Fine, let's talk about manly-men and contemporary fiction

musing on the thing you're not supposed to muse about.

like, come on. what is even going on here?

So there’s this kind of ongoing conversation — I’ve seen it in a few places in recent years — about how all the young male novelists are disappearing. And when they say ‘young male novelist’, what they sometimes mean is a ‘manly man’ who writes fiction. Subtextually, they also mean that he, this unicorn figure, is straight and white.

That’s a sort of subset of the conversation — because the broader conversation often makes a point of mentioning David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. And they’re obviously not ‘manly men.’ They’re too dead/old now to pass that cultural litmus test and, when they were young, they had the presence of limp towels. I mean, DFW played tennis in school and have you ever seen a photo of a young Jonathan Franzen?

This conversation also excludes the white male novelists who sell hundreds of thousands of books. Guys like Michael Crichton and Don Winslow and John Grisham — all of whom I’d classify as “manly men.” But no, this argument is limited solely to literary fiction.