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How to read like a man Male readers now are driven by hubris

'The reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion' (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

'The reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion' (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)


September 18, 2024   10 mins

A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as young men, and, indeed, much of their ardour as readers was sparked by the same author, William Faulkner. This is also telling, I think. From this pair of details a picture of incipient literary ambition comes plausibly clear. As young men with some thrilling but unformed sense of the talent they carried, McCarthy and Delillo read the famous prose of William Faulkner — earthy and recondite, vernacular in its music and grand in its thematic reach — and had two thoughts or intuitions, more or less at the same time. The first was: This stuff is amazing, like the greatest thing for a person to attempt and achieve. The second was: I can do that.

I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

“The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief.”

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.


Matt Feeney is an writer based in California and the author of Little Platoons: A defense of family in a competitive age


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M Kernan
M Kernan
5 days ago

Matt suffers from a very modern malaise: he has way too much time on his hands, lives inside his own head, and this results in the kind of writing on show here-a solopsistic mind-dump which leaves the reader with very little but dinner table irony laden talking points. Just read whatever you want and ignore the neuroticism of bored ‘writers,’.

Brett H
Brett H
5 days ago
Reply to  M Kernan

He’s not suggesting any sort of reading list, he’s making an amusing point about writers and would-be writers.

M Kernan
M Kernan
5 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Too literal, Brett.

Brett H
Brett H
5 days ago
Reply to  M Kernan

Me or him?

M Kernan
M Kernan
5 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

In this instance, you.

Brett H
Brett H
5 days ago
Reply to  M Kernan

Well that’s probably because I want to write a novel.

M Kernan
M Kernan
5 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Back to the blank page then, Brett. It is the only place where we are truly happy.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Write it for women, then. They control books from agents to first readers to publishing houses. Men are playing video games. Just so you know, that is far larger than the movie industry.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
1 hour ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

This is why as a matter of principle I only read books written by White men. Pretty much the only living authors I read are Houellebecque and St Aubyn. This year’s reading so far, from memory:-
Flaubert. Madame Bovary
Hardy. The Woodlanders
Flaubert. L’Education Sentimentale
The Penguin History of Canada
Voltaire. Candide
Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt
Balzac. Le Pere Goriot
Hardy. A Pair of Blue Eyes.
Percival Everett. Erasure. (Ok he’s black, but I made an exception for him because he’s anti-woke.)
Tolstoy. Resurrection

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
5 days ago
Reply to  M Kernan

I agree entirely. About three paragraphs in, i sensed where the article was heading and with better things to do, skipped to the last paragraph which confirmed i was right in not wasting any more time. Anyone care to disabuse me of that?

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
5 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Yes, read it

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago

Nope, you were right.

Liakoura
Liakoura
1 day ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

When he mentioned Cormac McCarthy, I expected some indication that Mr Feeney had something to say about at least one of his McCarthy’s twelve novels – so I read to the end and now I can understand why he didn’t.

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
5 days ago
Reply to  M Kernan

M Kernan suffers a sort of post-modern malaise so debilitating that when he encounters a topic, let’s say gender and literature, he can conjure nothing more poignant to contribute to the discussion than an inchoate criticism of the author’s choice of topic. It’s a brand of dull, smarmy inanity that is becoming inescapable online. The comments sections of earth are overrun with M Kernans and we’re all the dumber for it.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
4 days ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Yeh he’s a prat isn’t he

M Kern
M Kern
2 days ago

We all are. Some of us know, some don’t.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

A clever takedown effort, which is sort of your specialty, innit?
As a busy man of action not stuck in his own head, perhaps you’ll let know if you’re ever in partial agreement, or even constructive disagreement with anyone else here. Or further refine your ad hominem contempt. Your choice, of course.*
*a pointless, pot calling the kettle black comment on my part—withdrawn

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Another prat.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

You’re a soon to be elderly punk of an insult comic. No wonder you dig Trump.

William Amos
William Amos
5 days ago

Who would read new books, still less write them?
The muses are the allegorical daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne – the Deified Father and Reified Memory.
Our culture is, at present, Parricidal and at once both senile and infantile.
There can be no generative art in this context. All is essentially trivial, sophmoric and solipsistic.
“Distracted from distraction by distraction/Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration” as T.S. Eliot prohpesied once.
Our cultural moment is that of Lovato Lovati and Petrarch – if not, quite possibly, even Boethius. Our role and duty, at this extreme and fragmentary limit of cultural disintegration, is to preserve and transmit. Things really are that serious.
Teach your children genealogies, histories, old songs, poems and ballads, names and places. In generations to come there may be ‘time for such a word’ as creating new art and literature, but we have been eating the seed corn for so long now that the task of our times is merely that – to preserve and transmit.

Last edited 5 days ago by William Amos
Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
5 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

I feel similarly and think that would essentially be right, except…

Except for the fact that we have access with little effort to an extremely wide range of human achievement in the arts for at least a couple thousand years.

So, why is new art needed, when there is so much of what represents the Pinnacle of human achievement that any one person could hardly experience it all in one lifetime? You could pick the best of every era and read it in chronological order, and experience the way Emerson imagined civilizational development playing out like the development of a child.

Painting, writing, et al doesn’t expire. It’s like all the best chefs across times have all their best dishes just waiting for you to experience, just as soon as you’ve learned what to look for.

Last edited 5 days ago by Nathan Sapio
Sylvia Volk
Sylvia Volk
5 days ago
Reply to  Nathan Sapio

Well, you could have said that right before Shakespeare started writing, too. Ditto Tolkien. Dickens. Twain. Did we really need Henry Moore when we’ve already had Michelangelo and da Vinci? “It’s already more than any one person could enjoy in a lifetime” sounds like the wrong argument to me; it sounds like we shouldn’t look forward to more Tolkiens and Shakespeares eventually. That’s pretty bleak, Nathan.

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
4 days ago
Reply to  Sylvia Volk

I would also agree with you, all things being equal. But we essentially reached a point of anti-progress soon after post-modernism and reached a provisional status of much art today. I’m confident about that at least from the visual arts perspective.

Over-generalization? Of course. But if say you have to experience 20 instances of contemporary works of culture or art before you find one paragon, or if you can mostly just experience masterpiece after masterpiece through your remaining days… How is it even a proposition?

As lasting progress is made contemporary arts, there’s nothing stopping you from just shuffling that in to the deck of timeless masterpieces that are on the agenda.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Nathan Sapio

Keep in mind that when you consider the work of past centuries—especially prior to the 18th—you are probably only even looking at perhaps five percent of what was sold at the time.
That said, I agree that art is in a stagnant way nowadays. Still, the World War I memorial-in-progress by anti-modernist sculptor Sabin Howard looks pretty impressive on television. I hope his classical vision has a ripple effect.

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  Nathan Sapio

You would condemn modern fiction to oblivion!? Mm, well, actually, that’s not a bad idea. The MFA people can learn to code or do something useful.

Liakoura
Liakoura
1 day ago
Reply to  Nathan Sapio

“Who would read new books, still less write them?”
Because a day never passes without something happening that arouses such intense emotions that it provides the impetus for someone to write and later, often much later, others to read. Sadly few have the patience or endurance to undertake such a life consuming task:
I cite Karl Marlantes’ – “Matterhorn” (sorry mountaineers it’s not about climbing) 
In the summer of 1970, Karl Marlantes, a recently demobilised Vietnam veteran posted to US Marine Corps headquarters after 13 months of highly decorated active service, found himself walking some sensitive military papers across to the Capitol. He was challenged by a group of young anti-war protesters “hollering obscenities”, chanting “babykiller” and waving north Vietnamese flags. 
[echoes of 7 October 2023?]
(I quote from a review the source of which I failed to record.)
“I was stunned and hurt,” he recalls, speaking to me during a recent visit to London. “I thought, you have no idea who I am… yes, I wanted to shoot them. Six weeks before, I was killing North Vietnamese guerrillas in combat.” As his immediate rage moderated into puzzled anguish, Marlantes found himself wanting “to explain myself to those kids. I just wanted to tell my story”. 
So he began to work on his Vietnam novel, taking a title, “Some Desperate Glory”, from a line in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”.
The national trauma of the war was dragging on and he intended to address something huge in the life of contemporary America. “The Vietnam war was a defining experience in the US,” he says. “It made this incredible divide, even within families. The Democrats were anti-war and the Republicans supported our troops. It shaped a generation, at least, and conditioned our response to things like Iraq and Afghanistan.”
By 1977, Marlantes had completed a massive, first-person narrative, full, he says, of “psychobabble” and an unmediated bitterness that he’s now embarrassed to contemplate. No publisher would touch it. So he went back to a second draft, and a third… 
Finally, 35 years after he first sat down at his manual typewriter – by now divorced and in his 60s – he completed the novel that’s called Matterhorn, a debut that has been hailed by American critics as the definitive Vietnam novel of our times – “One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam” .

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
5 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

The one I wrote was good

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
4 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

I’d say you’re missing out on a literary tour d’force if you ignore De Lillo’s “Underworld” or McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” Thomas Pynchon and Ian McEwen are also worthwhile reading.
One Phillip Roth novel is pretty much like another, though.
All but the last are on my bookshelf, next to Herodotus and Gibbon.
Special mention to Lawrence of Arabia’s deeply weird, strikingly erudite, and utterly fascinating “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Lawrence was a heroic, unusual, phenomenally talented man.

William Amos
William Amos
4 days ago

I’ve read Blood Meridian, as it happens, and I found it very engaging. Gravity’s rainbow I found didn’t repay the effort invested. Seven Pillars is a terrific memoir and I found it very affecting at the age I first read it.
But my abiding impression of almost all literature, and art since 1920 is that it’s force and energy is extractive, destructive and – insofar as it ‘broached what it never brewed’ – parasitic, if not vampyric and latently nihilist. A Cukooo in the nest, so to speak.
In that respect can it really be called ‘creative’ at all? Even Joyce, even Cezanne, they made heavy use of the extreme urbanity and intellectual brilliance of their late age and public – while undermining the very foundations of that culture.

Last edited 3 days ago by William Amos
Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
4 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

Joyce and Cezanne made various innovations which could be drawn upon by future artists. So they contribute to an ongoing tradition, rather than simply destabilizing tradition by undermining entrenched certainties of form and technique.
I do get the impression that art since the 60s has become a kind of cargo cult, where artists dress up in transgressive clothes, but without really engaging in any tradition, and expect this clothing to be enough to count as authentic artistic innovation.
But Joyce & Cezanne are just making art in some kind of relationship between Cervantes, Rabelais, Rembrandt, Turner, etc. & the modern world they lived in.

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
5 days ago

Maybe literary authors should just write less dull stories. Personally I’d rather read about the bloody aftermath of the Mexican American War, for example, than some random schlub in his fifties getting a divorce. I’m not saying the latter type of novel can’t be done well, but it’s not exactly going to draw me away from him nine hundredth fantasy tome based on the premise alone.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
5 days ago

Men don’t read fiction now because it’s all by women and revolves around women’s concerns, quite likely because editors are all women and pretty much exclusively interested in women’s concerns. As Rooster Cogburn puts it in the campfire scene in True Grit, “This is like women talking.”

Edward Hamer
Edward Hamer
5 days ago

I find this subject interesting but also frustrating. I’m a man and I have always read a good deal, since childhood, but I read virtually no contemporary “literary fiction”. I would be much more likely read A Dance to the Music of Time, say, or Trollope’s Palliser novels, or more Dickens, or re-read Jane Austen, than buy a newly released novel which was being raved over by the reviewers. Much of the time I read historical biographies and history books, books about religion and Church history, and so on. I revere Patrick O’Brian and George MacDonald but can’t stand much other historical fiction – the prose tends to be too clunky, even from real pros like Bernard Cornwell. I do enjoy Jack Reacher, though I’ve only read a few.
I’ve read The Body Artist by DeLillo and The Road by McCarthy and admired them both, so I can imagine myself reading more of both men’s books in the future, but they never get to the top of my list (nor do Steinbeck or Faulker or Hemingway, though I read them all at school or university and can see the point of them).
Never having read any of Matt’s novels I wouldn’t want to criticise them but my general sense is that most contemporary fiction is about characters I’m not interested in, will have either limp or look-at-me prose, and will be written by someone with quite a different worldview from mine. I’ve just looked up this year’s Booker shortlist and I see nothing there to make me question that assumption. I don’t want to read the next Steinbeck or the next Hilary Mantel (I certainly don’t read Hilary Mantel herself) – I want the next Evelyn Waugh, though I would settle for the next Patrick O’Brian.

Last edited 5 days ago by Edward Hamer
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
5 days ago
Reply to  Edward Hamer

I‘m with you. George Macdonald Fraser, Robertson Davies, John Barth, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Martin Amis – just a few more to add to your list – are among the most cherished in my personal library. There is only one book by a female novelist in my entire collection, In a Dark Wood Wandering by Helle Haasse, that I think I read in the early 90s.

I guess I just read like a man.

Last edited 5 days ago by Allison Barrows
William Amos
William Amos
5 days ago
Reply to  Edward Hamer

Patrick O’Brien is an interesting name to consider.
I very much enjoyed his books, devoured them in fact, but he still strikes me, when compared with, say, Conrad or Herman Melville (to choose nautical writers) as a diminished figure. But that is a fault of the age and the cultural cycle. He stands to Scott or Stephenson as even the great Milton does to ‘his’ Shakespeare.
We can admire the technical brilliance, the descriptive flair, the beautiful and cascading cadence of proper nouns. But something, some glory, has passed away. And what remains is not quite literature.
Frankly, the Muse has departed, so to speak. The Palladium, even. Creative fiction of the sort that he sets out to write was passing out of possiblity, even in 1969 when his first book was written.
We have now withdrawn from even what Patrick O’Brien was capable of creating and sustaining, and the problem is cultural and spiritual. Literature can only be sustained by a culture in which it is typical. Beowulf in the Mead Hall, Shakespeare in the humanist and biblical ferment of Renaissance England, Austen, Dickens, Trollope in Victorian England.
We are at the bottom of a particularly arid cultural cycle. Torpid, tumid, oligarchic, material, cynical, scientistic and wearied with a sense that the inescapable joke is wearing thin. We stand as the age of Pope did to the age of Dryden and before him Milton. But with none of the classicising elegance, sobriety and decorum of the Augustan period.
What we have today is both lifeless and ugly.

Last edited 5 days ago by William Amos
Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

Wonderful. Thank you.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

“Fair nine, forsaking poetry” eh, as Blake said around the turn of the 19th century? Prematurely, I might add.

I like much of Pope but he was quite low on lifeforce compared to the highlights of Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, and Keats. Dryden was too. Milton is in a class of his own, for good and to an extent for ill, and he emerged during a very ugly and bloody age of English history.

One should avoid too easy idealizations of the before-your-grandparents past. And not presume to conclusively diagnose his own time. That would overstate your case as typed above, but I think you are making some overstated claims too, so I’m trying to reverse the swing of figurative pendulum.

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Edward Hamer
Edward Hamer
4 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

I wonder if you have read JCD Clark’s book about Samuel Johnson? He makes the point that in the eighteenth century there was still a living Anglo-Latin tradition of writing, which only grudgingly gave way to the vernacular. Clark’s account really helped me to comprehend the idea of different literary traditions and periods coming to a discernible end.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  Edward Hamer

Well said, sir!
Women and beta males have been the death of fiction for men. I am regretfully nearing the end of the Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan written between 1938 and 1945. He was the Permanent Undersecretary of State and lived in almost daily contact with Churchill and Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary. He made notes on everything from the magnificense of his surroundings to the black pillow case he covered with his shirt in a rough airstrip in travels that covered more than 50,000 air miles during the war. Churchill is humanized and Eden treated sympathetically. The Soviets were ignorant but cunning brutes and the poor Poles admirable.Cadagan was also good on the flowers in his garden from year to year. Can’t recommend it too highly if you can find a copy.

Edward Hamer
Edward Hamer
4 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

Thank you! I shall have a look at that.

Naren Savani
Naren Savani
5 days ago

This article made me think and also made me happy to be an UnHerd member

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
5 days ago

Thanks, this was an enjoyable read. A welcome reminder to keep at the books. It does take a bit of an effort to get stuck in to a novel and i abondon at least half of the ones i start but it does elevate us out of the banal politics of the day. And yeah, us men are ridiculous

Brett H
Brett H
5 days ago

I’m a reasonably serious reader of authors i’m sure we all know. I have: one completed unpublished novel, two rewrites of same novel unfinished, two others unfinished, one constantly being rewritten and one unfinished film script.

Erik Hildinger
Erik Hildinger
5 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Keep plugging away. It’s rewarding merely to have finished writing a book that is well written and polished.

Last edited 5 days ago by Erik Hildinger
John Tyler
John Tyler
5 days ago

I started this , but quickly concluded it was self-indulgent nonsense. Life is too short! Or perhaps I’m not manly enough to read it.

Mark Kennedy
Mark Kennedy
4 days ago

Hard to know what to make of this kind of pop-psychologizing, which generalizes from Faulkner, McCarthy and Delillo–three writers I’ve never liked (you can add Mailer to that list: he seems to fit it), though I read and like literary fiction well enough–to distinguish typically male motives and taste from those of typical female readers and writers. I haven’t done the kind of survey it would require to contest these curious generalizations, any more than Mr. Feeney evidently has to support them; what I would suggest, though, is that from a logical point of view, attempting to derive conclusions about the ‘typical’ from premises that concern themselves with the ‘atypical’ is a self-defeating enterprise.
 
As it happens, the backgrounds (including most emphatically the reading histories) of the male writers I personally prefer–too many to list, but Huxley, Camus, Mann, Malamud, H. Miller, T.L. Peacock, Soderberg, Kafka, Dostoevsky, etc., are representative–would classify them as more typically female than male, according to Mr. Feeney’s own criteria. Of course, he isn’t claiming that his generalizations are categorical; but do they even qualify as generalizations, understood as informative summaries inferable from relevant data, instead of the opposite: arbitrary summaries that tend to contradict those same data?
 
I think it’s a legitimate question. What seems clear on the available evidence is that there’s little overlap between Mr. Feeney’s tastes, reading experience and childhood reading background and my own, despite the fact for both of us those tastes and experiences are unquestionably literary. This in turn suggests that the kinds of conclusions he’s attempting to draw here could be far more idiosyncratic and less general than he realizes. (Full disclosure: as a retired reference librarian who’s been reading for pleasure since grade four, and has over eight thousand books in my home library, I’m not typical either.)

Last edited 4 days ago by Mark Kennedy
Edward Hamer
Edward Hamer
5 days ago

Hmm, I wrote a lengthy comment here a little while ago but it has vanished…

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
5 days ago

I look forward to your pieces when I see them.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
4 days ago

What I learnt was, that if men don’t read much or are not represented enough in literature these days, it’s their own fault for not reading enough.

On the other hand, when women don’t do as well in sports or are less represented in IT or computer gaming, it’s not their lack of ability or interest, it’s the men’s fault.

In a way, does explain why there should be a gender pay gap (there isn’t, in fact). Men who are taught to be responsible for their own lives and outcomes, would be more productive, dependable and successful than those who are taught to make excuses for their own shortcomings.

Last edited 4 days ago by Samir Iker
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

That’s not Feeney’s argument, though he’s a bit all over the place of course. I think he’s saying something closer to this: men are more drawn to superstardom and fame than women, on average. If they can’t impress many other men (in addition to women readers) because not that many read “serious” or literary fiction, fewer men will pick up the pen for that purpose. That seems like a plausible, though partial and simplified view of the current fiction scene.

To some extent I think you’re setting up a strawman version of the author’s perspective. Or just using this article as a launching pad for your men-have-it-so-rough speech.

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Samir Iker
Samir Iker
4 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I think you merely reiterated the point, and my takeaway was that he simply ascribes poor reading levels among boys and men to their own habits and tendencies, though in a partial and simplistic way as you said, and his logic was circular – men don’t read, hence men don’t write… “Most women I know who went to university …. read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know…read virtually no literary fiction’

And far from “men have it rough”,, I said it’s the reverse. Being responsible for yourself and your shortcomings is not the same as “having it rough”, it’s basic adulthood. I suggested rather that the other half of humanity increasingly have it easy, in terms of being allowed to escape responsibility and accountability for your own choices. But it has potential consequences for yourself if you are allowed, and opt for, that easy path.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Ok, fair enough*.
*Still, I don’t think women as a group tend to “escape responsibility and accountability” nor that men must always face it. Trump is kind of the ultimate irresponsible and accountable public figure. In many parts of the world, and in pockets within he West, women can suffer severe consequences for infidelities or disallowed choices, real or perceived. The men tend to skate by for these same actions.
You’re taking a selective view of life as a woman. I’d rather be able to walk down nearly any street without fear. And speak up without being called names.

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
3 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

*irresponsible and UNaccountable (though there are limits, of course)

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago

Stereotypes are a short cut to the truth. I stopped reading this article when I tired of the apologetic tone. Men are different than women. Can we not take this as a given like we used to? People with transgender mental illness are .003% of the population. Look it up yourself.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

Stereotypes are convenient partial truths that serve as the whole story for some. They are sometimes useful and relatively harmless if you don’t go believing everything you think too often. You can do something quickly with little effort or do it closer to right. Some people can’t be bothered to go beyond short cuts. Why come to this site if you can only handle considering what you already believe—or close to it—without much reflection or self-examination, Jerry?

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Alan Moran
Alan Moran
1 day ago

I only read the work of female writers if they were born before 1900. Later than that, especially those born after c.1950, their writing, attitudes and presumptions are so alien and bossy it wastes my time to even open the cover. Since the vast majority of modern fiction is written by women, it remains a ‘closed book’ to me.

Peter James
Peter James
1 day ago

This is the sort of nonsensical drivel I’d expect in the Guardian.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
5 days ago

Wow

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
5 days ago

As a life-long reader I have been asked by younger family members what I could recommend to get their non-reading boy friends to read. I usually start with Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Fight Club’, which qualifies as a novel ‘written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.’ It’s always popular.

Even Faulkner can be recommended … when I offer them “As I Lay Dying” (a reassuringly small book) I tell them that if they get past the first few pages to the climax they will feel as if the author has shot them right between the eyes. They usually like the book.

Though a reader of ‘literary’ fiction (currently enjoying Kate Atkinson’s new novel) I did recently read an Australian novel “Boy Swallows Universe” by Trent Dalton, which generally doesn’t appeal to women, but does to men. Very plot driven, grotesque characters, improbable coincidences, funny, violent … I wonder if Dalton’s “Love Stories” would have a more equal appeal because although the subject is likely to appeal to women, its easy-reading, relatable, very short stories pack an emotional punch which could also appeal to men.

Last edited 5 days ago by Russell Hamilton
Liakoura
Liakoura
1 day ago

I have read nothing by Don DeLillo or by Matt Feeney, but I have read everything by Cormac McCarthy and for me he is the greatest American writer.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Liakoura
Liakoura
1 day ago

My borough library in the UK has 10,733 e-books and e-audio books that because of its BorrowBox account, I can download and keep for up to 42 days before they disappear from my phone or my laptop. 
And as long as another library member hasn’t reserved them I can download again and again.
For me, it is one of the most valuable personal uses of computing and telecommunications technology.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
4 days ago

Some of Mr. Feeney’s points hit the mark here. I think women do tend to hold their heroes in less fraught regard—not as consumed by what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”—and approach the craft of writing with more patience and humility, on average.

These are broad generalities that dwell at the corner of nature and social expectation. Men are likelier to want to be innovators and rebels, and more of them seem imbued with the wherewithal to make such a splash. Some of this can be ascribed to the social expectations, duties, and strictures that women face, but I just don’t think all or even most of it can forever be explained away on those grounds.

Where are the truly great women writers in the English language? Seriously, please help me build the list. I’ll start by nominating Emily Dickinson and George Eliot (born Maryanne Evans). I’m leaving out a few that I’d acknowledge myself, and opinions will differ according to taste, and valid differences in ideas about what constitutes literary excellence.

But the imbalance is glaring. The same is true in music, painting, and sculpture: women produce much of the good and very good work, little of the great. Granted, I’m making these claims as a male, a middle-aged white one to boot. Perhaps women (or men) who find fault with my take can explain how I’m wrong, and by how much.

Lastly, I think it’s a bad and pretty baseless move when Feeney adopts a kind of third-person omniscient perspective on DeLillo and McCarthy, a self-serving one at that. He should at least quote something in the famous authors’ own work or public statements to support his claim that they, like him, were little wannabe Faulkners fixated on Greatness and Importance above having something to say.

Another uneven, rambling, and worthwhile contribution by Feeney.

Last edited 4 days ago by AJ Mac
Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

Penelope Fitzgerald.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
3 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

{Can’t edit comment above:}

I also think men produce a disproportionate share of the truly terrible writing, the kind that encourages cruelty and mass bloodshed.

And I’m not saying women haven’t cracked the “marble ceiling” at all, to take their place among the so-called greats, or that the gap won’t be narrowed. But will it ever be closed, even if we start from 1970? I understand and assign some weight to the “Shakespeare’s sister” case that Virginia Woolf made. I’d like to read more female greats and willing to listen to disagreement with my generalized claims. If anyone with an interest is still here, please alert me to women writers I may be missing too.

Steven Somsen
Steven Somsen
5 days ago

It seems to me, for women as with sex, reading but also writing is mostly an inner thing: you take it in. For males writing is more an outer thing, you leave your mark. Why bother reading. Something like that.