Real men don’t eat quiche, as we learned from Bruce Feirstein’s amusing 1982 spoof book of the same name. Every indication is damn few of us read novels either.
As a college student I skipped the fraternity scene, which struck me as the shallow end of the higher education pool. I shared with your average frat boy a keen interest in beer and comely coeds. But the incontinent way they consumed one and the ham-handed way they pursued the other were not my style.
It seems though, without my ever being aware of having joined it, that I’m now a member of a very select fraternity, to wit: men who read novels. (I Turna Page?) These include in my case, I’m not ashamed to admit, novels in which the central character is an alpha male who gets the pretty girl. But increasingly, to satisfy my habit I have to resort to back lists, too often including writers who’ve gone to their rewards. To name just a few: Bob Parker, Dick Francis, Nelson DeMille, Tony Hillerman, Raymond Chandler, Joe Wambaugh, Frederick Forsyth, and P.D. James.
The P.D. in the last name of my list above stands for Phyllis Dorothy, and she’s probably my favorite crime writer. Writing good traditional fiction is not, like that tree house of our youth, an all boys club. Phyllis’s work can be enjoyed by men who aren’t ashamed of being men.
Few worthies like these are being published today, for reasons recently and ably explored by TAS regulars Lou Aguilar and John Mac Ghlionn. These two thoughtful laments deserve wide readerships. They shine a light on yet another precinct of Western life that has been feminized and politicized to within an inch of its life.
Over more decades than I’m prepared to count, I’ve been privileged to enjoy a large number of male friends and acquaintances. But of these dozens of guys I can only think of three who read novels. Two are guys who frequent my gym, the other is a high school and college classmate enjoying a well deserved retirement on the left coast. I know other men who read books, but almost exclusively non-fiction. Some of these consider fiction irrelevant at best and airy-fairy at worst. Even though well constructed fiction can shed more light on the rich, various, complex, and ultimately mysterious business of the human enterprise than all the charts, graphs, and assorted mummeries of social “scientists” or political and social casuists who, far gone in certainty, believe they have the key to Everything.
Regular readers of my byline know I’m a consumer and booster of what’s variously labeled as crime, detective, or mystery fiction. I hold up at least the best of this form, which in recent decades (though not necessarily this one) has attracted the best writers, while so-called “literary” fiction has fallen on hard times. Crime fiction is clearly the current novel of manners. If a contemporary Anthony Trollope wanted to write about how we live now, he would likely do it through a series of novels featuring a recurring professional, private, or amateur detective. And imagine the female amateur detective Jane Austin would create today, on the way to selling lots of books.
Detective fiction is not my total reading. I’ve spent many happy hours under the lamp with Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Twain, Conrad et al. (I gave Henry James a pass for fear of drowning in a sea of dependent clauses.) In college during my day one couldn’t miss the triumvirate of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. When I wish to wrestle with First Things and the what’s-it-all-about question, I return to Walker Percy. (When nominations are opened for the title of Great American Novel of the 20th Century, I’ll put forward Percy’s Love in the Ruins.)
But such giants as these have nearly disappeared from the scene. Their successors today would have a hard time getting published. This dismal business is helped along by the professorate, who recently discovered that these writers are all dead, white, European males, mostly heterosexual, and therefore worthy of trigger warnings rather than reverence.
Lou and John touch on the reasons why most men have given up on novels, though I doubt there were ever that many hairy-chested novel readers, save for when someone like Tom Clancy comes along. (In subsequent books, at least for me, Clancy never again captured the magic of Hunt for Red October.) I wouldn’t bother with the NYT piece Lou references in his column. The writer, one Joseph Bernstein, AKA Butterfly Dundee, is an aged-in-the-barrel left progressive who pays obeisance to all the feminist and leftist pieties. (If you must read it, pack a lunch. It goes on forever, though it arrives nowhere.)
Perhaps the main reason contemporary novels leave traditional men cold is that the publishing industry is now heavily infested with graduates, many young, of the Seven Sisters schools. They hold black belts in feminist indignation and consider testosterone a toxic substance. They’re far gone in identity politics and the myriad delusions of the political and cultural left. With these literary gatekeepers, a new Dick Francis or Bob Parker would never make it out of the slush piles. A Raymond Chandler would cause this lot to hyperventilate.
And it’s not just traditional male writers who are getting the bum’s rush from publishers and other cultural organs the current smart set dominates. Look at how J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s mom, was cast into outer darkness for insisting on the bloody obvious, which is that a woman is a woman and a man can’t be one. Unlike so many others who retreat and kowtow when attacked by the left, J.K. hasn’t given an inch. When she has to, she can be tough as a two-dollar steak.
So as things stand, it doesn’t appear my select fraternity (and Lou’s and John’s) will be taking on many new members. Worthy new fiction is still available, though guys not trying to get in touch with their feminine side or are paid-up members of the Tim Walz Fan Club are having to look harder to find it. Their search will be the harder thanks to the near total disappearance of used bookstores. Mail order books have made these delightful places an endangered species.
But I’ll be all right. Some of my most enjoyable reading is re-reading. Worthy books are always worth a second trip. So my personal library of a couple of thousand volumes (not all fiction, of course) will sustain me for whatever page-turning days I have left.
Young masculine guys today have a much slimmer chance of developing the life-long habit I picked up in high school. Boring teachers drove me to the device of concealing a novel behind my school notebook. I soon developed the skill of appearing to be paying attention to what the teacher was banging on about while I was in fact reading something much more interesting. A skill of limited value I suppose. But one that served me well.
READ MORE from Larry Thornberry:
Reflections on 1970s Baseball and the Snakes in Baseball’s Garden