfegh. And when men do break through, they usually aren’t young, straight, or white.
It’s worth pointing out that, while women now publish more books than men, men are still publishing more books now than they ever have before.
But the (relative) decline of the men in letters has led to searching discussions, first murmured, but now increasingly debated in places like the New York Times and the Guardian: Why does the decline of the young, white, male writer matter? And what do we lose — if anything — with this shift?
“We’ve seen a lot of great work being done to account for perspectives that were left out of literature for a long time,” Ross Barkan, a journalist and novelist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “But I also think it’s important to know, for better and for worse, what the men of the 2020s are up to.”
Barkan and King talked about how he feels young men have been shut out of literary fiction, what he thinks is lost, and his experience trying to get fiction published. His third novel, Glass Century, was released earlier this month.
Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to hear the whole thing wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
We are talking to you today because you wrote an essay not long ago called “From Misogyny to No Man’s Land: The Vanishing Male in Contemporary Literature.” What’s your argument in that essay, Ross?
My argument in that essay is that among young literary writers today, there is a lack of men. This doesn’t mean there are no male novelists of prominence under the age of 40 — that’s the cutoff I use for young — but there are fewer of them than there were historically.
And most of the prominent literary fiction writers today are women. I’m talking about a very specific type of fiction that is vying for awards or trying to vie for awards, trying to attain a certain level of prestige.
You’re 35, and you’re a white man?
Correct.
I wonder about the kind of driving force for this essay and whether you are the vanishing male writer of which you wrote.
I think so, yeah, I think there’s less of me for sure. I mean, there’d be an era where there were a lot of novelists like myself, Jewish or not Jewish, but certainly white men.
I am inclined to find your argument very compelling. I was a teenager in the ’90s, a young adult in the 2000s. That’s when you read a lot of fiction, right? And I do remember David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer…
Yeah.
…Jonathan Franzen.
Jonathan Lethem!
And so what you’re saying actually really does track to me. The question I wonder about is the why. And let me ask you first to answer the why from your personal perspective.
You’re a novelist. You’re 35 years old. You’re a straight white guy — do you feel like those identities are holding you back in some way?
Not in the real world. In the real world, I have enormous privilege.
But in the 2010s, the literary world was less interested in straight men. I think you have a general lack of the heterosexual male perspective in newer fiction. There’s a long history of writers portraying toxic masculinity and rough male characters — and it feels like you see less of that today.
I also think at the same time, young male writers, white and non-white, were taking less of an interest in fiction. It’s a chicken-and-egg challenge: Is it the publishing industry deciding this is no longer something we’re going to push or take a real interest in, or is it market forces as well?
So some of it is internal — maybe there are fewer men who want to be great novelists, but maybe publishers are saying, “Hey, we’re just less interested in the perspectives of straight white men.” When you approached publishers with your novel Glass Century, did you hear that?
I think you hear it behind the scenes. You’re never told to your face. I’m not complaining — I don’t consider myself a victim. I’ve had a successful career. I’m very happy with it.
But what do you hear behind the scenes?
To echo Joyce Carol Oates in a sort of notorious but not wrong tweet from several years ago — and I’m paraphrasing — agents and editors, at least in the 2010s and early 2020s, were just less interested in straight male fiction. I want to broaden it a little bit because you see even among Black, Hispanic, and Asian straight men — there are some, but [they’re] less common.
And, certainly, the white male is now even less common, so I think publishers in general in that era were trying to diversify, which was fine. You had social justice politics, you had what they call “woke,” and in a way woke worked because it broadened things out and brought in new voices, but it is also zero sum. Some come up; some go out. And so for me, it’s observing that trend.
What do you think we lose when we lose the perspective of those young white men?
It’s a large part of the country. I think you have a lot going on with young men today. White and non-white alike, straight men — they are falling behind academically. They’re increasingly alienated. They’re increasingly angry. They are increasingly online. And fiction, in my view, is not grappling with all of that.
I agree with you, but I did actually see that in one book in the last year, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. There were characters who were highly online. The most acclaimed story was about an incel. That book was incredibly powerful. And it got praise, right? What do you think about that?
He’s a fantastic writer. I’ll start there. He’s a great prose stylist. There’s a short story I love about a young Asian man who is having these very lurid sexual fantasies about dominating other men. Fantastically written — he’s sort of the Roth of our era in terms of his ability to make a sentence really sizzle.
But this is the caveat that people seem to be afraid to point out: It’s not a straight male fantasy. Could Tony have written a straight male fantasy of wanting to subdue a woman the way that character wants to subdue men? Tony himself is straight. It was an interesting choice there to inhabit a gay character. Nothing wrong with that. Writers should write about whatever sexuality. I don’t believe in limiting anyone in that way.
But I thought it was a choice, right? Because straight male lust is very disconcerting. It’s not easy to write about. What do men think about? The modern novel is not addressing that enough. The nasty, nasty men. The men who are not — maybe they’re good at heart, but they have a lot of bad thoughts. And they take bad actions. You don’t see that much in fiction today, I would argue.
Let me ask you about an argument that I think many people might have in response to what you’ve said, including many women.
If you look at the stats going back to the year 1800, women made up about 5 percent of published authors. It’s 10 percent through about the 1900s, and then in 2015, women surpassed men — more women are publishing books than men. Although both genders are still publishing a lot of books, it should be said.
Are you at all sympathetic to the argument that you guys had your turn for centuries, the attention, the prizes, the accolades, so we’re just leveling the playing field out?
Yeah, I’m sympathetic, for sure. I think that it’s reasonable to believe that — that’s an honest argument. The problem is you’ll hear from people who say this isn’t happening, and I find that very tiring.
I think the honest thing to say is that it’s time to rebalance the scales or turn the tables. But there are winners and losers, right? Women were losing; now men are losing. I will say, there’s no solace offered to the 26-year-old male who must pay for the sins of the past, right? The young male writer can’t sit at home and think, Well, golly, it was good Norman Mailer and John Updike had such a great run.
So yes, I think one can rebalance, one can seek balance, one can ensure that groups of people who are discriminated against have their time as they should. My point merely is that you can’t then pretend there aren’t those who aren’t getting what they want.
