Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men

On Gender in Contemporary Fiction

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Feb 19, 2025

James Ensor, *The Intrigue*, 1890, Oil on canvas, Getty Images

Are contemporary female novelists writing men well? And are male novelists, in turn, doing any favors to women? In his tour de force debut, Django Ellenhorn, our Associate Editor, dives into a wide range of modern fiction to seek the truth. This is a great big one you will want to mull over for a while. And if you like what we do, as always, we appreciate your pledges of $50 for the year or $5 every month. Each dollar goes towards paying our writers and getting our pretty print issue off the ground.

-Lou & Ross

I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women.

Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed.

So, here’s what this is not:

I’m not saying that literary culture has degraded because women pack the book world to the brim; I’m not saying that Stephen King and James Patterson are immaterial nobodies, that their sales numbers matter not at all; I’m not saying that nonwhite folk have a cinch of a time getting their books on the shelves; and I’m not saying that female editors should now be freighted with the grim responsibility of victors and must dole out ginormous contracts to yearning and pitiful mediocrities just because they happen to be male. Everyone knows that some of the writers crying foul about the paucity of men getting published are mere aggrieved nimrods trapped in a deserved eternity of irrelevance. The phallus is no skeleton key for unlocking the mystery of their nothingness. They just suck.

But those are just some of the men who remain. Most of them are gone. In the cramped world of literary fiction, it can pay to be reductive, so I’ll do the same: young men don’t read and young men don’t write, and if they don’t read then they won’t write, which probably won’t matter, because right now candid depictions of male reality have little place in books. To a certain type of person, even our thoughts feel like a species of threat. And that’s no fun.

Anyways, consider the question begged: Why don’t young men read and write?

You can find one cute answer all over the place. Oh, look at the competition for their attention, YouTube, Reddit, videogames galore. The internet’s infinite carnival. How could these poor guys ever find their way to books? The point has merit, it flat out might be the gist, but it also lacks a crucial part of the repulsion.

Here’s what it misses. Both women and men have carped about how the Great Male Narcissists of the past century weren’t all that stellar at writing women, that their ladies were barely people, just castrating mothers or juicy fuckmeat. Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer — their fictive women, in this telling, were mostly tits on sticks or buxom babes with mouths that sadly like to speak as much as suck. These guys are all in graves, but they aren’t the only culprits. Whole subreddits and Twitter accounts exist to call out how poorly modern men write women. Still, it’s always fun to kick a dead god. When Patricia Lockwood did her appraisal of Updike in the LRB, she quoted a friend of hers who crucified his corpse for a throwaway dumb-guy comment — albeit repeated in several novels — that proved his men had failed to properly understand the intricacies of the female urinary tract. Updike didn’t know how women pissed; for this his bones must burn.

You might have thought, then, after all the tough talk over the years, that once women got their chance at the front of the pack, they would write men better than men wrote women.

Fat chance. Though I’m sure there exists a sad confluence of reasons for why young men no longer read or write, a fundamental obnoxious truth remains: when they open a novel by their contemporaries, often all they find is a slap.

Let’s be condomy about it: literary fiction right now is very much Rigged for Her Pleasure. The stories are rigged and the men within them are rigged, the men the protagonists love or hate or hate to love.

The reason here is simple and well-known. Books are all about money. Women read, men don’t, and publishers need to crank out hits or perish. So books will be written for the people who read, aka women.

And what do women want to read? Or, to keep it specific and tendentious, what do women want from male characters in literary fiction?

Part of the time you could be forgiven for thinking they just want to watch them get killed. That’s fine by me; it’s fun, even deserved. I say that not out of gelded masochism but a jokey sense of justice. Kill all men and you kill most rape. You kill most killing, too. That’s how it goes. I get the catharsis.

It’s easy to admit that recreational man-hatred is often a good time, and right now in literary fiction it so happens to sell. It’s probably healthy for literature to have a greenlighted prejudice — it lets authors have fun thrashing a group of people with no fear of alienating the reader — and for the past decade men have suffered their stint at the post. There’s very little you can’t say about or do to a man in a contemporary novel; nearly everything is good to go. No pussyfooting required.

The heavy hitters of what I slightly unfairly think of as misandrist fiction — books that go well beyond the casual men are dogshit swagger you can find all around — are A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers and Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. The men in this type of fiction are uniformly worse (in terms of morality and aesthetic rendering) than the women in Great Male Narcissist fiction; if those guys can get pinned as sexist, so can these women. You can feel lurking within these novels, and many less slaughterous others, an ambient suspicion that maybe men were a bad idea, that God should have snuffed Adam once he plucked the rib. Ottessa Moshfegh could probably be slotted into this half-serious category, since the vast majority of her men are limp-dicked poseurs or gangling homunculi or patriarchal grotesqueries. But Clark and Summers are the purest practitioners. Goodreads is a bummer, but it’s also instructive; you can go there to haruspex the vomit of the hive, and one of the top reviews there for Summers’ novel I find delightfully honest: “a woman killing men…exactly what i like to read about!”

You can imagine the sneering ghost of Valerie Solanas, would-be murderess and author of the SCUM Manifesto, standing behind these furious and suppurating books. Part of the undeniable pleasure lies in their liberating audacity; it’s nice to ride on the freight train of sociopathy, and the men here are the bodies strapped to the tracks. Some might argue that the narrators of these books actually hate the world far more than they hate men, that they are more misanthropic than misandrist, but some works of nihilistic fiction often aim their guns more in the direction of one gender than the other, and though insufferable women exist in this dyad, the blood belongs to the boys.

The basic set-ups: A Certain Hunger follows a food critic who eats men — she’s a serial killer who both sleeps with and devours a series of losers, describing their flesh with the same gourmand detail she brings to her restaurant reviews. The prose revels in both culinary and carnal appetites, turning male bodies into literal meat for consumption. I think you see where this is going. For its part, Boy Parts centers on Irina, a photographer who exploits men and boys for her art, pressuring them into increasingly degrading photoshoots. She’s a sociopath with a camera and a kitchen knife, getting off on her power to reduce men to aesthetic objects. The mere thought of lashing a boy and getting a cool shot of his struck face is enough to make her slide out of her chair.

Do you get the joke? Both books flip the male gaze into female violence — instead of men objectifying women, we get women consuming men or turning them into gruesome art. American Psycho (their literary daddy) had satirical ambitions beyond the splatter, but these books often seem content to gender-swap the sadism and call it quits for profundity. What if women looked at men the way that men looked at women? That wouldn’t be great. The end.

The male characters in these two novels are, with few exceptions, gargoyles of rapey machismo or piteous squalling infants who grew older without growing up. Both novels want you to hate them; they’re offered up to be knifed. Clark in particular seems eager to provide an origin story that doubles as an excuse for Irina’s every abusive act — if she blinds a sucker with a wine bottle, well, it’s because she got raped. This blocks the book from ever rising to an existential fury; instead, it squats like a toad in the box of revenge fantasies. The only male character in Boy Parts that she even tries to make marginally sympathetic is the annoyingly sweet-hearted Eddie from Tesco who turns out to be such a babbling simp that even I wanted to choke him till his eyes lobstered out of his skull.

The shallow depictions of men and the violence against them in these books aren’t what makes them feel like they aren’t for me, both in terms of taste and not being written with me, a man, in mind. What gives me just the slightly squeamish sense of yikes — the sense of a lurking slap — is how awkwardly besotted Clark and Summers remain with their bloody-minded heroines. You could chalk this up to the way that authors, naturally chairbound as a species, tend to get swept up by the aura of people of real action; but there hums a vaguely creepy sense of these books being, as it were, blue-balled before the catharsis of the torment and killings of the men. They feel like what the authors, not just the narrators, are trying to argue you into wanting, not that many need the persuasion. The stories, and, crucially, the behavior of the men in them, cooperate too cutely with the desired conclusion that we need some incarnadine comeuppance. Hell, even I was hoping for some castration.

The killings (of both men and women) and rapes in American Psycho serve a different purpose. They form part of the hellacious monotony of all things in Patrick Bateman’s life; Bret Easton Ellis describes them in much the same detail as the ridiculous dishes and the conversations of lobotomized masculinity with Bateman’s interchangeable finance buddies. Bateman’s crimes simply seem to happen, like some meteorological event emerging out of a larger slow-rolling storm. You can find hundreds of sentences like these: I went to Dorsia and got a shepherd’s pie with beaver meat and a crust made of balsa wood and the blended eyes of newts. I took a cab to 34^th street and picked up a hooker with a nice ass and no tits and took her back to my apartment where I knocked her out cold with a hammer and had sex with the wound. Strip the book of all the carnage, in other words, and you would still have a good measure of the spiritual vacuity and status-hungry inanity of 1980s America. It’s also vital that Bateman ends up in what amounts to Hell, and there’s no authorial indication that some mass maltreatment by women elicited the behavior that dumped him there. His rapes and killings don’t savor a lick of vengeance. Real or imagined, they’re a howl, and you could likely nix them from the novel and get a similar overall effect. You could even make him kill only men and the book wouldn’t be much different, though you would lose the current sense of moral slippage as women become his central targets. The worse he gets, the more women he kills — though far short of a ringing endorsement of womankind, it is a kind of estimation.

But without the cannibalism and the torture, all male-directed, in the misandrist dyad by Clark and Summers, we would feel a comparatively mammoth lack. The books that remained would suffer from a definitional absence. It doesn’t help their case that if you made the protagonists killers of women the books wouldn’t make sense. We came here for blood, and you know whose. Inter alia, the author’s infatuation is the slap. Nabokov said that there exists a green lane in heaven where Humbert Humbert, famed Lolita rapist, could wander once per year. I leave these two novels feeling like their authors would want to get brunch with their protagonists twice a week. The result of all this, the strangely unreluctant adoration of these executioners, is both a gruesome inside story of their minds and a righteous-seeming delight in the vivisection of their victims. The slaughter remains the heart of the appeal, and the authors, starry-eyed, present it either as generally retributive or badass. Cheekily, Summers actually dedicates her novel to “bad girls everywhere.”

Literature should be a place where you can scream blood so long as you do it with some intelligence and style. What I’m truly bemoaning here is the quality, not the subject matter. I might be a fan of these books if they were good. And I should add, in small favor of these two, that it’s always more boring for a novel to posture as a diagnosis (more on this later, re Ben Lerner) rather than luxuriating in the thrills of being a symptom of the disease. I would much rather read novels running on the diesel fuel of an unacknowledged hatred than some timid alternatives. Unfortunately, I dislike these books just as much for being mid — psychologically, aesthetically, etc. — as for being giddy dreams of boy-slaughter. Solanas did call for actual androcide, but at least she was funny.

Of course, not every female author wants to butcher her male characters, or wants you to want the same. Some just buff them into beautiful nullities. Their men aren’t allowed to be people, because that would blight the sappy point of the book.

Good luck talking about contemporary literary fiction without being drawn in by the planetary force of Sally Rooney. She’s been here for a while and she’s not going anywhere soon — catch your readership young and they’ll get nostalgia-trapped into adoring you forever. People still can’t kick Harry Potter even with Rowling turning her cannons on trans women for the past decade. For better or worse, Rooney is here for the long haul.

And in some ways, it’s for better and worse, since Rooney doesn’t seem to hate men. She even tries to write from their perspective — she just can’t look at them too closely. Call it an artistic and intellectual failure, but it also feels like commercial pragmatism. Truly looking at men would violate the imperatives of her work, since Rooney is one of the founders of that candy-colored class of literary novels that amount to paperback vibrators. They are fundamentally aspirational books about waifish white women going on erotic and amorous adventures with enigmatic and thinly rendered men.

It’s obvious: the ceiling on male reality in a book meant to make you quiver to the fantasy of one can only be so high. Take Nick from Conversations with Friends and Connell from Normal People as case studies. Rooney describes both as looking like they could have strutted out of an advertisement — Connell for Diet Coke and Nick for cologne. They’re pretty boys with self-esteem issues, lovable men with sick bods and soft hearts.

They are also both depressives. Nick goes through a major sad spell midway through Conversations, and at first, I thought, Oh, nice, a bit of realism. But his depression only serves to accentuate his jawline; this is not his story. Rooney deploys his depression to slip him back into the arms of Frances. His sadness makes him safe to love again. I never get the sense that Nick lives a life in the narrative at all separate from the girl who adores him (it’s clear the narrative wants you to adore him as well, of course). In other words, Nick’s experience, his lived reality, must always bend around the gravitational necessity of his remaining an object of erotic attention. He can be depressed, sure, but he can’t be too depressed, because then he wouldn’t be hot. His misery must be tuned to the sexual needs of the protagonist. He can only be so much of himself.

Absent the understanding that he is only really a brainy dildo, Nick feels like an incomprehensible nonentity of a character. He doesn’t make sense. He’s an actor with zero signs of personal vanity; he’s failed to win any awards he was ever up for and appears unwounded by such falling-short; and he’s even beatifically understanding of the multiple infidelities committed by his wife Melissa. When he mentions the betrayals to Frances, he seems to get it — Melissa needed a boning because he was sad. It’s revelatory that Rooney describes him as looking like he walked out of an advertisement for cologne after his period of excruciating depression. His dejection didn’t just soften him up; it maxed out his beauty. Nick is less a man walked out of a cologne commercial than a phantom from the bookish modern woman’s wet dream — eternally fit, soft-hearted, smart but not too smart, deferential, and flush with cash. His malaise doesn’t even make him impotent; he absolutely bodies that pussy with ease.

And if Nick is bad, Connell is a total bafflement. I know of nobody who thought he was a convincingly rendered twenty-first century boy besides the men desperate to think they resembled him or the women who wanted to date him or see him as a nice son. He’s smart, but not as smart as Marianne (that could never be true, in these books, I think you know why); he’s a jock, but he’s different than the other jocks (pick me, please); he has the moral strength to hang out with beery bullying boys his whole life without ever taking on their turpitude; he never watches porn (watching porn is a great sin in Rooney — check Felix in Beautiful World, Where Are You); and his depression, edging into the obliterative, gets some of the silliest treatment I’ve seen in contemporary fiction. His misery at its worst leaves him lying on the floor of his apartment for a minute. That’s it.

Rooney’s treatment of Nick’s depression is dumb but forgivable. Again, it’s not his story; he’s only ever seen through the eyes of infatuated Frances. But half of Normal People is told from Connell’s point of view, and her writing on his immiseration feels damningly weightless and box-checky. (About the latter, it’s literal: at one point, he fills out a questionnaire about his feelings, which asks if he’s ever had thoughts about killing himself.) Nick irritates me because his misery only makes him prettier; but Connell’s rankles even harder because, in a nearly hilarious act of reality-bending, he is never once rendered truly unlovely even from the inside — and he never smells bad. The lack of smell might seem like a small sin, but it is major. If you’ve ever been cursed to love a depressed man, you should see this as the tipoff that all you’re getting here is a fantasy. Dare to ever hug a schmuck like that and you’ll jet bile at the nearest wall.

The rub is that Nick and Connell — any man in a Rooney novel (and no, the men in Intermezzo are no better) — can never truly be real because then they’d ruin the dream. They must be softies, but also endearingly woundable protectors, Dobermans with the souls of Labs — men who, if you’re a man, make absolutely no sense as human beings.

A final note: they never have a truly questionable thought about women.

If you want to see the sins of an author distilled, look to her acolytes.

Two edifyingly weaker works by lesser writers came out in quick succession after the Rooney eruption (NB: many others have followed). First came Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan and then Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman. Kudos to Rooney for even trying to write men with some fidelity to reality — these two don’t even come close.

Dolan’s work is easier to shrug off because it’s fundamentally just more of the same but worse, less emulation than competent imitation. Exciting Times feels like if you fed Rooney’s corpus into an advanced AI and asked it to churn out a version set in Hong Kong instead of Ireland. We get a roughly synonymous story to Conversations with Friends: a snarky smartypants narrator with a distant father enters a situationship with an enigmatic rich boy. The book does feel strangely colder and more joyless than Rooney’s work, and the sex gets more of a pan-to-the-windows treatment, but Dolan managed to cash in on a serviceable imitation. Good for her. She’s notable mostly because she was the first of many to do the same. Pastiching your way to a comparatively dimmer stardom is nothing new in the lit world, but it’s clear that aping Rooney has proven a fast-track. These books are everywhere.

Fishman’s work is slightly different, especially when it comes to the requisite man. She’s a better writer than Dolan; there is blood in the prose. She’s also different about sex. She dives straight into the damp. That much I can applaud.

The problems start when you start to take the book seriously. Acts of Service postures as a disquisition on contemporary sex, along with the erotic quandaries lurking out there for bisexual women, with their inextinguishable yearning to bang men. This could have been nice, but the result feels far less like a look at the prevailing conundrums between men and women and more an exercise in outright vanity. The deeper I got into the novel, the more I felt like the intellectual chest-thumping was nothing more than a juke. Despite my derision of the men in her work, I wouldn’t accuse Rooney of writing mere cliterature. But Fishman’s novel sort of feels like the result of someone asking the daring question, “What if Colleen Hoover were kind of smart?”

And, yes, what about the man? At bottom (so to speak), Acts of Service concerns a bisexual girl named Eve who gets gleefully entangled with a monetarily well-endowed master of sex. She feels super-duper bad about it all, because socialism, feminism, etc. You know the drill. Reflections on her calamities of intimacy get repeated ad infinitum. Said rich man, Nathan, has inexplicable charisma — certainly inexplicable to this reader, who feels none of it. He’s just a guy with a fat wallet who loves to fuck. Apparently, he’s got such a weapon of a cock that he can smash through Eve’s reluctance to love men. To butcher a phrase from Christopher Hitchens: if you are the sort of person who likes this stuff, then this is something you will definitely like.

Shocker, I’m not; again, this isn’t for me, in both senses. Acts of Service is allegedly all about vanity and vapidity, which, again, could have been nice; but then you realize that Eve actually wants to applaud these qualities in herself, and Nathan is there to help guide her into ever higher registers of self-infatuation. She will do some requisite lamenting about the woes of her shallowness, but it’s never as fervent as the arias she repeatedly makes to her perfect tits. She is, in short, a pretty girl who loves being pretty, and as a result of such love she fears time. She doesn’t want to grow old because her greatest asset of being pretty will get killed by the clock. Bummer for her. I’m only half kidding when I say her moment of greatest suffering in the novel happens when Nathan neglects to make her come and Eve has to watch him get sucked to completion by another girl instead. “The mood was heavy,” Fishman writes, “when Nathan came.” After all the high praise it received from eminences like Becca Rothfeld, I kept waiting for Acts of Service to turn into something more, and yet it remained only a sugary nothing, a donut made entirely of hole.

The yin and yang, then, are complete. Roth and Updike had their hectoring mothers and whores with honkers huge enough to concuss a cow; contemporary female authors have their distant fathers and moneyed men with slurpalicious wangs. The women in the former’s works allegedly never quite rise above their station as breedable temptresses; and the men in many modern women’s work can only ever be so real, lest they lose their lovely status as intellectually deferential dildos and become mere dick.

I could go on, but the crux is clear: the men in women’s fiction are often no more real or human than the women in men’s fiction. Women can be great on their protagonists’ experience of men — I don’t doubt that the interiority here is vivid and unproblematic to those who share it — but that experience doesn’t take in any more of the totality of men’s experience than the protagonists in men’s works take in the totality of their women. What we’re left with is a very rough taxonomy of male representation in contemporary literature, from simmering hostility (Clark, Summers) to aestheticized reduction (Rooney, Dolan) to gleeful objectification (Fishman).

It’s worth asking, though: after hearing all those critiques about how men write women, after the constant calling out of how we objectify and reduce them, after all the flogging of those dead gods, have men gotten any better at writing women?

If only. As usual, Sigrid Nunez put it best:

And now male writers bend over backward to emphasize the superiority of their female characters. I meet the same paragon in book after book: high I.Q., great personality, firm moral purpose, dazzling wit. And the trick is to get across that she’s also very attractive without ever appearing to be somehow disrespecting her. It would be funny if it weren’t so boring.

A banal but true point bandied about just about everywhere but major publications in the past year is that male writers have become professional panderers. This inverts the dynamic Claire Vaye Watkins famously described in her 2015 essay “On Pandering,” where she confessed to spending years writing for white men, choosing subjects and styles she thought would impress male critics whose aesthetic barometers she didn’t even necessarily adore. Male writers are now stuck in a similar position of creative compromise, trapped in their own version of the pandering she so precisely diagnosed. It’s a great essay for many reasons, but mostly because it’s an argument and a call for freedom from such fear. The spate of “freer” books by women has been great to see. But that still leaves us with the current problem. Pick up a literary novel by a young male author published in the past ten years and ask yourself: who is this for?

The pandering now takes many forms, but the result is predictably disheartening, and when a male novelist pulls it off and gets trumpets and fame, I feel less envy than a peculiar, overpowering fatigue. Perhaps one of the weirdest examples of such lady-valorizing writers is Gabriel Tallent, whose My Absolute Darling stunned me less for its high style than for the fact that the regnant censors didn’t catch the trick. My Absolute Darling homes in on Turtle, a teenage girl in the Pacific Northwest who gets repeatedly raped by her burly pontificator of a father.

Many writers who dare to take on the unappealing subject of child rape are either trying to shadowbox Nabokov’s ghost or become his heir, though at times My Absolute Darling feels like it’s doing a bit of both, outclassing the big guy in the morality of such depictions — we get it all from the victim’s perspective, and the bad dad gets his punishment — while also deep-diving even further into the slurp and texture of the assaults. In nastier moods I’ve thought the result is a book that reads like some simpering rendition of Lolita, where a strained attempt to overly heroize Turtle works as a kind of fakeout. How could you accuse me of being weird about all this when I created such a strong girl? Look, she can shoot guns!

Even in calmer moods I found this book insane. It’s an odd artifact, a novel that Trojan-horses its perversion inside of an action-movie feminist plotline that finishes with a showdown redemption against the paragon of patriarchal authority. And yet Tallent, in his way, got away with it — not unscathed, but at least intact. My Absolute Darling contains enough feminist feints along with that redemptive plot structure to veer people away from the more dubious aspects of how he wrote that girl, those sluggishly vivid renderings of pedophilic defilement that even go so far as to depict the precise sensory experience of Turtle clutching a handful of her father’s bust “unspooling” from her “engorged pussy.”

Of course, the sex stuff in the book isn’t really my problem with it. That’s just the baffled part of the critique. What I find most grating is that Turtle’s experience as a girl is barely given much shrift at all; she’s far more a cipher than her father, who speaks ex cathedra about a wide variety of subjects before he decides it’s high time for another math lesson featuring a knife or a bedtime buggering. The most Turtle ever gives us is a sequence of thoughts no more articulate than, Grr. In short, Turtle doesn’t have a mind — that’s the scandal. She has no real interiority. I don’t clap shut the book feeling like I know what it feels like to be a girl, or even this girl. I just know what it feels like to read a guy writing about a girl getting raped and then, with a male-coded instrument of violence (gun), liberating herself from the bad, bad guy. Parul Sehgal bull’s-eyed the problem when she said that Turtle feels like a “male fantasy figure out of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road.’ And it’s a fantasy of a wearying sort, because Turtle has clearly been designed to be ‘empowering.’”

I might sound scandalized, but I’m not — at least, not by the rape. Far be it from me to sneer at a brave attempt to write about the illicit that goes foul. It’s really just that I get a sinister feeling about how this might semaphore to young men the trick to use to get onto the shelves. So long as you make your book ultimately about how women are cool, strong, etc., you can do what you like. Surely, it’s a small price to pay?

If Tallent represents a strange extreme of male literary pandering — the feminist Trojan horse — then Ben Lerner represents its more respectable face.

Please know that I do not want to attack this man. I think he’s one of the best authors alive; in college I just about built Leaving the Atocha Station a shrine. But I found The Topeka School — heavily marketed as investigating “a culture of toxic masculinity” — for all its beauty and intellectual vigor to be more of a bloodless educational overview of being a man than a true deep cut. Something about it savors of a PowerPoint.

The Topeka School follows Adam Gordon, a high school debate champion in late 1990s Kansas, as he blunders his way through adolescence while his psychologist parents work at a therapy institute called “The Foundation,” with interwoven narratives from the perspectives of his mother Jane, his father Jonathan, along with a rebarbative moron peer named Darren who commits the novel’s defining act of violence.

It’s disappointing, to say the least, that the most interesting character in a novel that got billboarded as a commentary on men ends up being Jane. She’s a real accomplishment, a dynamic act of ventriloquism that can’t be faulted for its literary merit even as it feels poignantly consistent with that marketed purpose of the book: “the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. [The Topeka School] is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.” Despite the jacket copy, I still felt juked and shortchanged. Adam, the Lerner stand-in, is no phantom, but his reality feels buried under too much hyperactive, debate-bro intellection, and for a novel about men, he doesn’t really think that much about women or how his attraction to them shapes his world. He exists mostly as the holographic impression we get from his parents, though the mother’s impression of him is far more incandescent and interesting than the father’s, who is, as a character, mostly a droning dud. We get a lot of Jane commenting on Adam’s masculinity, about the time, for instance, that he wrapped multiple pieces of bubble gum over his penis when he was a kid and then walked into his parents’ bedroom announcing that it had fallen onto his “body” and stuck there. It’s a funny scene, and it allows Jane to do some comically serious exegesis on the implications about Adam’s manhood.

But why are we seeing all of this from the outside? Adam’s sections are comparatively lacking in any reflection on such incidents or concerns. We get him going to parties; we get him soliloquizing to his girlfriend (who is never fully realized, just a voice and recipient of Adam’s dutiful cunnilingus); and we finally get him, years after the main events, going to an anti-ICE rally, where he stands up against a brutish police officer while his daughters play with chalk on the sidewalk. He’s our hero. A good man.

Alex Perez complained in his infamous interview in Hobart that we were unlikely to see pro-lifers and the unvaccinated (basically, anyone who voted for Trump) portrayed in a modern novel with any sympathy; they would only ever be villainous. He left out an additional descriptor: mentally deficient. Though Jonathan and Adam remain fundamentally vague to me, Darren is the least lived-in character of them all. His sections are evasively poeticized, all fancy language and no depth. Lerner seems afraid to think his thoughts. Darren gets brutalized by the other kids in school until eventually, in what’s portrayed as a kind of logical endpoint of masculinity, he slings a pool ball across a bar and hits a girl in the face. He crops up decades later as, you guessed it, a MAGA troglodyte. He is in many ways the negative image of Adam, the hyper-conscientious, wildly intelligent, and finally doting-husband protagonist who is, alas, never quite as real as his far more fascinating mother. It’s weird: in a novel that purports to be about men, all I really want to read is more about her. She alone feels truly alive.

Besides Jane, the PowerPoint effect is all that lingers. The Topeka School is a presentation about boys being boys for people who aren’t. Here’s boys being boys in debate; here’s boys being boys at parties, getting into pointless scrums; here’s how a nation of boys elected a manchild so they could feel like men in control. The intended audience for The Topeka School feels obvious and unavoidable, though still sad. It’s a novel that says, “Here are your sons, your brothers, your fathers, your uncles, your neighbors, your husbands, your president. Here’s how we got here, to this world you poor ladies have to live in, run by such gruesome and idiotic men.”

What it never seems to say is, “Here’s you.”

The few contemporary young male writers who exist often seem like they’re scratching out their books under the watchful eye of some imagined tribunal of women ready to fault-find at every turn of phrase. Some boys don’t even bother trying to depict women anymore, at least not with any dimension — they just keep them enigmatic and distant, smart chicks seen from afar. Doing so is a kind of refuge from the tribunal — how could you be attacked for thinking women are cool?

Some of the only honest semi-recent novels about the straight male experience came from Tyrant Books, helmed by the late Giancarlo DiTrapano. About two of the headliners, Atticus Lish and Nico Walker, I have nothing bad to say; I think we should be throwing them parades. Two years ago a passage in Preparation for the Next Life played a small part in keeping me from killing myself.1 Both these guys’ books are knockouts, though it’s worth noting for the tendentious purpose of this piece that Walker got lacerated in the New York Times by Julie Buntin for his allegedly shallow depiction of the main love interest. About that book, she decided to write about that.

More recent releases from the Tyrant crowd have not been so charming. Among the Tyrant boys that I’ve read, only Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi truly postures as being about masculinity, and it’s a revealing disappointment. I confess to liking Conroe as an artist while being leery of his novel. He seems serious about the calling; yay for that. But, without even considering its quality, it’s obvious that Fuccboi would have been at most a curiosity were it not for Giancarlo DiTrapano’s death — it was slated to be published by Tyrant Books for a 3k advance, and then mortality showed up, and Conroe got tsunamied with gold, which I’m sure he thought an odd commiseration. Even with the tragedy launch, Fuccboi spawned some commentary but hardly waves — it was no commercial blockbuster; it mostly elicited grievance cries from male authors who thought they deserved the advance more than Conroe. Maybe they did, but at least he had the moxie to try to let his book be a symptom, even if, in the end, it landed big more because of his mentor’s death than any Big Five editorial hunger for that type of work. The evidence is in the lack of follow-up — three years later, nothing like it has emerged. In other words, nobody really wanted Fuccboi before it became an artifact; after it, nobody has wanted anything similar.

Is that because of the quality or the subject matter? Probably both. Fuccboi to me feels like a partial failure not only because of the superficial, tantrumy subversions but because its potential profundity got hard-capped by the stupidity of its protagonist. Sadly, honesty doesn’t count for much without depth, and how deep can the deep cut ever be of a dumb guy when the dumb guy is telling the story? Christian Lorentzen pointed out both the charm and the flaw of our possible dunce of a narrator: “Conroe sums it up well in a line about the rapper Lil B and another artist: ‘For this, the subtlety of his subversion (where you couldn’t, like with Bolaño, quite decide ‘whether or not he was an idiot’).” Sean, the narrator of Fuccboi, bikes around doing a bro-ey spin on a blaccent for three hundred pages, pondering women (bae, as he calls them, in an initially funny but eventually exhausting bit, sort of the Conroe special) and sputtering observations about them rarely deeper than the equivalent of Damn, shawty got cheeks! The very vapidity of the appraisal is its own cover, no more than a literary catcall, a panting spasm of masculinity. It’s hard to take him seriously.

One of my big problems with Fuccboi, in the end, is its lack of heft. Any admiration I had for the candor dimmed with the onslaught of noisy but existentially weightless reactions to Sean’s life. As Philip Larkin put it: “Only an attitude remains.” Sean’s suffering, including a debilitating skin condition — skin conditions show up in two Tyrant boys’ works (see Gabriel Smith’s Brat) — an abortion with ex-bae, and foundering friendships, always feels depleted by the forced swagger and tryhard anti-woke invective. It all gets in the way because it’s mostly annoying. At times I felt like Sean could get diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and his response would be something like:

Ah, shit, bro.

That ain’t good, that’s some fuck shit, dying.

Your cells rebelling, mutiny ass socialist brain cancer.

Is it not PC to say you hate death?

Maybe that’s the transgression trap. If you think you can’t speak your truth, then you’ll punch at the forces you think constrain you from speaking your truth, which then degrades your art into a petty rebellion that you want to plop into the laps of the people who don’t want that truth to begin with. You can’t win; you can’t even really be yourself; or you can, but your self is now an irritation even to yourself. You’ve been reduced to a whiner. How often do literary rebels end up finding themselves obnoxious?

In any case, I find it sad. I keep waiting for a novel to come out by a man that would prove how much we’ve been missing by our absence, but so far books like Fuccboi have only proven the deprivation is minor, a cut appendix, the lack of a trivial organ in the literary body. It’s not their fault, really, and Conroe’s still a small hero. The choices left to a male novelist nowadays are few and scummy. You can either capitulate and write for an audience of women primed to distrust you, or you can succumb to the compulsion to spit at the people who stand at the door you wish to enter. You can either be a butler or a brat. Or you can just shut up.

More of what this is not: it would be simplistic to say that what male writers want is some recrudescence of the sinister cockslap of a great American male novel. Surely some are nostalgic for it; I’m not among them. I’ve got no wish for some latter-day, Internet-weaned Bret Easton Ellis or attritional gross-out Chuck Palahniuk (a few young men have gone the scatological route, to predictably boring results; these poopy books get small praise from me). A smattering of those more irreverent novels here and there might be nice. But I’d say the more common dream is less to be able to write novels where you can go into minute detail on the contours of a woman’s body without quailing at how women might respond than to be able to look at and evoke life straight, all of it, without any warping internal flinch. I could be vulgar and say that it’d be nice if we could get some novels by men that don’t feel like the author is wearing a chastity belt, and there’s some truth to that, but it’s not the heart of the fear. The real fear is that the flinch will lead only to more of these timorous books, sure, but more broadly to a further devastating lack of the inside story. What’s it feel like to date a woman, right now, as a guy? Could you actually know, reading any modern novel? What’s it like to be married to one? What about the whole fraught business of mothers and sons? Or, even more broadly: how much of what you want to conjure of life gets negated by the hesitation to even touch the subject of women without resorting to valorization or other forms of evasion? What truths are you aborting? What stories? Men’s novels these days, the ones that typically get published by the big houses, feel condemned to be defined by a negation. They feel like lies.

Back to vulgarity, because there is a truth there, too: I can’t kick the feeling that male novelists right now feel slightly cuck-chaired. Maybe that’s why I dislike some of the above female authors’ work so much. I envy freedom. Among other things, they get to sling puss and go buck wild. They have cultural sanction to be fearless. I’ll be juvenile and reductive: I’m still waiting for a book by a boy that truly fucks.

After the Second World War, George Orwell wrote that many of the appraisals of Hitler’s rise and the slaughterous crescendo of antisemitism written by English members of the commentariat were lackluster, fainthearted, and false. The reason, to him, was that none of the commenters could admit to the antisemitism latent in themselves, and so their insights were stunted by a fearsome repression.

The contemporary writer I most wish lacked a similar repression, not in his mind but in his fiction, is Tony Tulathimutte, since he’s the primary and saddest example of a stunted talent. Here’s a writer of near genius who seems condemned to cramped excellence by the fact that he will only ever try to make the wrong people laugh. You can feel the leash around his neck. He is also, to his credit, one of the only male novelists I know of who, in both Rejection and Private Citizens, has even semi-successfully let rip about the experience of being a man.

I revere Tulathimutte as a writer but often sigh at his work. He writes some of the best sentences of anyone out there and seems always willing to sprint straight into the kiln of shame. Martin Amis once said that John Updike was an exceedingly embarrassing writer — to our benefit — that he didn’t just take us into the bedroom but beyond it, into the bathroom. Mentally and otherwise, Tulathimutte goes straight down the drain, where he can show all the flushed jizz and blood-blackened feces. When I read him, I have a sense that here’s an author who could go anywhere in the house of his mind — that no rooms are locked.

In his review of American Psycho, Norman Mailer asked an interesting question: “Where is the author ready to bear the onus of suggesting that he or she truly understands the inner logic of violence?” Tulathimutte, more than any other male novelist now being published and feted, knows very well the internal logic of being a man, the millions of mortifications and rages, all the forms of willing servitude to the forces of your own slow dismantling, along with that unkillable suspicion of your lingering infancy — the fear that you will only ever be at best a mere boy. He’s also good on the topical perversions. Saul Bellow said that death is the dark backing of a mirror that we need if we are to see anything; in order to see Tulathimutte’s male characters, both in Rejection and Private Citizens, he rigs up a dark backing of porn addiction and private unmanning fury. Self-slaughter is our gender’s great talent, and Tulathimutte shows how for his resident losers that menace lurks around the corner of every day. “At work,” he writes in “The Feminist,” “when he isn’t thinking This is all I’m good for, he thinks I should kill myself.” He also has the wherewithal to cull some truths from the incel forums without getting infected with their dimwit vileness. Unlike Lerner, he doesn’t seem afraid of thinking wrong.

What he does seem squitteringly afraid of is writing wrong. If he seems to have a mind that could go anywhere, his fiction certainly can’t — at least not without vigorous and exhaustive signposting that he knows just how bad his characters are being. In every scene, there he stands, a hyperactive and relentless custodian of your every response. For much of the time in Rejection, I felt like Tulathimutte was speaking beyond me, all the way to that shadowy tribunal, ensuring that even in his depictions of men’s worst thoughts and actions he could still get seen as a good boy. This results less in a communion with the reader than an elaborate edifice of self-defense — the book swells into a bristling fortress against the critiques he so obviously fears.

The ending of Rejection is already well-known: the final entry is a publisher’s rejection of Rejection. I’ve seen some seal-clapping for the temerity of this bit, and though it’s cute and clever in parts, it mostly made me shrivel. It felt like watching a guy beat himself up to prove he agrees with his bully’s assessment of his failings, but also that he knows exactly how his bully would beat him up, if his bully ever got the chance. Instead of calling out the actual game he has to play, or refusing to play it — which might have meant Rejection actually being rejected — Tulathimutte calls out himself, thereby only indirectly calling out the game while still positioning himself as, well, The Feminist. In short, I found this closing tragic, though probably necessary. To watch an author of his caliber put himself through such a nervous act of intellectual and artistic contortionism just to get his book on the shelves and to keep himself in the right company felt like a kind of death knell. I wished he could just, as it were, tell it straight.

If I sound hard on Tulathimutte, it’s because I’m saddened to the point of hatred by authors who disappoint me far more than those from whom I expect nothing. Looking at how he wrote “The Feminist” can serve as a microcosm of the larger letdown. When I first read “The Feminist” in n+1, back in 2019, I felt a current crackle all the way through me, not at what I was reading so much as the shadow story I could have been reading, the vastly better, more confident work that I wish the culture would allow him the guts to write.

The problem: Craig, the titular feminist, is a primo loser, a guy who thinks that loving women the right way is enough to get him laid. I love women! he announces. Let’s drop trou and marry. He loves them as he thinks they want to be loved, or at least treats them the way he thinks they want to be treated, based on all the cues he’s osmotically taken in from the culture. His brain is a blender of SJW self-awareness that leaves him only with a confused slop of neurons and his unrelieved solitude. At times, he feels like a Looney Tunes character repeatedly slamming himself in the nuts with a ball peen hammer. The story amounts less to a deep dive into the mind of an incipient murderer (spoiler) than a sneering dissection of a clown. You get the barely relenting and oppressive sense that Tulathimutte knows this guy is a dork, that he makes no points worth considering and his suffering is all his fault (though Tulathimutte did have to run to Twitter when the n+1 version came out to announce to fretful readers that feminism does, in fact, rule, and Craig is a dolt).

And yet. Through the dense carnivalesque satire I could see winces of true sympathy for Craig’s plight, the abyssal depth of his loserdom. Tulathimutte is excellent on the corrosions of solitude: “In each second is the slow fizz of cell death, telomeres shedding their base pairs two by two like an ignited fuse.” And on rare occasions we do get a remark like this: “He keeps silent as another female friend says, ‘Men are dogshit.’ And sure, fair, he understands they mean the patriarchy and not him specifically — but why’d she say that with him standing right there, unless he didn’t count as a man to them?” Here and there throughout the story I wondered if maybe Tulathimutte was vortexing slowly towards revelations that his readers might find hard to see — if maybe his work would turn out the right kind of slap. A rogue wave that spares no one.

But of course it doesn’t. After posting a heavy-handedly hideous screed on an incel forum castigating the “giggling yeastbuckets” of women for the Hell they have made of his life, Craig decides to head to a restaurant and kill a bunch of the hags. The targets of his butchery go unnamed, but we know whose blood will smack the walls.

I count this ending as perhaps the worst story swerve I’ve read in years, a downer capitulation that functions as a kind of erasure. The story was at times almost different, actually daring; then it turned into just more of the same. I felt robbed. How’s this for totalizing narcissism: Tulathimutte wasn’t speaking to me at all. He became a butler. We got brief glimpses of: “Here’s a man.” Then it was back to: “Get a load of this guy.”

That final curve into carnage renders Craig’s previous desolation even more ludicrous and, even worse, dismissible. It’s an ending that offers the reader an escape hatch out of any sympathy or critique. Craig’s bilious history, the vast convergence of forces that led to where he stood, alone — it’s all gone. His crime is a punchline; his life was the joke. A suicide would have to be taken seriously. A woman-killer always sucked.

The truth is that in real life, this guy wouldn’t shoot up a bougie restaurant. It’s a species of sick comfort to think so. No — he would softly wrist-slit in a warm bath, maybe pop pills and perma-nap, or Jackson Pollock the ceiling of his sad sack apartment with the scorched mist of his brains.

Or, maybe, he would become a writer.

Django Ellenhorn is an Associate Editor at The Metropolitan Review. He is also a Fellow at The Writers’ Institute and a graduate of the University of Florida’s fiction MFA program.

For the curious:

She kept to a strict schedule, early to bed, early to rise. Not out like others, hunting love.
Late one Saturday night in her trailer court after she had been asleep in her bed for several hours she was awakened by a truck outside her window playing a love song. She picked up her head and as soon as she heard the harmony, that aching sweet pain hit her and she clutched her own mouth and cried out.
In the day, she told him she didn’t forgive him for anything — for leaving her in this world without him. Oh sure, she said, when he talked back to her. You had your reasons. So I’ve heard.
Skinner, she said, I’m eating well. And look at this: you see this sun? This heat? Here I am. I look out over the factory roof and see the Superstition Mountains. Aren’t I doing well? Look in my pocket: you see that? It’s cash. I’m piss-poor, get paid like shit out here. Your money’s keeping me in steak for now. When it runs out, it’ll be rice and beans from then on. But aren’t I happy, Skinner? Don’t I look good?