It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.
At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read “Northanger Abbey.”
Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.”
The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading.”
Some of the most charming encounters I’ve had with men were about books.
Mike Nichols once turned to me at a dinner in L.A. and told me his favorite novel was Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” I was startled because I have read that book over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics. Someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)
I went to interview Tom Stoppard in Dorset a few years ago. The playwright has no computer and is not on social media. He writes with a Caran d’Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel.
Stoppard had a romantic-looking bookcase full of first editions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. He complained that his book collection was regularly raided by “American burglars.”
It was ensorcelling. I felt the same when I interviewed Ralph Fiennes, and it turned out that he loves Shakespeare and reciting Beckett at 3 a.m. under the stars.
He recalled that his mother, a novelist named Jennifer Lash, read him bedtime stories from Shakespeare, including “Henry V” and “Hamlet.”
“My mother said, ‘I’ll tell you a story. There was this young man and his father’s died, and he’s a young prince.’ And she told it to me in her own words.”
President Trump projects a crude, bombastic image of masculinity. I can always escape by rereading Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” and falling back in love with Eugene Wrayburn, an indolent, upper-crust barrister who turns out to have every quality a man should have.
I asked my friend Richard Babcock, a former magazine editor and novelist who taught writing at Northwestern, about the male aversion to reading. His new novel is “A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon,” set in the Nevada desert in 1954 under the shadow of nuclear bomb testing. It follows three people whose lives are entwined. “The book is about guilt, adultery, murder, a chase through the mountains — you know, the usual day-to-day stuff,” Babcock said wryly.
“Not to blame the current cultural landscape on Ronald Reagan,” he said, “but I think the obsession with money and wealth that arrived in the 1980s may have encouraged the false idea in men that there was little to learn from a novel. If you want tips on how to crush your rival, better to read nonfiction.
“Similarly, with the education focus turning to math and science, gateways to good-paying jobs, the value of the humanities has been degraded. And we don’t hear enough about how novels, sweeping over landscapes, personalities, ideas, events can open perspectives and discipline the mind.”
Susan Sontag once said novels can “enlarge your sympathies,” preventing you from “shriveling and becoming narrower.” That’s more essential as everyone is hunching over fiendish little personal devices.
She called fiction an ax that “kind of splits you open,” shakes you out of your crusty habits and preferences “and gives you a model for caring about things that you might otherwise not care about.”
As Babcock points out, the decline of literary fiction with everyone has left romance and historical fiction, traditionally favored by women, the dominant genres. Still, he said, he is “a bit distrustful of the men-don’t-read-novels lament,” noting that “my friends eagerly read novels, even returning to the classics, such as ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Middlemarch.’ Some wonderful male writers are turning out thoughtful, dramatic books, such as Daniel Mason’s ‘North Woods’ and Ben Shattuck’s ‘The History of Sound.’”
A couple years ago, I wrote about how getting my master’s in English literature from Columbia underscored for me that we need the humanities even more when technology is stripping us of our humanity.
Works like “Frankenstein” and “Paradise Lost” shed light on the narcissism of the powerful, male tech geniuses birthing a world-shattering new species, A.I.
After that, a New Yorker named Paul Bergman emailed me an invitation to his book club — all men, lawyers and a judge who had gotten to know one another from the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office.
“For the last 45 years,” Bergman wrote me, “we’ve been sharing our thoughts on books we’ve read.” Would I join a few sessions on “Middlemarch”?
Dear reader, I did.
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