Thanks for parsing this out and for continuing to think about it. I breezed past that headline assuming it was a click bait opinion piece. Enjoyed how you break things down and dig into the stats and claims, and I’m a female writer saying this. And thank you for linking to Lincoln Michel. I hadn’t come a rooms his Substack yet - good stuff!
Another astute rebuttal of a sensational but ill-conceived op-Ed. I agree completely with your assessment of what can be considered literary fiction and what’s not. Thanks John!
I'm so glad you wrote about this. I've been losing my mind ever since I read it. All that hashing and discourse that you refer to--I think I've had every one of those conversations in my head. But what really got to me was the sloppiness of the argument. The conclusions without the evidence. The ease with which he implies--you can't really pin him down saying it and that enrages me too, so slippery--that, once again, women's success is the cause of men's downfall. Where is the causation? The snark in my could say all kind of things, like maybe without an underage female muse to steal from, young white men just don't have much to say. But that is mean. And not helpful. One wants to invite young white men to the table, for their sake and most definitely for ours. And maybe that's the real issue here. It's funny (not) how it always comes back to consequences. Was anyone worried when women and non-white men were shut out? Not really. Not worried about the effects of that silencing, but, more importantly, no one ever thought, gee, we should be scared of women because when they don't have a place at the table, they might just try to kill us all. Ok. I am still losing my mind.
I haven’t read any of the books. I passed on the piece in the Times. Like you, I’m not sure what people are talking about when they talk about literary fiction; when I was young it was the fiction that defined Modernism - the moment we discovered we were on our own in a world bereft of absolutes, and thus of meaning. I’m still the modernist I was born to be 76 years ago. So why am I responding? What right have I?
None, but that’s the world we live in.
One assumption that I’d add to the list of assumptions that need to be critically analyzed is that persons respond to feeling they’re excluded by withdrawing from the process of trying to gain access. It seems like a lot of “cutting off your nose to spite your face” if true.
I don’t understand the social changes in men. “Abdication in favor of the women” is actually a way of describing what I personally felt back at the end of the sixties. “Move over and make room!” I thought it was progressive and fair and fun. But it quickly spawned a feeling of “You aren’t able to compete with women because you’re not a woman.” Not on identical terms, no.
Competition is as American as apple pie, which brings me to The Great British Baking Show. It’s far superior to all its American versions because the people on it are so nice, and while they are in a competition, they’re not nasty about it. They follow their better angels. But the bakers on the American versions of the concept are either hyper-competitive, whether they’re men or women, or else they’re uninteresting. I would love to meet all the bakers on the British show; I would avoid eye contact with the contestants on the American knock-offs. …As a general policy, that is.
This explanation may come from deep inside our culture’s fundamental structure - the necessity of competitive ruthlessness in order to prevail. We believe in it so much that it has become true.
The history of culture is story after story of destruction, suppression, experiment and ruin. Culture is literally the ruins of the past with which we surround ourselves. Look behind you; all you see are failures. The literary novel wouldn’t exist without human failure, destruction, struggle to stay alive. Look ahead of you; if you say you can see anything certain, you’re a liar.
Technology is the new godhead. It gave us victory of Fascism, Nazism, and Racism in World War II. If we had fought with our moral courage and Judeo-Christian values alone, absent the “one ring to rule them all,” which is technological magic, then we would have lost. But I have to say, fully aware of where this is going to appear and all the “ironies” in it, this new god is a false one, a fickle one, a broken one.
If men have withdrawn from the field of literary striving, I don’t think it’s because men feel pushed out. I think it’s because we’re terrified. Modernism isn’t dead (for me at least) but you can only go so far with the death of the gods and heroes, before you encounter young readers who have no gods or heroes except their celebrities and their machines and images and sounds.
In the comics world, way more than two decades ago every hero suddenly grew a dark side, became resentful, wounded, or tired of being “good.” Most of them were men, if I may generalize. Today, you can’t find a good guy for love nor money. If the super heroes aren’t fighting among themselves, or fighting their own worst impulses, or going rotten, then they’re fighting the very people they were “born” to protect - the ungrateful and selfish human race. It’s as if the comics discovered that even the best of us must be tainted by original sin and go out there and kill his brother Abel - because this is what they saw all around us and it sells comics. This is the Great American Bake-Out. This is the end of the line for “Truth, Justice, and The American Way. Please take all your belongings when exiting the train. We’re not responsible for anything you leave behind."
It’s hard for a man to write a literary novel in a cultural landscape where there is nothing to which our “better angels” might aspire.
Women, on the other hand, write as women see the world, but it’s not their fault that few of these books answer my instinctual craving for meaning and purpose as a man. It’s a miracle that I still have such a craving, anachronistic as I am.
Like George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, I went through a period of seeking meaning and purpose in women. Don’t gasp. It’s true. I enjoy rereading that sequence (from “Man And Superman”) even in my darkest hours. It is only a literary conceit, but I have refused to give it up, as I refuse to “curse God and die,” which is all that Job’s advisors ever say.
It is interesting to consider the ethos of competition in the differences between the American and British baking shows. There does seem to be an American spirit that embraces the notion of life as a zero-sum game. Trump obviously appeals strongly to that sense of the world, and it seems clear that the way people experience the world reinforces that sense. With the world of "literary" fiction, there's very few, if any, spoils to be won unless you manage to win a big prize or something like that.
I’m troubled by the intuition I’ve had that too many Americans embrace the view that politics is a game with winners and losers. It makes politics a consumable and disposable product. It makes politics very major league sounding! Full of “Wait until next year” for the “losers.” I’m heartily sick of sports. I’m not a gambler; I don’t get anything from playing zero sum games. If I play a game, it’s to learn something, not to win. A game that teaches nothing but is only about winning or losing is “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”
Nor am I a fan of the British. As a people, they can be deeply flawed, cruel, mean-spirited, overbearing, insufferably colonialist…there’s a good reason our ancestors kicked them out. But it appears that many of their amateur bakers do not regard their avocation as a zero sum game, nor do their viewers see amateur baking as all or nothing. They seem to regard baking as giving pleasure to others. They create goodness so others will make more goodness. Do ut des.
The British show consciously tries to highlight generosity and hope in a diverse group of similars - hope that everyone will prevail pours out of it every week, alongside the acknowledgment of humility, "there but for fortune…” There’s almost no triumphalism. The show builds relationships and shares people's ups and downs not as wins and losses, but as moments worth having lived to the fullest.
Hope arises in a group and it can’t be bought and sold because its value doesn’t fluctuate.
Optimism is half of a zero-sum game. "Optimism minus pessimism equals zero," explains why capitalism works - also colonialism. It separates us into winners and losers, and the false promise of winning the big prize appeals to many. In my humble opinion, these people are vulnerable to manipulation. The zero-sum-vernacular term for them is “suckers.”
Not only are there no big dollar spoils in literary art/craft; books published as part of a zero-sum strategy are a huge risk to publishers. Publishing houses must fight to make a profit in a zero sum game. They become risk averse, like smart gamblers. They try to stack the deck. They bet on horses with a winning track record; this often makes up for publishing some big “losers.” Well, publishing is and has always been a capitalist enterprise.
That any literary fiction is still published attests to the enduring hope of some highly subversive readers.
Optimism is a product marketed by capitalist oligarchs, which people buy into when they want to minimize loss and maximize gain; or contrarily they buy into its competitor, pessimism. Both optimism and pessimism are manufactured for the individual, whose buying preferences are closely monitored by our devices. Trump sells both! And so many buy their kit from him that it’s troubling.
Cheers! [Meaning hope, not optimism. If I were optimistic I’d end with: Profits!]
my takeaway: the article is saying "where are the people like me? they are not finding success in what i am looking to do." education is to blame and powerful people are to blame. but certainly not me myself - I'm not at fault for not being as successful as other people i'm comparing myself to.
i appreciate you showing an alternative view of the situation from a similar perspective.
I am just frustrated with the idea that it's somehow a problem that women dominate a particular thing or field. I mean, dear God, if we let women write and read the majority of the fiction and make up the majority of most medical school classes, next thing you know women might... gasp... want to earn more money! Or, I dunno, hold more CEO positions and high elected offices.
You or one of your readers will undoubtedly know more about this, but if I recall correctly from my 19th century British novels class in college, novels were historically largely the realm of women.
I dunno. If someone can show me how getting more men to read and write novels is going to solve the wage gap or some other actual problem in the world, I'm all for it. As it is, I will just remain grouchy.
To your point, we have a lot of evidence that once women dominate a field, pay and prestige decline. Mrs. Biblioracle is a veterinarian, a profession that has come to be dominated by women, and also a profession that has seen a steady decline in terms of job satisfaction, even as big picture costs are up. Even people are hesitant to see these things as "progress" as I do, at the very least they could grapple with the fact that things change.
For sure. (I am also grouchy about the pay/prestige phenomenon you note, as well as related phenomena--for instance, clinical track faculty (mostly female) earning less than research track (mostly male), or library administrators (mostly male) earning more than other library staff (mostly female) or--well, I needn't belabor the point.)
Enjoyed reading your take on this. I completely agree that the op-ed’s argument that men reading more would somehow save them from the lure of the manosphere is an overstatement on literature’s capabilities. A good book may inspire empathy, but it doesn’t remove people from their larger social and economic context. Then again, I say this knowing many men who aren’t big readers of literature but also aren’t into the manosphere. Instead, they have good jobs, stable and long-term relationships and other hobbies.
Oh, this topic comes up a LOT in K-12, because we see the beginnings of this very early on (we've seen girls perform better than boys on *pre*reading tests, so these roots are deep). The divide becomes almost a chasm in middle school: boys who could sustain their book attention through elementary are far quicker to drop it than girls are when they hit secondary. Even though secondary curriculum STILL favors literary men (heck, my own full-class texts are 12 Angry Men and Hamlet), it doesn't change the course of things.
Societal expectations for boys are definitely at play. Technology use is also HUGE. Boys often end up spending their time on media in a far more isolating way (playing video games with minimal/optional chat functions) than girls (participating in visual social media like Instagram or tiktok, which as a side note has a thriving book recommendation sector).
I came across this tidbit in Ron Charles's Book Club feature on the Washington Post that may interest you and your subscribers, plus you could probably flesh it out for us: Thorndike Press, publisher of large print books, will soon release a white paper documenting reading improvement in school children with access to large print books; for example, those with ADHD and those reading below grade level. The study is a joint effort with the nonprofit Project Tomorrow. (I myself am an elder and accidentally brought home a large print book from a thrift store, When I opened it up to read, something in me opened up and relaxed, and I breathed a spontaneous prayer of gratitude. I had already noticed that even normal sized print is easier to read when there is a generous space between the lines. That aspect is also touched on in the report.)
I think John’s critique of the piece in the Times is a good one, and I agree with it.
Sure, I have concerns about men seeming to opt out of higher education. I have concerns that my agon isn’t addressed in literature written by women, but it never was. I have concerns that men are addicted to zero-sum games, and that this contributes to the questionable numbers. Although I’m worried about men, I don’t think that pumping iron or hiking in the woods or trout fishing will cure the popular addiction to good v. evil cultural tropes.
But as I said, Mr. Warner is right about the piece in the Times. It fails on several levels. This is a huge topic that resists simple answers of right or wrong & simple theorizing. The question remains open for debate, as it should.
What do you think of the Alvarez thesis that “masculine” fiction is provocative and possibly annoying to many female readers and editors, which is part of why it’s out of favor? Even when we’re looking for an example of the male-writer-women-don’t-like we have to reach back to poor old David Foster Wallace.
I don't know what to make of some of these theories because I have to know what we mean by "masculine" fiction. Richard Russo writes about the troubles men have as men and finds wide readership - by any standard - and doesn't come in for any kind of approbation. It may be because his readership skews older, but then reading skews older period.
The DFW example is hard to parse because the person/persona has become separate from the work, and some of what's become more known about how he badly mistreated women in real-life has colored how people view the work.
I remember a book titled "Cherry" from a few years back which would qualify as masculine fiction that got a lot of attention. Teddy Wayne always rights about men sabotaging themselves and he only gets more popular. It wouldn't surprise me that, like many other areas, men are later bloomers than women and it just takes longer for them to develop into confident, compelling literary novelists.
But that's just me speculating. I think publishers would love to find the hot, young, male writer, but they may not have a sense of what kind of voice will be compelling. I saw a piece in the Times about the rise of the "Noodle boys," actors like Timothy Chalamet who don't present as manly men, but have undeniably strong appeal to women. It makes me realize these things are always in flux, and how we see masculinity/femininity today is not how we'll see it tomorrow.
OK, John, but I take issue with you saying that reading and writing don't have magical qualities. Of course they do. They are magical activities on many levels. Having said that, I'm going to further say that the whole Gosh, what's happening with our young men, especially white men, etc., KIND OF goes back to the whole unraveling of the world as we knew it. Some aspects of modern life are great, but many have been destructive for all people. Unlike Cher, we can't really turn back time. I respectfully suggest that, without going to the woods and smearing mud on their chests, men could do better/maybe need help with getting in touch with their inner king/warrior/magician/lover, and just trying to be better human beings. This applies, in my universe, across racial and economic lines, and would definitely involve more reading and writing. I wandered further afield than I meant to, but I said what I said. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
🙏🙏🙏
Thanks for parsing this out and for continuing to think about it. I breezed past that headline assuming it was a click bait opinion piece. Enjoyed how you break things down and dig into the stats and claims, and I’m a female writer saying this. And thank you for linking to Lincoln Michel. I hadn’t come a rooms his Substack yet - good stuff!
Another astute rebuttal of a sensational but ill-conceived op-Ed. I agree completely with your assessment of what can be considered literary fiction and what’s not. Thanks John!
I'm so glad you wrote about this. I've been losing my mind ever since I read it. All that hashing and discourse that you refer to--I think I've had every one of those conversations in my head. But what really got to me was the sloppiness of the argument. The conclusions without the evidence. The ease with which he implies--you can't really pin him down saying it and that enrages me too, so slippery--that, once again, women's success is the cause of men's downfall. Where is the causation? The snark in my could say all kind of things, like maybe without an underage female muse to steal from, young white men just don't have much to say. But that is mean. And not helpful. One wants to invite young white men to the table, for their sake and most definitely for ours. And maybe that's the real issue here. It's funny (not) how it always comes back to consequences. Was anyone worried when women and non-white men were shut out? Not really. Not worried about the effects of that silencing, but, more importantly, no one ever thought, gee, we should be scared of women because when they don't have a place at the table, they might just try to kill us all. Ok. I am still losing my mind.
I haven’t read any of the books. I passed on the piece in the Times. Like you, I’m not sure what people are talking about when they talk about literary fiction; when I was young it was the fiction that defined Modernism - the moment we discovered we were on our own in a world bereft of absolutes, and thus of meaning. I’m still the modernist I was born to be 76 years ago. So why am I responding? What right have I?
None, but that’s the world we live in.
One assumption that I’d add to the list of assumptions that need to be critically analyzed is that persons respond to feeling they’re excluded by withdrawing from the process of trying to gain access. It seems like a lot of “cutting off your nose to spite your face” if true.
I don’t understand the social changes in men. “Abdication in favor of the women” is actually a way of describing what I personally felt back at the end of the sixties. “Move over and make room!” I thought it was progressive and fair and fun. But it quickly spawned a feeling of “You aren’t able to compete with women because you’re not a woman.” Not on identical terms, no.
Competition is as American as apple pie, which brings me to The Great British Baking Show. It’s far superior to all its American versions because the people on it are so nice, and while they are in a competition, they’re not nasty about it. They follow their better angels. But the bakers on the American versions of the concept are either hyper-competitive, whether they’re men or women, or else they’re uninteresting. I would love to meet all the bakers on the British show; I would avoid eye contact with the contestants on the American knock-offs. …As a general policy, that is.
This explanation may come from deep inside our culture’s fundamental structure - the necessity of competitive ruthlessness in order to prevail. We believe in it so much that it has become true.
The history of culture is story after story of destruction, suppression, experiment and ruin. Culture is literally the ruins of the past with which we surround ourselves. Look behind you; all you see are failures. The literary novel wouldn’t exist without human failure, destruction, struggle to stay alive. Look ahead of you; if you say you can see anything certain, you’re a liar.
Technology is the new godhead. It gave us victory of Fascism, Nazism, and Racism in World War II. If we had fought with our moral courage and Judeo-Christian values alone, absent the “one ring to rule them all,” which is technological magic, then we would have lost. But I have to say, fully aware of where this is going to appear and all the “ironies” in it, this new god is a false one, a fickle one, a broken one.
If men have withdrawn from the field of literary striving, I don’t think it’s because men feel pushed out. I think it’s because we’re terrified. Modernism isn’t dead (for me at least) but you can only go so far with the death of the gods and heroes, before you encounter young readers who have no gods or heroes except their celebrities and their machines and images and sounds.
In the comics world, way more than two decades ago every hero suddenly grew a dark side, became resentful, wounded, or tired of being “good.” Most of them were men, if I may generalize. Today, you can’t find a good guy for love nor money. If the super heroes aren’t fighting among themselves, or fighting their own worst impulses, or going rotten, then they’re fighting the very people they were “born” to protect - the ungrateful and selfish human race. It’s as if the comics discovered that even the best of us must be tainted by original sin and go out there and kill his brother Abel - because this is what they saw all around us and it sells comics. This is the Great American Bake-Out. This is the end of the line for “Truth, Justice, and The American Way. Please take all your belongings when exiting the train. We’re not responsible for anything you leave behind."
It’s hard for a man to write a literary novel in a cultural landscape where there is nothing to which our “better angels” might aspire.
Women, on the other hand, write as women see the world, but it’s not their fault that few of these books answer my instinctual craving for meaning and purpose as a man. It’s a miracle that I still have such a craving, anachronistic as I am.
Like George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, I went through a period of seeking meaning and purpose in women. Don’t gasp. It’s true. I enjoy rereading that sequence (from “Man And Superman”) even in my darkest hours. It is only a literary conceit, but I have refused to give it up, as I refuse to “curse God and die,” which is all that Job’s advisors ever say.
nuf said
It is interesting to consider the ethos of competition in the differences between the American and British baking shows. There does seem to be an American spirit that embraces the notion of life as a zero-sum game. Trump obviously appeals strongly to that sense of the world, and it seems clear that the way people experience the world reinforces that sense. With the world of "literary" fiction, there's very few, if any, spoils to be won unless you manage to win a big prize or something like that.
I’m troubled by the intuition I’ve had that too many Americans embrace the view that politics is a game with winners and losers. It makes politics a consumable and disposable product. It makes politics very major league sounding! Full of “Wait until next year” for the “losers.” I’m heartily sick of sports. I’m not a gambler; I don’t get anything from playing zero sum games. If I play a game, it’s to learn something, not to win. A game that teaches nothing but is only about winning or losing is “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”
Nor am I a fan of the British. As a people, they can be deeply flawed, cruel, mean-spirited, overbearing, insufferably colonialist…there’s a good reason our ancestors kicked them out. But it appears that many of their amateur bakers do not regard their avocation as a zero sum game, nor do their viewers see amateur baking as all or nothing. They seem to regard baking as giving pleasure to others. They create goodness so others will make more goodness. Do ut des.
The British show consciously tries to highlight generosity and hope in a diverse group of similars - hope that everyone will prevail pours out of it every week, alongside the acknowledgment of humility, "there but for fortune…” There’s almost no triumphalism. The show builds relationships and shares people's ups and downs not as wins and losses, but as moments worth having lived to the fullest.
Hope arises in a group and it can’t be bought and sold because its value doesn’t fluctuate.
Optimism is half of a zero-sum game. "Optimism minus pessimism equals zero," explains why capitalism works - also colonialism. It separates us into winners and losers, and the false promise of winning the big prize appeals to many. In my humble opinion, these people are vulnerable to manipulation. The zero-sum-vernacular term for them is “suckers.”
Not only are there no big dollar spoils in literary art/craft; books published as part of a zero-sum strategy are a huge risk to publishers. Publishing houses must fight to make a profit in a zero sum game. They become risk averse, like smart gamblers. They try to stack the deck. They bet on horses with a winning track record; this often makes up for publishing some big “losers.” Well, publishing is and has always been a capitalist enterprise.
That any literary fiction is still published attests to the enduring hope of some highly subversive readers.
Optimism is a product marketed by capitalist oligarchs, which people buy into when they want to minimize loss and maximize gain; or contrarily they buy into its competitor, pessimism. Both optimism and pessimism are manufactured for the individual, whose buying preferences are closely monitored by our devices. Trump sells both! And so many buy their kit from him that it’s troubling.
Cheers! [Meaning hope, not optimism. If I were optimistic I’d end with: Profits!]
my takeaway: the article is saying "where are the people like me? they are not finding success in what i am looking to do." education is to blame and powerful people are to blame. but certainly not me myself - I'm not at fault for not being as successful as other people i'm comparing myself to.
i appreciate you showing an alternative view of the situation from a similar perspective.
I am just frustrated with the idea that it's somehow a problem that women dominate a particular thing or field. I mean, dear God, if we let women write and read the majority of the fiction and make up the majority of most medical school classes, next thing you know women might... gasp... want to earn more money! Or, I dunno, hold more CEO positions and high elected offices.
You or one of your readers will undoubtedly know more about this, but if I recall correctly from my 19th century British novels class in college, novels were historically largely the realm of women.
I dunno. If someone can show me how getting more men to read and write novels is going to solve the wage gap or some other actual problem in the world, I'm all for it. As it is, I will just remain grouchy.
To your point, we have a lot of evidence that once women dominate a field, pay and prestige decline. Mrs. Biblioracle is a veterinarian, a profession that has come to be dominated by women, and also a profession that has seen a steady decline in terms of job satisfaction, even as big picture costs are up. Even people are hesitant to see these things as "progress" as I do, at the very least they could grapple with the fact that things change.
For sure. (I am also grouchy about the pay/prestige phenomenon you note, as well as related phenomena--for instance, clinical track faculty (mostly female) earning less than research track (mostly male), or library administrators (mostly male) earning more than other library staff (mostly female) or--well, I needn't belabor the point.)
That is so cool. Just saying.
Enjoyed reading your take on this. I completely agree that the op-ed’s argument that men reading more would somehow save them from the lure of the manosphere is an overstatement on literature’s capabilities. A good book may inspire empathy, but it doesn’t remove people from their larger social and economic context. Then again, I say this knowing many men who aren’t big readers of literature but also aren’t into the manosphere. Instead, they have good jobs, stable and long-term relationships and other hobbies.
Oh, this topic comes up a LOT in K-12, because we see the beginnings of this very early on (we've seen girls perform better than boys on *pre*reading tests, so these roots are deep). The divide becomes almost a chasm in middle school: boys who could sustain their book attention through elementary are far quicker to drop it than girls are when they hit secondary. Even though secondary curriculum STILL favors literary men (heck, my own full-class texts are 12 Angry Men and Hamlet), it doesn't change the course of things.
Societal expectations for boys are definitely at play. Technology use is also HUGE. Boys often end up spending their time on media in a far more isolating way (playing video games with minimal/optional chat functions) than girls (participating in visual social media like Instagram or tiktok, which as a side note has a thriving book recommendation sector).
I came across this tidbit in Ron Charles's Book Club feature on the Washington Post that may interest you and your subscribers, plus you could probably flesh it out for us: Thorndike Press, publisher of large print books, will soon release a white paper documenting reading improvement in school children with access to large print books; for example, those with ADHD and those reading below grade level. The study is a joint effort with the nonprofit Project Tomorrow. (I myself am an elder and accidentally brought home a large print book from a thrift store, When I opened it up to read, something in me opened up and relaxed, and I breathed a spontaneous prayer of gratitude. I had already noticed that even normal sized print is easier to read when there is a generous space between the lines. That aspect is also touched on in the report.)
I saw that too and made a note because I thought it was really interesting. The theory definitely makes sense.
I think John’s critique of the piece in the Times is a good one, and I agree with it.
Sure, I have concerns about men seeming to opt out of higher education. I have concerns that my agon isn’t addressed in literature written by women, but it never was. I have concerns that men are addicted to zero-sum games, and that this contributes to the questionable numbers. Although I’m worried about men, I don’t think that pumping iron or hiking in the woods or trout fishing will cure the popular addiction to good v. evil cultural tropes.
But as I said, Mr. Warner is right about the piece in the Times. It fails on several levels. This is a huge topic that resists simple answers of right or wrong & simple theorizing. The question remains open for debate, as it should.
What do you think of the Alvarez thesis that “masculine” fiction is provocative and possibly annoying to many female readers and editors, which is part of why it’s out of favor? Even when we’re looking for an example of the male-writer-women-don’t-like we have to reach back to poor old David Foster Wallace.
I don't know what to make of some of these theories because I have to know what we mean by "masculine" fiction. Richard Russo writes about the troubles men have as men and finds wide readership - by any standard - and doesn't come in for any kind of approbation. It may be because his readership skews older, but then reading skews older period.
The DFW example is hard to parse because the person/persona has become separate from the work, and some of what's become more known about how he badly mistreated women in real-life has colored how people view the work.
I remember a book titled "Cherry" from a few years back which would qualify as masculine fiction that got a lot of attention. Teddy Wayne always rights about men sabotaging themselves and he only gets more popular. It wouldn't surprise me that, like many other areas, men are later bloomers than women and it just takes longer for them to develop into confident, compelling literary novelists.
But that's just me speculating. I think publishers would love to find the hot, young, male writer, but they may not have a sense of what kind of voice will be compelling. I saw a piece in the Times about the rise of the "Noodle boys," actors like Timothy Chalamet who don't present as manly men, but have undeniably strong appeal to women. It makes me realize these things are always in flux, and how we see masculinity/femininity today is not how we'll see it tomorrow.
OK, John, but I take issue with you saying that reading and writing don't have magical qualities. Of course they do. They are magical activities on many levels. Having said that, I'm going to further say that the whole Gosh, what's happening with our young men, especially white men, etc., KIND OF goes back to the whole unraveling of the world as we knew it. Some aspects of modern life are great, but many have been destructive for all people. Unlike Cher, we can't really turn back time. I respectfully suggest that, without going to the woods and smearing mud on their chests, men could do better/maybe need help with getting in touch with their inner king/warrior/magician/lover, and just trying to be better human beings. This applies, in my universe, across racial and economic lines, and would definitely involve more reading and writing. I wandered further afield than I meant to, but I said what I said. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.