‘Literary Men’ Aren’t Disappearing

In a year, a lifetime, of bad takes on everything, this Sunday’s “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone” in the New York Times stands out as particularly obnoxious and annoying. The author, David J. Morris, an assistant professor of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where all literary men go to disappear, swoons that “literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit.” Is this a problem? “To be clear,” he writes, “I welcome the end of male dominance in literature.”

This smacks of “I welcome our new alien overlords,” but whatever keeps you on tenure track, Professor Morris. As a man who has previously dominated literature, I don’t welcome this end. What should I do? Go into coaching? But the problem goes far beyond career concerns, says this cat, Morris:

“If you care about the health of our society—especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster—the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.”

Young men, he says, are no longer reading Douglas Coupland. That reference is so dated, he should have said, “they are no longer listening to LPs on the hi-fi.” Instead, they are listening to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, and masturbating to pornography on their telephone devices! If you truly believe that Donald Trump is a social emergency after this “Fight Club election,” then the fact that young men aren’t reading novels is the least of your problems. The 64 percent of Native Americans who voted for Donald Trump probably also aren’t reading novels. They, too, might have access to YouTubers with a “distorted sense of masculinity.”

Whither the sensitive soul who sought political solace in literary fiction? Whither? Whither?

The fact is, “literary” fiction is completely irrelevant to the lives of most men, and most people. In the last few years, the most literary people I know have spent their time and intellectual energy supporting Covid lockdowns and forced masking of toddlers and signing petitions calling for the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. Why should we listen to these dumb people in novel form? What does a literary novel even mean anymore? Are literary novels even good?

I consider myself the most literary of men. In fact, I am the Greatest Living American Writer, and have been for a quarter century. When I read now, whether the writers are male or female, I find myself drifting back into the past. The best novels I’ve read this year were by Evelyn Waugh and Dostoyevsky. Most men who read, and there are still a lot of us, don’t find themselves drawn to the blinkered political concerns of modern literary fiction. We want story, excitement, subject matter. If there were more novels about UFC champions or guys addicted to sports-betting apps, I bet you might find some readers. Instead, we drift back into the past, or into imagined realities.

Guys who read like spy novels, or novels about submarines, or political biographies, or, yes, books about the Roman Empire. There are still male readers and writers in sci-fi, and fantasy, and horror. You want to appeal to whatever “literary men” remain? Commission a good novel about the Hittite Empire. Don’t try to sell us the latest blather by some self-loathing washed-up Jonathan. Will we read novels by women? Of course! If they have dragons and wizards in them, or World War II, or, better yet, dragons and wizards fighting in World War II.

Professor Morris is making his male students read The Handmaid’s Tale and bell hooks. But whatever shreds of men who still want to read don’t want material that scolds them or warns them about “stochastic fascism” or tells them that they are bad and evil. They don’t need some low-rent English professor wagging his finger about Donald Trump, who to normal people is an abstraction, a meme, not a warning shot about masculine identity issued in Las Vegas Comp 101.

Give “literary men” books with swords and laser guns or authors who might be willing to sit across a table from Joe Rogan to promote their writing. Then you might have the attention of men. It is 1805. Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British stand before him. Oceans are now Battlefields. That is what literary men want!

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