I Think We All Know Why Men Aren't Reading Fiction
Hint: It's not because of a shortage of "sad boy" novels
Note: I originally wrote this post during the last cycle of the “why don’t read fiction” discourse, in fall of 2024. Then I sat on it for a while, in keeping with my policy of sitting on everything I write, but also because it seemed too hot and spicy. Now, in keeping with my new policy of shoveling things out onto the internet just for the hell of it, I’m going to schedule it for publication again. Maybe I’ll even get around to promoting it.
If nothing else, it is, as they say, a take.
Men aren't reading fiction, and I think we all know why.
The trouble is that we're not saying why. Most people don’t care about this topic at all, so they have nothing to say whatsoever. And the people who do care are painfully reluctant to discuss the problem in plain terms.
The numbers are clear enough. As one article puts it:
There is statistical evidence showing that adult women read more novels than men, attend more book clubs than men, use libraries more than men, buy more books than men, take more creative writing courses than men, and probably write more works of fiction than men. If women suddenly stopped reading, the novel would nearly disappear.
That may be an exaggeration, but drier analyses show a clear and durable gender gap among readers.
There's also a divide in the kinds of genres men and women read, with men gravitating to sci-fi, classics, and nonfiction, while women prefer just about everything else.
Numbers of readers overall are declining as new media come on the scene, but that still doesn't explain the slant of these figures. Why are men so averse to modern fiction?
Let’s (Not) Talk about Sex
The dearth of male readers became a hot topic recently in literary circles. You could find smart Substackers like Ross Barkan, Andrew Boryga, Chris Jesu Lee, Naomi Kanakia, and Alex Perez weighing in on the theme. These folks are all good writers, and they don't pull punches, but I find it bizarre that they've mostly settled on what seems to me a questionable explanation for the trend.
In the view of these writers, what we're missing today isn't masculine literature per se, but a particular kind of masculine novel—what some critics call the "sad boy" novel: a book that focuses on the travails of a sensitive young man struggling to get by in the modern world. The Sorrows of Young Werther; The Great Gatsby; The Catcher in the Rye; Notes from Underground; Goodbye, Columbus; Bright Lights, Big City; and High Fidelity might be cited as examples. These kinds of books don't get published, critics imply, because the publishing industry is now dominated by liberal, highly educated women don't want to read about the sexually explicit thoughts that swirl around inside young men's heads.
To which I say: fair enough. There's no doubt some truth to that critique. I have a fair number of inappropriate thoughts that swirl around inside my own head. But I don't find this to be a compelling explanation for the overall state of publishing today.
Let's get the easy stuff out of the way. It's true that educated, liberal women hold most jobs in publishing, with men now occupying only 1 out of every 5 jobs in the industry. And it's true that these women have made it known that they're looking for fiction with certain notable features, like a focus on identity and social issues. It's also true that young men think and say many things that aren't always pleasant to read about, and that, while the sexual frustrations of young men can be a worthy subject for literature, it's also in many ways an unpromising subject. Most people—and not only women—don't want to pick up a novel that reads like a bitter man's fictionalized work of revenge porn.
Really, though, how many novels have there ever been about young men with creepy sexual ideations? Would it be a major loss to literature if this particular topic went unaddressed? John Updike, Philip Roth, and Henry Miller are the only major authors I can think of who made this subject the focus of their work. The "sad boy" novels people cite as classic examples don't actually bring up sex much at all, or if they do, they come at the subject indirectly by depicting strains of romantic yearning. Notes from Underground features a prostitute as a major character, but it's mostly about a young man's envy of his peers. The Catcher in the Rye is about a boy mourning his younger brother. Bright Lights, Big City is about a young man coping with his mother's death. F. Scott Fitzgerald's books are about young men who idolize rich women, with salacious material kept to a minimum. I've never read The Sorrows of Young Werther, but it's not known for its detailed descriptions of piggish sexual fantasies. Are these stories really so scandalous?
The men in these novels have similar complaints. Compared to their lofty dreams and ideals, the world around them seems hollow and cheap. They yearn for a sense of higher purpose. A sincere connection. A brush with the sublime. These guys aren't wallowing in the muck, they're brooding among the stars! If current tastemakers shun this kind of writing, it's not because they can't handle frank talk about men's sexual fetishes. It's because they've turned away from a particular form of masculine romanticism.
What’s Missing from This Picture?
Is that all they've turned away from, though? I don't follow modern literature obsessively, but I do pay some attention to the field. And my impression is that, under the guidance of the women who now dominate the industry, fiction has come to focus on an increasingly narrow range of subjects and styles.
What happened to war novels, for instance? A Farewell to Arms? Slaughterhouse Five? The Naked and the Dead? Dog Soldiers? Tree of Smoke? They don’t seem to get talked about much anymore, even though war itself is still very much with us. Same with sports—although the "sport novel" was never well established as a genre, it seems to me that athletics used to crop up a lot more often in fiction. You also don't hear much about satires of the business world, like Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, or William Gaddis's JR, even though culture has probably never been more ripe for that kind of material.
Issues-driven novels about the woes of the working class, like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Russell Banks's Affliction, or Richard Russo's Empire Falls are also getting harder to track down. It's understandable that the colonial novel went away—I'm not sure we need successors to Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, Foster's Passage to India, Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, or Maugham's The Painted Veil—but what about the postcolonial novel, like Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Naipaul's Bend in the River, Theroux's Mosquito Coast, Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, or Norman Rush's Mating?
Twenty years ago, there was a lot of talk about "hysterical realism" and "systems novels." I was never quite sure what those terms meant, but whatever the "systems novel" was, it doesn't seem to get discussed much anymore. Fat novels told from many different perspectives, like Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Wolfe's A Man in Full, or Michener's Hawaii, also seem to have faded from view. In general, grand social sweep is out of fashion. Gonzo novels full of stylistic flourishes and technical asides, like those by Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Samuel Delany, or Umberto Eco, also don't get the love they used to, if they ever get published at all.
Along with "hysterical realism," magical realism also seems to be on the wane, reduced to a minor element deployed to add flavor and variety to otherwise conventional texts. Other omissions are harder to describe. I'm not sure what you call novels like DeLillo's White Noise, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, or Jose Saramago's Blindness, but I don't hear about them much these days. The novel of ideas, with its bold sociological theories, seems to be in retreat as well; Sandra Newman's The Men is the only example I can think of that received significant attention in recent years. When I was in high school, we read Brave New World and 1984 in History class, not English class, because those novels were thought to be of particular interest as works of political theory. Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale, Invisible Man, and A Clockwork Orange also once qualified for that kind of analysis. What's the modern equivalent?
That's to say nothing of the kinds of genre novels that used to break through to become cultural events, discussed in cocktail chatter and literary gatherings along with other, more high-minded fare. Stranger in a Strange Land, The Godfather, Carrie, Neuromancer, Interview with the Vampire, and The Da Vinci Code were all once major breakout sensations. Who's the modern heir to Michael Crichton? Dennis Lehane? John Le Carré? Disaster-themed potboilers also used to make a splash: The Poseidon Adventure; Lucifer's Hammer; Alas, Babylon; Earth Abides. When the apocalypse shows up in modern fiction, it's usually as a backdrop to an intimately staged interpersonal drama, as in C Pam Zhang's The Land of Milk and Honey or Edan Lepucki's California.
I’m sure everyone remembers the craze for YA that took off twenty years ago. Have any newer YA books broken into literary circles the way His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games once did? And what about those old planet-scale novels dealing with the origins and evolution of civilization itself: Asimov's Foundation series, Herbert's Dune books, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? Sure, those were marketed as potboilers, but they blew up into the kinds of influential novels that sophisticates couldn't afford to ignore. Hit novels used to be packed with bold theories about economics, religion, mass psychology, genetics, multigenerational empires, the fates of galaxies. Not anymore. Even comic novels like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series seem to have faded away.
In short, books that deal prominently with action, adventure, technical subjects, jokes, or abstract ideas have slowly been squeezed out of the American literary scene. There are exceptions to the trend, of course, and manifold complications; historical fiction, for instance, is still going strong. But books rich in what might be called, for lack of a better word, nerdiness have either been ejected from the scene entirely or relegated to permanent obscurity in downmarket niches.
Some of these changes are no doubt due to the dwindling popularity of leisure reading overall. But publishing is still a commercial business, and huge numbers of books are still published every year. What seems more significant is that the demographics of the fiction market have changed. There's no way to sugarcoat it. The departure of men from publishing hasn't only coincided with a gradual drain of male sexuality from the field, but with a loss of masculine humor, heroism, geekery, and grandeur as well.
How Did It Come to This?
The strange thing is that there's no clear reason why this should have happened. It's not as if women can't write nerdy, panoramic, action-packed books. Zadie Smith was once considered one of the foremost practitioners of hysterical realism. Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is a great war novel. Margaret Atwood is primarily known for ideas-driven fiction about big social theories. So is Ursula K. Le Guin. Jennifer Egan made her name writing formally daring fiction. Barbara Kingsolver built a career on ambitious books packed full of scientific info. Helen Dewitt. Hilary Mantel. Doris Lessing. Mary Shelley. Susanna Clarke. The list goes on and on. But the women who now serve as stewards of modern literature don't seem to have much taste for that kind of writing, no matter who produces it. The virtuosic technical novel that dispenses facts and flourishes with joyful vigor, the postmodern novel with its lavish experiments, the novel of ideas with its grand social allegories, have all waned in significance along with the influence of male editors, audiences, and critics.
The truth is that today's trendsetters aren't merely averse to big nerdy novels. They actively discourage people from writing them. Artistic genius is derided as a phallocentric myth, invalidating the kind of acclamation that naturally accrues to technically ambitious work. The tenor of literary criticism has changed even more than the content of literary fiction, shifting from a focus on structure and technique to a hunt for moral offenses. Contemporary mores discourage authors from writing about other cultures or identities, restricting the range of available material and making it difficult to write stories that play out on an epic scale. Work that upholds traditional gender roles is also denigrated, which makes it tough to write honestly and vividly about traditional cultures, working class characters, historical periods, and even many modern families.
What does that leave us? A recent Esquire article sums up what today's tastemakers are looking for: in the author's words, books that "encapsulate the malaise of millennial and Gen Z existence: unfulfilled desires, life under late-stage capitalism, the threat of climate change, and so on."
Malaise. That's it. Contemporary literature has become a literature of fatigue. Even a subject as technical as climate change gets reduced to one entry in a list of millennial disappointments, like missed career milestones or unpaid student debt. Of course, millennial malaise is a fine subject for a novel. But it's become something more like an overriding fixation, because so many other topics have been shoved off the shelf: deemed too vulgar, too pretentious, too problematic, or too old-fashioned for the women who sign contracts in New York. With so much potential material Xed out of consideration, these novels of malaise tend to focus on the ups and downs of one or two intimate relationships, with obsessive attention paid to the doubts, hopes, hang-ups, and frustrations of beleaguered college graduates. The Esquire article linked above lists examples of the kinds of books today's luminaries are looking for, including:
Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, which "approach[es] the subject [of male vulnerability] through autotheory."
Adam Mars-Jones's Box Hill, which depicts a gay relationship where "abuse, intimacy, degradation, and tenderness coexist."
Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, which "sees a rotating cast of grad students coupling up, cheating, fighting, and getting back together."
Azumah Nelson’s Open Water, which "weaves a love story between a photographer and a dancer against a backdrop of Black exuberance and artistic expression."
Bryan Washington's Memorial, which "depicts the fractured relationship between Benson, a middle-class Black man, and Mike, a Japanese American chef."
André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, which chronicles "the tender and tumultuous romance between seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman and twenty-four-year-old Oliver."
Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In, which tells the story of a trans man who "comes to terms with his experience of having lived as a girl while failing to live up to societal expectations."
And these are offered as examples of masculine books! Novels to help bring men back into literature.
Female Masculinity? Come on.
It's not that these books sound obviously bad. It's that every single one of them is a bittersweet lyric about the ups and downs of intimate relationships. The only book in the article that departs from the pattern is Ben Lerner's The Topeka School, which broadens its focus to the nuclear family and, in Franzenesque fashion, lodges its depiction of male melancholy in an analysis of broader social ills.
I haven't read any of Tobin's picks. But the newish books I have read hew to the same trend. They include:
Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind, which tells the story of a young woman coping with a miscarriage while navigating the collapse of her academic career.
Patricia Lockwood's No one Is Talking about This, which tells the story of a young woman coping with a niece's illness while curating her social media feeds.
Aesthetica, by Allie Rowbottom, which tells the story of a young woman coping with her mother's illness while struggling to launch an influencer career.
Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, which tells the story of a young woman ruminating on a breakup while struggling to launch a writing career.
Vivek Shraya's The Subtweet, which tells the story of a young woman navigating a difficult friendship while coping with a faltering music career.
Julia May Jonas's Vladimir, which tells the story of a woman lusting after a coworker while coping with a philandering husband.
Most of these books were pretty good. Some were great. Smallwood and Lockwood, in particular, are highly accomplished. It's impossible not to notice, though, when you put them all together, how small modern literature has become. Major authors like Sheila Heti, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, Rachel Cusk, and Honor Levy all seem to work on the same intimate scale; Rooney's books are practically metonyms for the trend. Are there exceptions? Sure. But take a close look, and I think you'll find they mostly come from Boomer authors who got their start in earlier eras, or from authors who cut their teeth overseas. As a rule, the closer you get to New York, the quieter fiction becomes.
Or how about this? Let's try taking a look at recent novels highlighted by The Atlantic and The New Yorker, two major outlets that still review fiction for a general audience. Scanning results for the last few months, at time of writing, gives us:
Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, which is about a "biracial writer-professor protagonist" with a "shambolic personal life" and "a tenure deadline" who's pitching an adaptation of her novel to a prestige TV producer.
Jo Hamya's The Hypocrite, which is about a woman "staging a critically lauded play in London's West End" while settling scores with her overbearing father.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina, which is "a campus novel about a Latine senior at Harvard who thinks about books, boys, and clothes … and dreams of becoming a writer."
Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare, which is about "an unemployed, perennially agitated 30-something who … recently left her long-term boyfriend" and "smokes weed on her couch while she … ties herself into emotional knots."
Yasmin Zaher's The Coin, which is about a "beautiful," "wealthy" woman with "impeccable taste" who has taken a job teaching English at a middle school and gets involved in a scheme to sell knockoff handbags.
Miranda July's All Fours, which is about a woman who pursues an open relationship to relieve the doldrums of an unsatisfying marriage.
Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists, which is about a young couple who "drift through an unnamed city, mingle with their fellow expatriates, attend apartment showings, and otherwise indulge in dreams about the arc of their futures."
Rosalind Brown's Practice, which is about a woman who spends a day puttering around her apartment to avoid the pressures of her academic career.
Sarah Manguso's, Liars, which is about a woman who looks to divorce "to reassert an essential identity that’s been effaced by coercive social scripts."
R. O. Kwon's Exhibit, which is about a photographer who "finds her life at a standstill" and embarks on a secret relationship with a ballerina.
Claire Sestanovich's Ask me Again, which is about a young woman who "graduates from a prestigious college and gets a job at a newspaper while contending with romances, ambitions, a nascent political consciousness, and a changing relationship with her parents."
Sarah Crossan's Hey, Zoey, which is about a woman who "finds life-affirming companionship" with a sex doll after her marriage falls apart.
I think you can be forgiven for skimming that list. Whatever the strengths of the individual books, they all start to sound the same in a market crowded with similar fare. The few entries that depart from the format, such as Wendy Chen's intergenerational saga Their Divine Fires, Teddy Wayne's lit-thriller The Winner, or Taffy Brodesser-Akner's social novel Long Island Compromise, serve to accentuate the restricted scope of current literary offerings: book after book about dissatisfied, mostly female professionals seeking companionship and creative validation.
Contemporary genre books are necessarily more action-packed, but in my experience they've also grown more intimate in scale and more deliberative in tone, with that old millennial malaise creeping in from every corner. "Coziness" has emerged as a cross-genre marketing category, with cozy mysteries, cozy fantasies, and cozy romances offered to readers who prefer not to meet with too much excitement in their fiction. Science fiction is naturally more grandiose, with blockbuster authors like N. K. Jemisin continuing to work on an epic scale, but it's worth noting that many authors from that genre who defiantly buck modern trends—Andy Weir, Cixin Liu, Hugh Howey—originally came to prominence outside contemporary American publishing circles. The real powerhouse genre of the moment is romance, with authors Colleen Hoover, Julia Quinn, and E. L. James achieving the kind of runaway success that once greeted action-packed epics such as Game of Thrones, Shogun, or The Lord of the Rings. Whether we're talking about highbrow or lowbrow markets, intimacy now triumphs over action, tender feelings over big ideas.
The Esquire article referenced above gives a taste of the attitude that led to this diminution. Discussing former literary lions David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, and Thomas Pynchon, the author notes that they now have "reputations as the apex of white male pretension" with their books having "acquired cult status as signifiers of misogyny." That's the problem right there. The people who now set the tone of modern publishing don’t see a difference between ambition and pretension. Worse, the ubiquity of this attitude makes it difficult to discuss the matter in plain terms, because women who think this way conform so perfectly to negative feminine stereotypes. How do you respond to someone who insists, in all earnestness, that intellectual exuberance is bad because boys like it? And yet it's the inverse of this attitude—the idea that genius inspires us all, that ambitious books can be for everyone—that's now branded as misogyny.
The Misogynists Were Wrong
Are the old stereotypes true, then? Does the shrinking of modern literature ratify the predictions of yesterday's patriarchs, who argued that fiction by and for women would necessarily conform to traditional feminine interests? Not so fast. We've already seen that women, given the chance, will throw themselves into bold, wide-ranging, stylistically ambitious, topically varied books—and were already doing so in an era when men tried hard to get them not to. And much current literature, though published by and for women, isn't especially feminine by old-fashioned standards. The misogynists of the past thought that women writers, given free rein, would devote their energies to conventional romances. But contemporary fiction, at least in literary circles, has drifted almost as far from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as it has from Saul Bellow and Herman Melville. A recent New Yorker review gives a taste of what these modern stories about relationships are like:
John washes most but not all of the dishes. John does the dishes, but he puts the refillable seltzer bottles in the dishwasher and melts them. John forgets to clean the cutting boards. John forgets to buy the muesli. John arrives late to parties and forgets the gifts. John buys another stack of comic books and spends too much money on cheese again. John promises to vacuum but pleads back spasms. John spends forty dollars on sushi. John promises to be home before eleven o’clock to fuck Jane; at eleven o’clock, Jane, alone at home, begins washing the dishes.
…
Jane spot-cleans, area-cleans, rage-cleans, and nurses the baby seven times. Jane plays Mozart for the child. Jane plays “Rhapsody in Blue” for the child. Jane makes origami polyhedra with the child. Jane kneads two batches of cookie dough—after her hysterectomy! Jane packs and unpacks their belongings, hires and fires babysitters. Jane gets John’s phone turned back on after he forgets to pay his bill. Jane makes herself come, again. Jane roasts carrots.
Most modern fiction isn't quite so acerbic, but it would be hard to call today's literary novels "romantic." Instead of passionate lovers like Emma Woodhouse and Cathy Earnshaw, we get the gripes and antipathies of the millennial dating scene. Instead of brash social climbers like Becky Sharpe and Undine Spragg, we get a parade of creatives bemoaning the shortcomings of their parents, partners, and peers. Even radical feminist writing seems to have lost its mojo, trading in the world-bestriding mythopoesis of Angela Carter for scrupulous lists of mundane aggravations.
This isn't quite the world yesterday's misogynists foresaw. Still, the overall trend is hard to ignore. Someone who held stereotypical views on gender might have predicted that a publishing industry run by women would eventually come to focus overwhelmingly on domestic matters and intimate affairs. And, well … isn’t that basically what's happening? The major qualification is that family, as a subject, is surprisingly underemphasized, with children rarely given significant roles. Instead, contemporary American novels zoom in on the kinds of adult connections that can be severed if they prove disappointing—flawed friendships, unsatisfactory marriages, fleeting love affairs, fraught family ties—dissecting their shortcomings in meticulous detail while treating other material as background decor.
Worrying that today's publishers are too quick to snub white men, or that we don't have enough "sad boy" literature, feels like a dodge around the bigger issue staring us in the face. With such a narrow range of topics on the table, fiction threatens to become little more than the depressive stepsister of memoir, focused narrowly on the personal quest for self-actualization but compelled to cater to the tastes of editors who look askance at both the masculine passion for heroism and the feminine passion for romance. Anything that smacks of a masculine taste for competition—physical aggression, technical showiness, intellectual bloodymindedness—or savors too much of feminine tenderness—maternal devotion, coquettishness, marital bliss—is dismissed as criminally old hat. Meanwhile, because modern conventions also forbid attempts to stray too far from one's own ethnic and gendered perspective, novels rarely venture outside the milieu of upper-class professionals. The challenge for a modern author is to try to slip a few morsels of interesting material through a system that seems designed to strip literature of the qualities that both men and women find most stimulating: competition, adventure, violence, romance, philosophy, intellectual curiosity, religion, self-sacrifice. This lack of exciting material then becomes the main subject of the fiction we do have, with characters clinging desperately to a few flawed relationships in a world that seems drained of meaning and hope.
Virginia Woolf famously argued that writers needed a "room of one's own" in which to give the imagination space to thrive. To judge by the offerings on display, the modern literary author is trapped in that room—imprisoned, like a self-defeating agoraphobe, in the private haven she once demanded.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I'm not entirely sure the shrinking scope of publishing is a problem that cries out for a solution. As many critics have noted, novel reading originally took off as a pastime among genteel women; we may simply be reverting to a historical baseline. Besides, there's nothing wrong with understated dramas, even if readers like me pine for more boyish pleasures.
As for men, with so many distribution options available, there's nothing to stop us from sharing the kind of fiction we like via other channels, as women once did with their own favorite books. If men have mostly sought out other media, from games and movies to podcasts and YouTube channels, do we have anyone but ourselves to blame?
Still, it bugs me when people who do think we have a problem—who lament the departure of men from fiction—shy away from describing the situation in plain terms. You want more guys to read and write novels? Maybe publish more authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Dan Simmons, or William Gibson, who cram their books full of geeky commentary on military hardware, combat techniques, computer science, history, orbital mechanics, genetic engineering, ecology, terraforming, the rise and fall of civilizations, and a million other topics. Maybe throw more garlands at cocky virtuosos like Nabokov, Joshua Cohen, or Shehan Karunatilaka, or at maestros who don't shy away from writing panoramic works about people from all different cultures and classes. Maybe try publishing more caustic satires in the style of Brett Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, or Chuck Palahniuk. Maybe cultivate a thick-skinned literary culture that tolerates rude jokes, authorial hubris, risky decisions, and sharp-elbowed criticism. Maybe celebrate masculine enthusiasms instead of reflexively denigrating them. Maybe admit that men and women are different, have different motivations, and like different things.
Because the truth is, literature has lost more than a handful of coming-of-age novels by young male romantics. The changes we've seen are bigger than that. They're complex. They're multifaceted.
Someone should write a book about them.