In so many ways, the “crisis of masculinity” is a crisis of imagination. We have a vivid, if generalised, image of its victim: the lost boy of modernity surrounded with his clichés of video games, online porn and Jordan Petersons. We take him seriously, cataloguing him nobly as one of society’s most pressing failures — as well as one of its chief villains. But the figure above is little more than a shadowy caricature, and our distance from him is inhibiting our discussion of the problem. A culture that has forgotten to think honestly about what a young man can be like cannot understand what afflicts him, let alone how to fix him.
Which is an odd regression, because we used to know him so well. Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page, male writers started to compete with each other over who could depict the arrival of sexual maturity in the most appalling, hilarious detail. They would write about themselves at school, themselves in the bedroom and, most perversely, themselves in the bathroom.
As Kingsley Amis later reflected, in the Fifties “to utter or write a swear-word, as they were called, counted as a small act of revolt, the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger”. And at the start of that decade, we had The Catcher in the Rye, a novel which set the thematic tramlines for what was to come (angst, alienation, youngsters vs oldsters). But Holden was a good kid really, his deepest moral sin nothing more than a brief and ultimately chaste parlay with a prostitute. He was overtaken by far meaner younger brothers and, by the end of the Sixties, Philip Roth had produced Portnoy’s Complaint, an unsparing exposé on the dangers of rabid self-abuse. But the greatest and most summative achievement of the lot, arguably retiring the genre in its unstinting imposition of the nastiness, arrogance, misogyny and truth of male adolescence, is Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, published 50 years ago.
When Amis died in May, there was much handwringing over exactly what order of talent was being commemorated. A virtuoso stylist, certainly. But a serious novelist? A mere literary comedian? James Wood leant towards the latter, bafflingly labelling Amis our latter-day P.G. Wodehouse. And some dedicated fans simply threw out the fiction in frustration, trusting that the true talent had found its way into the memoir, the essays, the journalism. Quite an insult to the author of 15 novels, and quite misguided, too. Obviously, Amis’s true métier was as one of our great novelists of masculinity — specifically, its most resentful, female-fearing and insecure aspects, exactly those which trouble us about our young men today.
It’s there from the opening lines of The Rachel Papers — “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me” — that special brew of what, on the next page, Charles calls “all the self-consciousness and self-disgust and self-infatuation and self-…you name it” that is essential to this species of male adolescence. It is the eve of Charles’s 20th birthday, an occasion which is vital for the novel’s plot: a moment of metamorphosis, a simultaneously elevating and enervating release of “teenage” anarchy, to be replaced with “that noisome Brobdingnagian world the child sees as adulthood”. Charles spies an opportunity for self-inspection, even amid the self-absorption. And what follows is his account of the love affair that he believes has marked the last months of his youth, his relationship with Rachel.
What follows is a triumph of stylised solipsism. Charles has kept detailed notes on Rachel (as he does on everything else, from his reading for Oxford entrance to the no less scholarly Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis). He has analysed seduction like a lepidopterist and places Rachel under a romantic siege-surveillance, pursuing her with all the sleuth and sociopathy of a lusty Sherlock. She is run through a gauntlet of on-the-cuff speeches, calculatedly accidental meetings and pre-prepared gallery visits (Charles goes the day before, to pick out and make notes upon the most aphrodisiac paintings). And this doesn’t let up at the bedroom door. Amis’s sex scenes are pure adolescence: choreographed accounts of first-person pornography, studies of athleticism and repertoire.
“I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings,” Charles tells us. “Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work.” Charles (and obviously Amis) recognises that this is something new, an attempt to establish a new kind of sexual frankness that will drain any romance from the act. Post-Chatterley, post-Portnoy, no chastity belt may remain locked and no modesty curtain undrawn. Charles, as Amis himself noted, is scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. Intimacy is reduced to: “Thus, I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns.”
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SubscribeI never could get on with Amis fils, not because I object in any way to amorous adventures as recorded by males; nor because I recoil from remembered adolescence – his line about the self looming large in those years rings terribly true. No, it’s the posturing intellectualism I dislike; the introduction of theory into the mind of someone in the very midst of action. This is far, far worse than mere self-consciousness. Frankly, it feels like a dreadful blend of cowardice – retreating behind all those polysyllables – and pretension. And it’s so horribly cold, too. It’s as if the characters are so alienated from their presence in the world, their embodied, sensational presence, that they conduct those bodies in the manner of Ryle’s “ghost in the machine”, sitting inside some cockpit in the forehead and driving the levers this way and that. In the end, it is this disdainful refusal of experience – refusal of its power to shape him, to shape the protagonist – that leaves his fiction lifeless. The obvious contrast is with Kundera, who manages to settle recorded, fully absorbed sensual experience within a process of reflection, which lives not in the character’s mind as it acts, but in the narrator’s voice as it remembers. Far, far better.
Excellent analysis. I felt exactly the same about his writing only I think you are missing the words narcissism and nihilism.
I worry about Mr Harris and condescension
Well said
Yes. Around the time of Amis’ death there were articles specifically about his work (not just “bad-boy lit” in general) and made very similar points. He won’t be remembered in any positive way by future generations.
Well, agreed the fiction is ropey but I had to take my hat off to him years ago when he popped up with “Koba the Dread”, a handy account of Stalin and his abominations. Moving, as he did, in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American literary milieu, Amis the Younger’s emphasis on the sheer criminality of a left wing dictatorship was an act of civil courage. And indeed many of the usual apologists for such regimes took some unpleasant pops at him. So, for my money, the poor old chap wasn’t all bad…
Well, agreed the fiction is ropey but I had to take my hat off to him years ago when he popped up with “Koba the Dread”, a handy account of Stalin and his abominations. Moving, as he did, in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American literary milieu, Amis the Younger’s emphasis on the sheer criminality of a left wing dictatorship was an act of civil courage. And indeed many of the usual apologists for such regimes took some unpleasant pops at him. So, for my money, the poor old chap wasn’t all bad…
I have never found any of this intellectualism in the amis books I’ve read
Amis himself was pretty cold though. As was his father.
Excellent analysis. I felt exactly the same about his writing only I think you are missing the words narcissism and nihilism.
I worry about Mr Harris and condescension
Well said
Yes. Around the time of Amis’ death there were articles specifically about his work (not just “bad-boy lit” in general) and made very similar points. He won’t be remembered in any positive way by future generations.
I have never found any of this intellectualism in the amis books I’ve read
Amis himself was pretty cold though. As was his father.
I never could get on with Amis fils, not because I object in any way to amorous adventures as recorded by males; nor because I recoil from remembered adolescence – his line about the self looming large in those years rings terribly true. No, it’s the posturing intellectualism I dislike; the introduction of theory into the mind of someone in the very midst of action. This is far, far worse than mere self-consciousness. Frankly, it feels like a dreadful blend of cowardice – retreating behind all those polysyllables – and pretension. And it’s so horribly cold, too. It’s as if the characters are so alienated from their presence in the world, their embodied, sensational presence, that they conduct those bodies in the manner of Ryle’s “ghost in the machine”, sitting inside some cockpit in the forehead and driving the levers this way and that. In the end, it is this disdainful refusal of experience – refusal of its power to shape him, to shape the protagonist – that leaves his fiction lifeless. The obvious contrast is with Kundera, who manages to settle recorded, fully absorbed sensual experience within a process of reflection, which lives not in the character’s mind as it acts, but in the narrator’s voice as it remembers. Far, far better.
Just read 470 pages of nonsensical drivel called London Fields.
Sorry to hear you disliked it. Many would differ. No harm, no foul.
Me, for one. I’ll take any Amis offering over the ocean of wet “sad girl-lit” (and that’s all women seem to write) every single time. My many Martins are right next to my Kingsleys, and they share a section with Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Robertson Davies, and George MacDonald Fraser.
Robertson Davies is one of the forgotten greats. I think it’s because he was Canadian. George MacDonald Fraser combined comedy and action with unparalleled skill, giving us the big picture from bedroom to empire. The other two aren’t bad, either. Amis wasn’t in that league.
Robertson Davies is one of the forgotten greats. I think it’s because he was Canadian. George MacDonald Fraser combined comedy and action with unparalleled skill, giving us the big picture from bedroom to empire. The other two aren’t bad, either. Amis wasn’t in that league.
Me, for one. I’ll take any Amis offering over the ocean of wet “sad girl-lit” (and that’s all women seem to write) every single time. My many Martins are right next to my Kingsleys, and they share a section with Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Robertson Davies, and George MacDonald Fraser.
It’s funny
Sorry to hear you disliked it. Many would differ. No harm, no foul.
It’s funny
Just read 470 pages of nonsensical drivel called London Fields.
Do actual normal, well-adjusted men actually read those neurotic, post-WW2 navel gazing, novels, where men obsess about their sex lives? I’d rather have dental work than read Roth, or Amis, or Mailer.
They were popular for a reason, they’re good, and funny, ha ha
They were popular for a reason, they’re good, and funny, ha ha
Do actual normal, well-adjusted men actually read those neurotic, post-WW2 navel gazing, novels, where men obsess about their sex lives? I’d rather have dental work than read Roth, or Amis, or Mailer.
“Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page,…”
Isn’t that where it all started to go wrong?
“Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page,…”
Isn’t that where it all started to go wrong?
Allowing the sub editors the use of ‘toxic masculinity’ is to ‘frame’ the following article before a word is read.
I don’t like the snipe at Jordan Peterson either. I have some major issues with Jordan Peterson but he’s no Andrew Tate, which would have been a better person to dig out.
I don’t like the snipe at Jordan Peterson either. I have some major issues with Jordan Peterson but he’s no Andrew Tate, which would have been a better person to dig out.
Allowing the sub editors the use of ‘toxic masculinity’ is to ‘frame’ the following article before a word is read.
Hel-oo, one little thing. Males have moved massively on to video games. Reading and writing are for and by women, who have populated 90% of the book industry, from writers and agents to publishers and reviewers. Surprised you haven’t noticed.
Hel-oo, one little thing. Males have moved massively on to video games. Reading and writing are for and by women, who have populated 90% of the book industry, from writers and agents to publishers and reviewers. Surprised you haven’t noticed.
Peter York has the best analysis of Martin Amis’s success: ‘The media needed a novelist who looked like Mick Jagger’.
Peter York has the best analysis of Martin Amis’s success: ‘The media needed a novelist who looked like Mick Jagger’.
The most memorable scene in The Rachel Papers was Rachels’ other love interest reading history textbooks while having sex in order to prevent premature ejaculation.
Premature? That must be a concept conceived by the toxic feminist matriarchy. 🙂
Premature? That must be a concept conceived by the toxic feminist matriarchy. 🙂
The most memorable scene in The Rachel Papers was Rachels’ other love interest reading history textbooks while having sex in order to prevent premature ejaculation.
I’m trying to recall if I’ve ever actually read any lit-fic published post-1965 or so, and I think the answer is no. Give me genre fiction any day of the week.