As always, an incredibly lucid and incisive read! I am quite sympathetic to the “man up” position, basically, “write something good enough and we’re ready to give it a shot,” which I think is now the dominant institutional position, and which you imply, to a degree: Write worthy work, boys; stop complaining and start doing. Your reference to Soviet and other expats is great; perfect conditions are no requirement of producing literature, quite the opposite. On the one hand, you have the PEN fiction longlist just announced that I don’t believe had any white men on it (although I did not meticulously look), suggesting these trends are still quite fearsome. On the other hand there are writers like Bud Smith who have an almost token blue collar slot regularly appearing in the Paris review, and then you have writers like Ben Lerner who is really not that old that never went anywhere but who are not in the topic much because they are a certain type, I guess, a sort of neutered man. And I think one of the most pernicious developments has been the slotting of “good boys” and “bad boys” as the only two horizons of the male writer; as if you have to either be perfectly behaved to the professional managerial class or you’re a dissident outsider; everyone becomes a caricature of themselves, psychologically repressed, in this unfreeing binary. I think we will see more high profile white male writers the next few years, this is how the system works, it identifies these gaps and closes these gaps, the Invisible Hand of Representation; there is a literal market opportunity to respond to all this Discourse with a Bold Male Book. But I do think something sharp from Savage which you underplayed here is the “lost” in “lost generation,” the sense that these millennial male writers are already, rather permanently, defeated, that they have internalized the defeat, that these failed careers have had psychological and artistic impacts that will probably not be undone, and that there is no turning the ship around for that generation. I am sympathetic to that position, as a description of reality. It’s a structural description and that is how generations tend to work; many have been lost before or lost again. And already Gen Z is here so, in the most painful honesty, we do not need the millennials to say anything at all. The larger question anyway may be the failure of the millennial generation as a whole, all genders included, to produce great literature equal to previous generations. Easy answers (the self-consciousness born of the internet age!) are probably wrong and we may not see it clearly for many decades.
Thank you for these valuable thoughts! I could spend another week replying … I guess one thing I wonder about is whether—jumping reluctantly on the MFA-dissing bandwagon—the writing departments have created a widespread expectation that a career as a writer is really on offer when realistically, even in the boom years, it is not. Only a very few people statistically have ever made a living being a writer of literary fiction or made an enduring mark as literary writers on the culture. In the midcentury years, if you didn’t find a mainstream audience there was not general access to a department position to pay the rent. It was sink or swim. It’s just that men were more visible among those few who made it so apparently that was a different kind of damage. For me the lists of who is in the Paris Review or on the prize longlists is one sort of indicator but not that salient. These top-level markers are always going to be lagging and formulaic, unless you have really visionary people making those decisions, which we’ve sort of moved away from, and it’s hard now with such a huge field of competitors for really individual new talent to make it through the thicket to the narrow band of widely visible spots. And I think Caleb Claudel is right that these plaudits have a pretty limited impact on sales though they do open doors. I also just don’t have such a consciousness of generations. There are writers I really appreciate, how old are they exactly? Most of the ones I appreciate most aren’t that famous or financially successful. As Ann Trubek has said (a quote I didn’t manage to work in! https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/men-substack-novels?publication_id=19052&post_id=165009835&isFreemail=false&r=22y&triedRedirect=true), if you want to write artistically important work, don’t expect to publish commercially. I know some pretty widely admired writers in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who think that the current reading climate has rendered them all but invisible. I think we share a very tough moment for culture which is translating into a very tough moment for our humanity, for everyone. What’s going to make a difference, so far as I can tell, is cultivating smaller communities of readers and ways to reach them.
Another thought. Apparently white cisgender heterosexual men born between 1981 and 1996 are about 6 percent of the adult US population. If there were fifty successful novels in a given year, however defined, and three of them were written by people in this cohort, would that feel like fair representation to them? It takes a lot to adjust to such a big shift in one's relative social firepower, no doubt.
Also a great point about well, sometimes representation feels lacking when in fact it is statistical; in this case I’m not sure about these specific numbers—aren’t 55% of millennials white non-Hispanic; so then what, 28% are white men, to get down to 6% being straight white men seems incorrect. And no you wouldn’t “want” a perfectly balanced and formulaic representation, that would be a hackneyed DEI approach to the arts, terribly reductive. Sadly there seems to be “no way out” of “balancing” as a primary concern of representation in multiculturalism, and you have tokenization happening for white men (“let’s throw a white man into the mix”) it’s really not ideal because it foregrounds the superficial, the optics. Probably if there was more exciting literature happening there would be no need to concern ourselves with such things anyway, because the work would so dominate the conversation. But the next step after autofiction has not yet been identified, so we are in a discursive lull.
I’m not a numbers person (🫤) but what I was trying to get at was the proportion of the total adult population that is white cisgender heterosexual male millennials. Maybe I got it wrong! Also just thinking that if we ever arrived at a society where prejudice was not playing a part, everyone had opportunity and education and so on, you might expect people to be published more or less equally across the demographics, which puts this group in a pretty small minority. I’m pretty sympathetic that that’s a big cultural change to experience in a short time.
Ah, I misread, it may be that straight white millennial men are 6% of the US population; I was trying to say that straight white men are more than 6% of millennials, both may be true. But again with these much lauded statistics that the New Yorker has never published a story by a straight white millennial man, the anecdotal moments like the Joyce comment which you catalogued, I am not convinced that it is just a shift in numbers. But you probably don't either since you call it a "cultural change" not just a "demographic change." The backdrop of the Great Awokening is impossible to ignore; I am not sure anyone sees these changes as byproducts or coincidences, but rather, regardless of their valence, quite driven by human choices. At the end of the day, when all is stripped away, the great Bureaucracy of Books is run by women, and especially, white women.
Equal publication across demographics in a society with no prejudice and equal opportunity and education is a nice vision but I am not sure what evidence it might be based, stemming from an almost theological universalism. It's not the original conversation and not always one that is prudent to tackle (a sensitive, and unsightly, discussion!), but, if you look at SAT scores, or LSAT scores, or MCAT scores, or marathon finishes, there are rather robust variations in distribution across populations, and these are fairly consistent even with various controls, including the loose control across time of throwing vast fortunes at the achievement gap. Is novel writing, among all the pursuits and measurements just mentioned, possibly the one with the most egalitarian potential, the most equal distribution? That is plausible; speech is ready at hand. But I can't agree categorically with any claim that any skill is distributed equally across the earth's populations; that is not really suggested by genetics. Then again I am not sure the "Lit Bros" are not asking for "an outsized share of the pie equal to our big outsized male genius" and more just "is it true what Oates said that editors won't even look at our manuscripts?"
And yes you two a nice line of grappling with what may be true while also not folding in on core principles!
Agreed with all of this! The generationalism can be reductive although you get moments like modernism and minimalism that so feel very historically inflected. Autofiction was our century’s moment thus far and truth be told if you had to give it to a generation it was Gen X. There was a moment when there did seem to be a largesse of sinecures for writers thanks to the writing program expansion; it did seem to be a viable if very exclusive career around the heyday of the Boomers. But yes bringing the conversation back to the shared precarity of writing and to the shared future of fighting for the survival of the book, is a very good thing.
Brilliant framing of how earning an audience differs from expecting one. The contrast between Israel's definition of swagger as 'influnece with integrity' versus the grievance-focused approach really clarifies where productive literary conversation needs to go. I've noticed in publishing circles that the writers building real readerships are the ones doing exactly what's described here, connecting new work to tradition rather than just demanidng visibility.
Thank you so much! Of course I’m sympathetic with writers’ desire to stay out of the fray. I just think if you are taking that path now you are choosing a harder way. And we desperately need measures to create and delight new readers. This is the urgent need that I just don’t see much of the establishment paying attention to. I wish we could see a concerted national effort to buoy up institutions that support reading and culture locally. What we are getting is quite the opposite. More visibility for books and writing would mean more opportunity for developing careers outside the fad of the week. Booksellers are really on the front lines.
Really liked this. I need to re-read it. A lot here, in a good way.
Thank you so much! I wrestled with it… a lot to assimilate.
Keep writing, Ann. We need your research and your thinking.
So good to have your encouragement, dear reader!
As always, an incredibly lucid and incisive read! I am quite sympathetic to the “man up” position, basically, “write something good enough and we’re ready to give it a shot,” which I think is now the dominant institutional position, and which you imply, to a degree: Write worthy work, boys; stop complaining and start doing. Your reference to Soviet and other expats is great; perfect conditions are no requirement of producing literature, quite the opposite. On the one hand, you have the PEN fiction longlist just announced that I don’t believe had any white men on it (although I did not meticulously look), suggesting these trends are still quite fearsome. On the other hand there are writers like Bud Smith who have an almost token blue collar slot regularly appearing in the Paris review, and then you have writers like Ben Lerner who is really not that old that never went anywhere but who are not in the topic much because they are a certain type, I guess, a sort of neutered man. And I think one of the most pernicious developments has been the slotting of “good boys” and “bad boys” as the only two horizons of the male writer; as if you have to either be perfectly behaved to the professional managerial class or you’re a dissident outsider; everyone becomes a caricature of themselves, psychologically repressed, in this unfreeing binary. I think we will see more high profile white male writers the next few years, this is how the system works, it identifies these gaps and closes these gaps, the Invisible Hand of Representation; there is a literal market opportunity to respond to all this Discourse with a Bold Male Book. But I do think something sharp from Savage which you underplayed here is the “lost” in “lost generation,” the sense that these millennial male writers are already, rather permanently, defeated, that they have internalized the defeat, that these failed careers have had psychological and artistic impacts that will probably not be undone, and that there is no turning the ship around for that generation. I am sympathetic to that position, as a description of reality. It’s a structural description and that is how generations tend to work; many have been lost before or lost again. And already Gen Z is here so, in the most painful honesty, we do not need the millennials to say anything at all. The larger question anyway may be the failure of the millennial generation as a whole, all genders included, to produce great literature equal to previous generations. Easy answers (the self-consciousness born of the internet age!) are probably wrong and we may not see it clearly for many decades.
Anyway great read!
Thank you for these valuable thoughts! I could spend another week replying … I guess one thing I wonder about is whether—jumping reluctantly on the MFA-dissing bandwagon—the writing departments have created a widespread expectation that a career as a writer is really on offer when realistically, even in the boom years, it is not. Only a very few people statistically have ever made a living being a writer of literary fiction or made an enduring mark as literary writers on the culture. In the midcentury years, if you didn’t find a mainstream audience there was not general access to a department position to pay the rent. It was sink or swim. It’s just that men were more visible among those few who made it so apparently that was a different kind of damage. For me the lists of who is in the Paris Review or on the prize longlists is one sort of indicator but not that salient. These top-level markers are always going to be lagging and formulaic, unless you have really visionary people making those decisions, which we’ve sort of moved away from, and it’s hard now with such a huge field of competitors for really individual new talent to make it through the thicket to the narrow band of widely visible spots. And I think Caleb Claudel is right that these plaudits have a pretty limited impact on sales though they do open doors. I also just don’t have such a consciousness of generations. There are writers I really appreciate, how old are they exactly? Most of the ones I appreciate most aren’t that famous or financially successful. As Ann Trubek has said (a quote I didn’t manage to work in! https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/men-substack-novels?publication_id=19052&post_id=165009835&isFreemail=false&r=22y&triedRedirect=true), if you want to write artistically important work, don’t expect to publish commercially. I know some pretty widely admired writers in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who think that the current reading climate has rendered them all but invisible. I think we share a very tough moment for culture which is translating into a very tough moment for our humanity, for everyone. What’s going to make a difference, so far as I can tell, is cultivating smaller communities of readers and ways to reach them.
Another thought. Apparently white cisgender heterosexual men born between 1981 and 1996 are about 6 percent of the adult US population. If there were fifty successful novels in a given year, however defined, and three of them were written by people in this cohort, would that feel like fair representation to them? It takes a lot to adjust to such a big shift in one's relative social firepower, no doubt.
Also a great point about well, sometimes representation feels lacking when in fact it is statistical; in this case I’m not sure about these specific numbers—aren’t 55% of millennials white non-Hispanic; so then what, 28% are white men, to get down to 6% being straight white men seems incorrect. And no you wouldn’t “want” a perfectly balanced and formulaic representation, that would be a hackneyed DEI approach to the arts, terribly reductive. Sadly there seems to be “no way out” of “balancing” as a primary concern of representation in multiculturalism, and you have tokenization happening for white men (“let’s throw a white man into the mix”) it’s really not ideal because it foregrounds the superficial, the optics. Probably if there was more exciting literature happening there would be no need to concern ourselves with such things anyway, because the work would so dominate the conversation. But the next step after autofiction has not yet been identified, so we are in a discursive lull.
I’m not a numbers person (🫤) but what I was trying to get at was the proportion of the total adult population that is white cisgender heterosexual male millennials. Maybe I got it wrong! Also just thinking that if we ever arrived at a society where prejudice was not playing a part, everyone had opportunity and education and so on, you might expect people to be published more or less equally across the demographics, which puts this group in a pretty small minority. I’m pretty sympathetic that that’s a big cultural change to experience in a short time.
Ah, I misread, it may be that straight white millennial men are 6% of the US population; I was trying to say that straight white men are more than 6% of millennials, both may be true. But again with these much lauded statistics that the New Yorker has never published a story by a straight white millennial man, the anecdotal moments like the Joyce comment which you catalogued, I am not convinced that it is just a shift in numbers. But you probably don't either since you call it a "cultural change" not just a "demographic change." The backdrop of the Great Awokening is impossible to ignore; I am not sure anyone sees these changes as byproducts or coincidences, but rather, regardless of their valence, quite driven by human choices. At the end of the day, when all is stripped away, the great Bureaucracy of Books is run by women, and especially, white women.
Equal publication across demographics in a society with no prejudice and equal opportunity and education is a nice vision but I am not sure what evidence it might be based, stemming from an almost theological universalism. It's not the original conversation and not always one that is prudent to tackle (a sensitive, and unsightly, discussion!), but, if you look at SAT scores, or LSAT scores, or MCAT scores, or marathon finishes, there are rather robust variations in distribution across populations, and these are fairly consistent even with various controls, including the loose control across time of throwing vast fortunes at the achievement gap. Is novel writing, among all the pursuits and measurements just mentioned, possibly the one with the most egalitarian potential, the most equal distribution? That is plausible; speech is ready at hand. But I can't agree categorically with any claim that any skill is distributed equally across the earth's populations; that is not really suggested by genetics. Then again I am not sure the "Lit Bros" are not asking for "an outsized share of the pie equal to our big outsized male genius" and more just "is it true what Oates said that editors won't even look at our manuscripts?"
And yes you two a nice line of grappling with what may be true while also not folding in on core principles!
Agreed with all of this! The generationalism can be reductive although you get moments like modernism and minimalism that so feel very historically inflected. Autofiction was our century’s moment thus far and truth be told if you had to give it to a generation it was Gen X. There was a moment when there did seem to be a largesse of sinecures for writers thanks to the writing program expansion; it did seem to be a viable if very exclusive career around the heyday of the Boomers. But yes bringing the conversation back to the shared precarity of writing and to the shared future of fighting for the survival of the book, is a very good thing.
So appreciate your reading and thinking about and sharing your thoughts!
Brilliant framing of how earning an audience differs from expecting one. The contrast between Israel's definition of swagger as 'influnece with integrity' versus the grievance-focused approach really clarifies where productive literary conversation needs to go. I've noticed in publishing circles that the writers building real readerships are the ones doing exactly what's described here, connecting new work to tradition rather than just demanidng visibility.
Thank you so much! Of course I’m sympathetic with writers’ desire to stay out of the fray. I just think if you are taking that path now you are choosing a harder way. And we desperately need measures to create and delight new readers. This is the urgent need that I just don’t see much of the establishment paying attention to. I wish we could see a concerted national effort to buoy up institutions that support reading and culture locally. What we are getting is quite the opposite. More visibility for books and writing would mean more opportunity for developing careers outside the fad of the week. Booksellers are really on the front lines.
Seen “swagger” used repeatedly today to describe Washington Post reporting. Interesting!