Men aren’t reading fiction, but literature has bigger problems

We must save literature from the moralizers

According to a New York Times opinion piece by someone named David J. Morris, it’s very bad that men aren’t reading and writing fiction anymore. It’s paywalled, but if you read these two paragraphs, you’ve read the whole thing (emphasis added):

To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured. Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers.

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The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

I guess the question for me is: why the fuck would a man who has lost interest in literature (or never developed one in the first place) get back into it if that’s how people in the literary world think about people like him? Men, you are not being sufficiently edified, so you need to turn off the Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan¹ and come back to literature so you can be better men for the sake of the rest of us. Hey, where are you all going?

Look, I don’t know if it’ll to get more men reading, but we must stop talking about literature this way. “We have to get the boys reading for their moral betterment” is not going to get the boys reading, or anybody else for that matter. People don’t read fiction for moral betterment, we read fiction to be thrilled and entertained and moved, and for the pleasure of seeing language used beautifully. If along the way we pick up some moral lessons and empathy for our fellow humans, so much the better, but that’s not what makes us pick up the book, and it’s especially not what makes a kid pick up a book. No kid ever developed a lifelong love for reading out of a sense of moral obligation.

Call me crazy, but I think it’s bad for its own sake that men aren’t reading! That’s a poor and empty way for a person to live, regardless of any broader societal implications there may or may not be². I want more men reading and writing because those are ends and joys in and of themselves that enrich our lives in ways that other kinds of entertainment and art can’t. If the best we can come up with for why people should read fiction is they need it for their moral improvement, we’re going to alienate a lot more than just men.

It’s not just the commentating David J. Morrises of the world who devalue literature by reducing it to a vector for moral instruction, it’s the people who write it. I’m reminded, as I often am, of this quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in an Atlantic interview last year:

You know, I’m constantly buying books, and I do that because I’m thinking about when I started and how terrified I was that nobody would buy my books. So I’m always trying to buy, especially first novels. But I almost never finish them. I remember recently reading this book, and I thought, My God, everybody is good in this book. And that’s a lie. Literature should show us all sides of ourselves. And I read this book, and everyone was ideologically correct. Everyone had all the right opinions.

If you make any effort to read what’s new and notable in literature, you know she’s right. The prevailing attitude in publishing seems to be that fiction should educate people, which in practice means instilling the correct political and social values³. It’s stifling.

To me, it’s familiar. I grew up isolated from the mainstream and immersed in the wild, wild world of Christian pop culture. I don't know to what degree that cultural ecosystem is still a thing, but as of the late 90s it was going strong, with all kinds of movies and books and music and radio programs that was all explicitly branded as Christian. Often it was very deliberately a Christian version of some mainstream cultural phenomenon, other times it was its own thing. There were clear rules: you couldn't have profanity or explicit sex (you could imply sex, but only between married people), and you had to have an unambiguous and explicitly Christian message.

As you might imagine, most of it sucked.

I was a true believer at the time, but even then I knew I was being pandered to. The stuff would sometimes be marketed as "we're going to reach the people who enjoy the secular equivalents of this, and we're going to save their souls," but even as a kid it was obvious to me that it was more about providing cultural products to Christians who didn't want to engage with the sinful secular culture all around them. Which I totally understood, and still do! The problem is that it mostly sucked as art. In my experience, many great artists are deeply religious but very few explicitly religious artists are any good. Preaching to the choir makes for terrible art. The need to spell out the message got in the way of conveying meaningful truth — and that's just the ones who were sincere. There were plenty of cynics among them who didn't really care about the message itself; they just saw a lucrative market with a particular set of rules and created a product to sell to it.

Another factor, which I’d come to understand later, is simply that if you put such strict parameters on the kind of art that is allowed, you limit the pool of artists who can contribute. If you’re drawing from a smaller pool, you’re going to have fewer good artists and you’re going to have to promote more mediocre ones. It’s the reason bigger high schools tend to have better football teams.

All of this is to say, over the last decade or so, I have seen the same mentality take over mainstream literature (and pop culture in general), except instead of conforming to the moral values of a specifically American, late 20th century, middle class kind of Christianity, it conforms to the moral values of a specifically American, early 21st century, professional-managerial class kind of social liberalism. I was a late 20th century middle class Christian then and I am an early 21st century professional-managerial class social liberal now, and I still will call bullshit pandering when I see it. I don't know what kind of behind-the-scenes work back then went into making sure that all the music I listened to and books I read and movies I watched maintained such rigid message discipline, but there were definitely actual people whose job it was to make sure it all did. Today's literary agents and sensitivity readers would hate to think they have anything in common with some Mike Pence-ass evangelical Christian who worked for Focus on the Family in the 90s, but they are doing the same thing. They’re torturing and limiting art in service of a message. They have a different set of moral commitments, but they have the same view of their purpose in the world and they have the same lack of respect for their audience's intelligence and they are both enemies of good art.

Personally, I’m so sick of the pandering that at this point I would rather read something by someone whose politics I find reprehensible but is trying to make good art than something by yet another person who agrees with me on everything and thinks their job is to make me feel good about what I already believe.

Anyway, the whole thing is a joke, because who the fuck wants moral lessons from writers? Many of the best ones are dissolute weirdos and many of the most successful ones are brainless conformists. We’re due for a revitalization of literature that cans the preaching and focuses on producing beautiful, interesting, complicated books. If that happens, a lot of people alienated by the current state of affairs will come back. Some of them will probably be men.

Scattered thoughts:

• For a much smarter take on why men are disappearing from mainstream literature and what we’re all losing because of it,

  Ross Barkan
  laid it out well back in May. Also recommended:
  Andrew Boryga
  on the challenges of selling books about male vulnerability and interiority in the current climate.

• Another annoying thing about the Morris New York Times piece is the way he just takes it as a given that going to college = reading more novels, which is probably true, but shouldn’t be. Definitely didn’t used to be. Lots of factors at play, but we can’t pretend that a big one isn’t the fact that everybody involved in writing, representing, editing, publishing, and marketing most mainstream fiction has at least a bachelor’s and probably a master’s. I can’t remember the last time I read a new novel with a protagonist who wasn’t either a college graduate, an aspiring college graduate, or a criminal. Diversity and representation in fiction is important for every group except, apparently, the ~60% of American adults who don’t have college degrees.

1. Of course Morris name-drops them both, along with Trump.

2. I am very skeptical that reading fiction has as much power to edify and build empathy as people who write fiction like to believe it does.

3. This is the only permissible kind of moralizing — to try to impart lessons in things like loyalty, selflessness, or integrity might be seen as judgmental.