The online literary wars rage on, with faulty arguments and inconsistent narratives. In an age dominated by short-form “BookTok” content, the New York Times, in a recent article, suggested that the “literary man” is on the way to extinction. Liberal media call this a grave concern, but it’s only posturing. Any man who does read today is labeled a dangerous, right-wing “lit bro.” Serious literature is seen as unacceptable and problematic, as opposed to the slop pushed by most legacy publishing houses.
The author of the piece, Paul Bernstein, fundamentally misdiagnoses the issue. By only interviewing men in bookstores and publishing, Bernstein shows his hand. Literary men don’t exist in coastal elitism’s upper echelons because their seats have been taken.
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The rugged reader of Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy clashes with the New York Times’s bohemian, inclusive, cosmopolitan male model. The people Bernstein considers authorities, steeped in the female-dominated publishing industry, don’t understand what literature that appeals to men would even look like. Men generally seek grit and individualism. For women, romance and fantasy are what sells.
The piece whiffs on its audience: How can one accurately picture this nebulous ‘literary man’ without venturing beyond the liberal bubble?
As Bernstein notes, “literary novelists … have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys.” This is because they’re incentivized to elevate underprivileged identities on a literary pedestal. Fun fact: The New Yorker has not published a white male in the magazine for fiction since 1984. A quick look at award-winning novels should indicate that this trend has hit critical mass. So why is anybody surprised that men don’t want to participate in the literati?
There is nothing for them there.
As a bookish, college-age male, I immediately go to the classics section in any bookstore. Why would I try new fiction, given everything I know about it? I read for my own taste, not for the approval of the New York Times.
In its study of the crisis of male literacy, the New York Times focuses on reading as an ambiguous pleasure or comfort. This framing suggests a total inability to deal with the subjects on their own terms. Men, especially serious literary ones, don’t read to “find” themselves. They read to situate their mind in reality, or to “level up.”
The author abandons this idea, suggesting men start “approaching their reading lives a little more like women do: getting recommendations online from celebrities and influencers, browsing together, forming book clubs.”
No. The liberal ideal is for men and women to be ungendered and undifferentiated. The mere hint of male interests that differ in the slightest from female ones evokes the speculative fear of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: literary Kens retreating to “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses,” blasting Joe Rogan and Kid Rock while reading Fight Club or The Catcher in the Rye.
MY MY HEY HEY, WESTERN CIV HAS GOT TO STAY
Bernstein is right: Fiction reading has long been driven by female tastes. But the solution is the opposite of what he has in mind. Men find meaning in books when authors such as Faulkner and McCarthy diagnose the human condition, not when the latest “BookTok” phenomenon pumps out entertaining pulp with happy endings.
The idea that literary men would return “if only men read like women” is actually the heart of the problem. To get books back in the hands of the unreading sex, what’s needed are authors and an industry unafraid to write like men.