Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?
Daniel Manus Pinkwater, one of the two or three last great male writers alive, is putting his new novel, The Yggyssey, online, one chapter each week. He is up to chapter four! Mr. Pinkwater, like so many men after him, attended Bard College (most probably concurrently with former feminist pioneer and current outcast Phyllis Chesler, as she is a year older than he), but some decades before Bard and Bennington and that sort of school became factories for today’s malformed, self-centered boy-writers.
The male writers we find on the pay-for-placement bookstore tables today could be the unhappy real-world future of Mr. Pinkwater’s narrator, Yggdrasil Birnbaum, who attends, near the corner of Sunset and Vine, the Harmonious Reality School, founded by a doctor of fruitopathy (it is what you would think), and where “the teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.”
It all sounds rather like a barely disguised parody of Deep Springs.
These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition. At night they plot. “He knew about every little magazine that ever was,” the late New York Times editorial board member Mary Cantwell wrote in her memoir Manhattan, When I Was Young, of the boy-writer she married in the 1950s.
A little penis, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing. But it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying. (Norman Mailer, sad to say, belongs to 1968, and that was so long ago already.)
Ursula Le Guin, who’s been tirelessly writing about war and conflict for the last 40 years in a way that no one has before or since, just published the big and lovely Lavinia, in which she picks up the history of the Latins where Virgil couldn’t be bothered to tread.
Renata Adler is now nearly finished with a new novel. (Almost! “Except for superstition,” Ms. Adler wrote in an e-mail last week.)
Katherine Dunn has still not turned in her long-awaited fourth novel—her most recent, Geek Love, is nearly 20 years old. And yet here she is. Her agent, Richard Pine, told me recently: “She’s going to have a book out next year—a collection of her boxing columns.”
Janet Malcolm’s latest, on Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein, was slight and so modest, and also perfectly formed, a biography like the shell of a nautilus being laser-sheared open.
Sharon Olds, the strongest poet of our time—although, really, Erykah Badu is coming up on her, no?—has not had a new book in four years. (Perhaps she is waiting out the Bush regime.) But she will.
Do we need to even discuss Joan Didion? Particularly when no boy today can even surpass Edna O’Brien, the inventress of chick lit now nearing 80, who was always just way more groovy and readable than J. D. Salinger.
It’s no wonder that a fella can’t figger out what to do, with these Durgas and Rheas crashing around, rearranging seaboards and raising mountains.
FOUR YEARS AGO now, this newspaper expressed its discontent at the scruffy, feelings-talking boys that had begun to plague our city, and presumably other urban zones. (It also ends with what has since become a punch line: “With additional reporting by Jessica Joffe.”) But since then, men’s underwear has only become more sculpted, more package-enhancing; men’s thoughts have become smaller and more interior; and so their books have become more miserable, more antisocial.
“When did men get all the baggage?” one interview subject wondered back in 2004. Another suggested that they were just Frenchmen manqué. Which is why they want books. Bernard-Henri Lévy has books!
It’s rare that siblings have books published at the same time, but Masha and Keith Gessen both put something out this spring. Ms. Gessen is a longtime nonfiction writer who careens from newspaper hackery (that is praise) to reported family memoir to science writing; Mr. Gessen is an editor of n+1. His first novel, All The Sad Young Literary Men, resulted in a profile in the Styles section of The New York Times in which he should never have participated; it begins with him playing football with bond traders in the park and ends with his declaration of earnestness.
“To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little; but to be young—to be young was divine,” wrote Mr. Gessen early in his book, a sentence that reads like a rejected blurb to Cantwell’s 1995 memoir. Next Page >
Nelson & Trafalgar
Derek George Montague Gardner (1914–2007) was one of the finest British marine painters of the 20th century, and his work continues to fascinate collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. He fought as an officer in the Royal Navy in World War II and, in 1942, was mentioned in dispatches for his distinguished service.
Read More »On Painting
Gerhard Richter's Claudius is one of the largest and most overwhelming of his colourful Abstract Paintings. Dating from 1986, this picture towers over the viewer at a height of over ten feet, absorbing us, swallowing us into a vast and turbulent universe of colour.
Read More »Marilyn Revisited
By the end of the 1970s, Andy Warhol was everywhere.He was endemic, up there with Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola. His silkscreen aesthetic was instantly recognisable - the Warhol look had been used on album covers, in ads and on the cover of Time magazine. Read More »
why can;t they write no mo? because the WOMEN have New York nailed down. Paging Sloane Crosley! No more shoes, girls and boys, it's real observation abut NYC! Meanwhile, let poor Keith play his footy ball and pretend to be deep.
The real question is: Why can't writers for the Observer write anymore? Remember when the gig used to be a platform for big ideas, and a stepping stone to better jobs, instead of a glorified welfare for bitter, burnt-out ex-Gawker editors circling the drain?
Ditto--this piece is atrocious, possibly the worst thing the paper has published in years. Peter Kaplan: what happened?
I'm hoping that this was a gimmick that didn't work as opposed to a serious piece because - hoo boy - that was some REALLY bad writing, Choire. What happened?
You hit the nail on the head with Christopher Hitchens. Too bad you didn't hit him on the head. He's an example of someone who was blessed with the right friends to make something of his talentlessness.
don't fear the haters, choire. well done as per your usual.
As an old who knows some young ones who moved to NY I am saddened by this column. It lacks any humanity.
Methinks you need to retake Engl. 101--you know--transitions, etc.
maybe it's supposed to be performative...what with men not being able to write and all.
This article is moronic. It is mean and unfair and borderline stupid. Almost every sentence of it can be blown away with a minor bit of thought.
First of all, it's rdiculous to compare writers with one or two books, writers at the start of their careers, to people in the prime or at the end of their careers. Why not throw Alice Munro or Amy Hempel in the list, too. How do those thirty year olds stack up now!
Second, it's totally a straw argument. It's unfare to both male and female genders. But If you want to complain about male writers and how they stack up compared to great female writers, if you at least want to pretend to be honest, how about you deal with a generation that includes Edward P Jones (pulitzer), Jonathan Franzen (NBA), WIlliam Vollmann (NBA), and DFW (genius grant)? That's a pretty good lot. I'd say there's some pretty strong writers there.
But hey, that would make sense. Instead, let's look at the generation of writers you are bitching about. The generation you say has been outdone by a fraudulent cult author whose major talent was nothing more than generating publicity for herself.
One of that generation, Junot Diaz, just won the friggin Pulitzer Prize. Joshua Ferris was a finalist for a National Book Award (and moreover wrote a book that's been universally praised, universallly that is by everyone except the idiot who wrote this article). Eggers has been a cultural touchstone, rightly so, because of that memoir, and the only person who didn't like What Is The What is Lee (Batshit Insane) Siegel. As far as Foer goes, like him or hate him, the guy's creative as hell, and is definitely one to watch. Alexander Hemon won a genius grant. Those are just some of the big male writers under 40 working right now.
Also, whoever wrote this shitfest of an essay obviously also hasn't read Beautiful Children. There's no reason it's lumped in with some of those other books, other than the fact that it got publicity, and the author's a guy. It's not a navel-gazing novel, though. It's anything but. And while Janet Maslin didn't like it, Ruth Franklin -- in that pushover rag The New Republic -- along with Leissl Schillinger (cover of the NYT book review) and the John Burnett (Washington Post) all said that it was an important book and the writer of it was the real deal.
Hmm. Maybe the real problem that needs to be discussed, Choire, is that some people who cover literature and claim to care about literature, in fact, have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
Just to add to the previous email — this generation of male novelists also has Colson Whitehead and David Mitchell. In the previous gen you should add Denis Johnson and George Saunders.
This is a very interesting topic. I've never even heard of the female writers you mentioned, except for Joan Didion, and I still didn't know what she did. The male writers I knew, but I didn't chalk their failures up to their genders. I lay the blame to artistic inbreeding and a need for new issues to analyze. We've abandoned examining the connection between creed and life; for many writers God is passe, if not dead. One doesn't need to be an evangelist to appreciate the intersection of literature and faith. Remember Melville? Remember the Victorians? Remember Defoe and Charlotte Bronte? Art thrives on conflict, but conflict needs a clash of ideas. So before you go throwing around the gender card, take a moment to consider how being largely rich and liberal may have made these men sound alike. [Note: I refer to social liberalism, not politics.]
Also, men have baggage out of a weakness of their role. It has been commented that in the past men had the money and women had their bodies; well, today both men and women make money, and only women have their bodies. There is an inequity of sex on that score. Women tend to be set for older men until the age of 24 or 25 when men have jobs and prospects of their own. And add to all of this that women look for a stable man(job security) with a wild streak(entertainment) and enough sensitivity to be compelling without losing masculinity. The wildness and stability are contradictory, although the sensitivity and masculinity are more easily balanced. Women don't look for a bad man so much as one with confidence; the trope about women wanting bad men is more a result of forgetting about the confident good men that get women.
As always, either gender will say that the other doesn't play as fair. As a man I really do believe that men are expected to put up with women wanting things both ways and keeping "security blanket" men until they get a line on a better one. But I am conscious that women have probably as many complaints about men as men do about women; and men don't have to deal with rape.
Finally, you were asking why men have baggage. We have baggage because of the hubris of past men; the chivalry system set up to protect women and cement men's dominance in a hegemonic role has now come back to bite us. It is not that women do not still deserve physical protection, but socially they must be made to stand on their own two feet, and double standards as far as romantic behavior must be rejected. Men have baggage because our forefathers screwed us over.
Maybe the 1985 Robinson article couldn't be found because you spelled her name wrong: it's Marilynne Robinson.
This is one of the worst, most disjointed articles I've read in some time. What is Choire even talking about? I take offense at this as a male. It's belittling and without merit or substance.
Mr. Sicha is apparently in thrall to the spirit of Nathanael West. West presented the world of freakish journalism (Miss Lonelyhearts), as well as the all-consuming worship of celebrity (Day Of The Locust) that ultimately destroys. Unfortunately, while an earlier day's journalist could see the difference between the real importance of literary accomplishment, as opposed to writers as culty celebrity figures, Sicha conflates the two areas, with the result that a writer, not the work, becomes the commodity.
(As for his considerations of gender among modern and pomo scribes, he starts out strong, using proper female touchstones Adler, Malcolm, Didion, etc., though to weak effect, as his argument ultimately peters out (pun intended) with J.T. Leroy. This after he has even dragged Salinger in as a straw man. Presumably he sucks because he got all manny with female writer Joyce Maynard when she was THE chick in lit? (How about a little explanation of motivation Mr. Sicha?)
And although I think it unfair to criticize him for his gossip column roots, it is fair to point out how he gauges literary importance according to an elemental urge (a substitute for fucking), a sort of lit libido, rather than based on a considered act of creation and the commerce that ensues.
In short, this piece by Mr. Sicha misses the mark as the writer never realizes the simple fact that "It ain't the meat, it's the motion."
I think it's because we've credentialized writing to such an insane degree that Iowa is now the Hollywood of literature, with similarly depressing results. Just as you can't learn to be a reporter by going to something called "journalism school," you can't learn to be a novelist by sucking at the teat of Joyce Carol Oates. Reporting, and novelizing, require a combination of teeth-clenched courage and spastic determination that schools are specifically designed to groom out of us. It turns out that hormone-pumped, antiobiotic-filled laboratory literature they produce is just as nasty and bad for us as tainted beef or dairy.
Go on with your bad self, Choire, you're refreshingly unjournalistic.
To the extent that there is an idea here, Sicha seems to have confused the characters in Mr. Kunkel's and Mr. Gessen's novels with the authors. Both authors have noticed the same phenomena that Sicha is struggling to identify in this piece, and their books take aim at it.
I am feeling like a lot of hostile male respondents are feeling challenged and pissed off by this, Choire. Get used to it fellas! Women have had to deal with gender stereotypes ala Bitchface Hitchens and so it kind of just rolls off after time. If you simply disagree and this outpouring is not based upon feeling so threatened, why bother with the personal attacks? It's lame.
Also, not even bothering to make up a cute moniker and attacking as "anonymous" is also very lame.
What the hell are you talking about? I thought everyone knew that Daniel Pinkwater is a pseudonym I use.
Or refreshingly uninformed, depending on your level of insight.
Ah. Daniel Pinkwater, Katherine Dunn, and Marilynne Robinson. A man after my own heart. Have you been peaking at my "Fave Authors" shelf?
While I appreciate the general argument ("what's up with all the wussy literature coming from men nowadays" - even though I do enjoy a few of those wussy authors), I do think it a bit unfair to pick the softest of the boyish authors of the last decade or so with the female literary greats of the last 30+.
What of Charles Bukowski? T. C. Boyle? Michael Chabon? Chuck Pahluniak? And, as others have mentioned: Johnathan Franzen, William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson? There's some freaking awesome stuff coming from the menfolk. And a lot of dreck coming from a lot of women.
For me, these omissions weakened the piece a bit, but it was still very fun to read this, and the aftermath. I love a bit of drama and backstabbing :)