"This leads to a lot of pretty good books by women, but fewer great ones"
It's intriguing how often this pattern plays out: Men at the extreme ends of success and failure, with a higher proportion of woman in the middle of the curve. Men lead armies far more often than women, but get slaughtered at a higher rate. Men create world-shifting startups and sit on Fortune 500 boards at higher rates than women, but are also more likely to end up addicted to who knows what while living in a sidewalk tent.
How much is the absence of men in literature due to female takeover versus men just dropping out in favor of newer forms of entertainment like video games, social media, etc.?
How much indeed? Are any new readers being minted? Are we readers like Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders. Aging out and dying while no entry level riders are consuming the company's product even in small amounts. YA fiction is still being published but I have my doubts that any young adults are reading the stuff.
Funny, I’ve been wondering that myself lately. When I was young, my father turned me on to classic fiction, i.e. English and Russian lit, Hemingway, Kafka, etc. Reading about all those books, you got the sense that you were joining this big world of ideas and personalities.
Now I look around and wonder if anyone else reads any of it anymore. Doesn’t seem like it. Maybe it is a gender thing. None of the women I’ve known who were into books cared much about classics, they were more into Oprah books of the month, Devil Wears Prada, etc. Stuff that’s already forgotten.
Maybe Greatest of All Time lists aren’t the only male thing here. The people who get curious about a book because it’s part of a literary canon mostly seem to be men as well.
I remember the apotheosis of this TV-led book revival as the curious decision by the high school to have all the kids incoming to 9th grade, be asked to read the same book so as to have something to discuss, right away, in class. Maybe this was related to Mayor's Book Club type stuff that was then in the air. The Mayor's Book Club choice was always something about a magical abuela. But that was to be expected.
The choice of Oprah-stamped book "The Secret Life of Bees" for all the kids, male and female, to read before showing up for the first day of school - was pretty crazy, and at least to me, pretty funny. It was hard for me to imagine the conversations around that, given that for many of the kids it would be the only book they read that summer (very likely the kids who didn't read it at all, in fact read other things) but they were surely pretty female-centric.
"OMG I've got it, I read a book recently and it was sooooo good."
"Great!"
It was not an isolated example, of current books that (the teachers and administrators had read/been able to read?) finding their way into the classroom; it was as if in say the 1950s they had put "Peyton Place" on the school curriculum the moment it came out.
I think they might have found a little pushback, at least on gender lines if nothing else, because the next year the book that was purchased in the hundreds, was an as-told-to story about a refugee, a guy, from Rwanda.
Gen Z reads much, much less than previous generations. When I lived in NYC I joined a writer's group. Most of the people in the group under 30 said they rarely read; "I listen to podcasts," they said. Or TikTok. Insta. Etc.
75% of my children are more or less voracious readers. They’re late teens to early twenties. The boy can hardly be bothered with fiction. He read A Farewell to Arms a few weeks ago and labeled it a chick-flick book with some decent parts. The girls read almost entirely fiction. I’ve looked through some of it and it’s mostly bilge, or worse.
I worked in a library and the readers among the librarians themselves, though grown women, mostly stuck to YA. It pretty much replaced romance novels (often now with worldbuilding!). Or maybe you'd say it replaced that dowdy Mary Higgins Clark type "woman being pursued/evil surprise doppelganger" stuff. The success of the Twilight books had a few years earlier temporarily buoyed the fortunes of the book - or at least the library book - industry, enough so that when the library embarked on a renovation, they displaced the audiobooks in their clunky covers, gave the additional shelf space to the YA they themselves devoured, and moved it to pride of place in the middle of the space.
The checkouts of YA by teenagers had by this time dried up though. Screens had triumphed over books - and maybe the reading kids did read a YA book now and then on their screens. But mostly it seemed that no new "Twilight" series came along to draw in teenage (tweenage) girls. Needless to say, no boys ever entered the YA section. I'll be charitable to the genre and say that I imagine *some* boys might have liked some of what they found there, but it was so overwhelmingly girly - or I guess we have to say 20-something-womanish - that it would have taken some social courage to do so.
The Greatest American female novelist of the 20th Century wrote about Architects, Inventors, Philosophers, Industrialists, and Lady Railroad executives. She has a lot of male fans. Wonder if he thinks she’s unappreciated?
"Atlas Shrugged" is a fine novel yet its weakness is that virtually all the characters are cardboard cut-outs of who Ayn Rand thinks are morally evil and morally depraved. John Galt, Dagney Taggert, Hank Reardon, Francisco d'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold and Ellis Wyatt are great. James Taggert, Wesley Mouch, Dr. Robert Stadler, President Thompson, Orren Boyle, Kip Chalmers, Tinky Holloway and Cuffy Meigs are evil. There's few people in between. Eddie Willers is morally sound but not a great man. The Wet Nurse learns from Hank Reardon and begins to become morally sound before he's killed. Cheryl Brooks is morally sound until corrupted by James Taggert.
And yet you remember them! Her characters aren’t “realistic,” but she rejected realism. They are memorable and interesting, though. And anyone who thinks Oren Boyle, James Taggart, and Wesley Mouch aren’t realistic never lived or worked in the Washington, D.C. area.
I’d say the biggest flaw is the frictionless way that Dagny shifts between the three alpha males vying for her attentions and their quiet acquiescence to being supplanted. I can believe a motor that works on static electricity before that. Rand’s attempt at casual polyamory in her own life was an absolute disaster.
I made it a few chapters through 'Atlas Shrugged" as a tween and gave up when it began to strike me as a very strange tractlike piece of work that is not at all like a novel. Later, I was astonished to discover it being praised to the heavens by MIT graduates. The works of greats such as Tolkein, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, Del Rey, Dysart, Blish and Herbert were much more fun and, in my view, successful as novels.
Well, she isn’t for everyone. Lots of people love her work, lots hate it. I did read Tolkien, but I have to say it was kind of a trudge. Lots of walking, and quite a few pointless digressions. My aunt gave a box set of CS Lewis to correct my incipient irreligiousness. This did not work, but I quite enjoyed the work. I was more a fan of Heinlein and Asimov and Poul Anderson. I did like Dune, but the sequels lost me.
If you're a cereal lover, Ron Dysart was the anonymous editor of The Chex Press (dating myself) and many outstanding and funny works of science fiction.
Rand has never been known for the greatness of her novels. She was first and foremost a polemicist. There has been some re-appraisal, particularly of her non-Atlas Shrugged works; but this is mostly conducted by committed Randroids, and has not penetrated wider literary circles.
Coincidentally, the latest news is that apparently many Harvard and Stanford students simply never read books at all (not even "novels," just 'books" in general).
Maybe, even aside from the gender question, reading novels is going to become the domain of a highly selected subculture of people, like going to the ballet or the opera.
(Ross Douthat thinks that movies too are going in this direction. The same lack of attention,.focus, and concentration that keeps people from reading novels, also keeps them from watching an entire feature-length movie.)
A cultural adjustment by which a revolt against "TikTokification" emerges in the coming second quarter of the 21st century. Similar in scope, maybe, to the turn against the former norm of smoking to the cultural ghettoization of smoking familiar in polite company by the early-21st century.
The arguments against Tiktokification (and audio- and video-"content" writ large) are strong. Those formats are, most of the time, inferior to information conveyed through the written word, across a range of criteria.
There are podcasts and "Youtubers" and others who could take a full hour to get around to making the same points that Steve Sailer makes in one single written-word post, like this one, that can be consumed in full in mere minutes. Content lifespan for the written word is also necessarily going to be a lot longer, on average.
But most importantly, people will (should) come to the realization that Tiktokification, as I've here called it (far from being the first to coin the term), and addiction to things like Instagram "feeds" and the like, are bad for the brain. Transfer all that time to well-produced books and the like, and you win a kind of intelelctual-psychospiritual jackpot.
Reading takes more mental energy than watching or listening. We forget that 99.9% of humanity never knew how to read, and those that did were either the super-smart (priests, engineers) or the wealthy/powerful (kings, courtiers, lawyers) because it was necessary for their jobs.
Gutenberg's printing press started the whole "reading to expand the mind" with The Bible, but the idea of "reading for pleasure" was a 19th-Century invention for the middle class as cheaper printing methods for novels and monthly literary magazines (e.g. The Atlantic is from this time period) that serialized works. So in the 19th century you could find middle class people willing to sit down and read a novel or a book of short stories.
But with every technological innovation fewer people wanted to spend the mental effort to read a whole book. Radio and movies are easier to relax to than reading for most brains. Television--the boob tube---was a further step forward in cutting down reading, as legions of books and short stories decried. The internet was another step forward, most especially tube sights like YouTube and TikTok, which are far easier to watch than reading anything longer than a few paragraphs.
So its not surprising kids's aren't reading novels anymore.
—In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.”
I said this same thing here a few weeks ago but as I am not a public figure, I was safe from being forced to attend a Struggle Session to recant the crime of speaking a politically incorrect truth. There are benefits to being a nobody!
Of course the 21st century's Children of the Permanent Revolution need and want to have a mirror in front of their faces at all times, but it must be a self-flattering mirror that erases all blemishes—esp the blemish of possibly being a punitive enforcer from the Thought Police, when all the cool kids know that's impossible, as they're way too edgy and believe in sex changes for kids and other transgressive sacraments.
Wanting to be any kind of writer in modern America is akin to wanting to be a saint in Calvin's Geneva—you must live in anxious terror of a punishing god and must always be publicly performing your devotion to him, except ours is the post-Christian Victim God, one of Jehovah's bastard grandchildren. And the most popular way to display your piety is to craft a therapeutic narrative about our new Hero's Journey, where the narrator shows her scars, catalogues her stigma, let's you know she's either a genuine sacred Victim or at least an ally, and then achieves redemption by defeating various bigots and -isms (or that Great Satan, the Patriarchy) and ascends to become her True Authentic Self™.
As this canned contrived narrative involves an enormous amount of shameless whining and an obsessive neurotic navel-gazing, all of it heavily basted in self-pity and desperate need, it's no wonder that no self-respecting male wants anything to do with it. There are times in history when all art, thought and literature go fallow and are replaced by a mountain of monotonous political and theological tracts—and this is one of those times.
David J. Morris' article in the NYT is an interesting subject with major importance and "implications" (as some like to say). But it's a poorly executed writeup.
Morris's essay here makes a splash but then muddles along and whimpers out. He is scared to actually make the points forcefully, or even coherently-defensibly. It almost resembles that terrible bane of writing in these times which we call "clickbait." For one thing, he retreats immediately from the claims he has just staked out. So the whole thig is disappointing, confused, and puzzling. The body of the text, in other words, fails to live up at all to its billing.
Morris should've put more effort into his essay here, maybe gone through a few more drafts. Admittedly, making the points "forcefully" within the New York Tines would require great finesse, skill, and courage -- and this is not it. Because it achieves something of that worst-of-all-worlds aspect you sometimes see with even well-intentioned essay writing: it leaves one asking, "What's the point?"
"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.
Mr. Morris teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas."
So to be entirely consistent in his views that male dominance in the writing field is a no-no, then he should in fact do the honorable thing and resign, or allow his job to be taken from him by a DEI--I mean, a more capable, younger female professor. After all, in the Current Year, ONLY other women can TRULY decipher, as well as interpret great literature that is written by women.
Why should MEN professors be teaching what WOMEN authors write?
Therefore Mr Morris should be given the sack immediately, and out he goes to make way for a woman professor--she's certainly going to be much more knowledgeable about what women write than he could be.
Unless of course Mr Morris becomes Ms Morris, due to reassignment surgery because H/She suddenly decides in early middle age that he/she is now a woman. Then of course that might be considered acceptable, and Ms Morris could keep her job.
Wodehouse might actually be the British author of the first rank who had the most genuine passion for modern sports like golf and cricket. His adopted daughter married a cricketer, jockey and horse-trainer to the Queen Mother.
Steve Sailer writes: "I found the Publisher’s Weekly list of top 10 bestselling novels each year from the mid-1890s onward"
The important caveat:
'Bestselling' and 'Best' are different categories.
How would the graph's percentages look different if some neutrally created Best (not Bestselling) list? I believe I've seen some Best lists that have about ratios in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in which the male:female author ratio is as high as 10:1.
Once again, why not just write a good declarative sentence rather than trying to be clever. Any list of the "Best" Novels in a year would probably be based upon a set of awards and would just result in an argument over if the novel should be considered the best.
Excerpts from the discussion on this article by the Reddit "TrueLit" people, one of the most-honest and best forums for literature discussion and not-unfriendly to males (as BookTok and many other forums would be, including Reddit's r/Books forum):
The discussion there includes criticism of the general weakness of Morris' article, including it "not saying anything new," relying on weak data and vagueness, and being overly short. A traditional strength of male writers is boldness and willingness to break taboos or consensus. But Morris, he retreats from his own points. Should we give a lot of benefit to this doubt, and interpret this seeming weakness to have been an intentional meta-point on how male writing has declined? (As Morris 'declines' to even make his own point in any kind of forceful way.)
The Reddit r/TrueLit commentariat offers a range of valuable views that make points often more interesting than Morris makes:
Reddit-commenter proustianhommage says: "[T]he fact that women dominate the book market, while said books are generally just copy-and-paste genre fiction, doesn't convince me that it's only men who are becoming less literary. It seems like even people who go for English degrees are completely uninterested in what I might call 'serious literary fiction'."
From icarusrising9: "If you 'don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction' and say that 'male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers', then why would this even matter to you? And are we really to believe that educational disparities between genders are related to young males' consumption of "video games and pornography"? Really? Hyper-sloppy opinion piece."
From Giant_Fork_Butt: "I am a man. I'm in my early 40s. [...] [M]ost women I meet think reading is weird, and most women who do read only read self-help, NYT best seller stuff, romance/erotica and Netflix novels. [...] My interest in literature and writing largely serves to alienate me from the vast majority of people, who become disinterested or hostile when I mention that I read, and what I read. It's seen as pretentious and a waste of time, and if I am reading I should be reading something 'productive' or to 'help me grow as a person' i.e. self help nonsense."
ksarlathotep: "[I]f the difference between men and women readers is largely made up by Romantasy and Colleen Hoover and faerie smut readers then idk what to tell you. I think playing Call of Duty and reading faerie porn are about equidistant from reading meaningful literature."
Smart-Locksmith3180: "The last time a small portion of men got interested in reading they were derided as 'litbros' whose sole purpose in life was to suck off DFW because they hate women or something. If you're a young man, particularly a young white man, you just have to accept that the academic establishment has decided that there is more money to be made and power to be seized in ostracizing you rather than working with you. This strategy will not pan out for them in the long term."
Kloud1112: "I feel like in the past few years there hasn't really been a big lit debut by a young white male writer. Maybe I'm wrong though. Can anybody name any?"
axolotlorange: "I’m almost middle-aged and male. And I have increasingly felt boxed-out of most fictional literary genres over the last twenty years. And the list keeps growing. I read the old favorites, classics from several genres, [...] I get the feeling of feeling abandoned by the market. But I also get that the market doesn’t exist for me. It is a peculiar feeling."
New-Energy2830: "[T]he truth is that book clubs are all women, editors are all women, and most importantly, literary agents are all women. Most of them in their 20s and 30s with a real act to grind about no more white male writers, please."
unbotheredotter: "The issue is that literary novels are overall significantly less widely read than they were in the past. They have lost more male readers than female readers, which means publishers are now looking for books that appeal to a smaller, more specific audience. This doesn’t mean that publishers need to publish books written by men to bring back more male readers [...] To reverse this trend, the literary world would need to produce more works (written by either men or women) of high quality / wide interest that would attract the attention of readers who have tuned out (both men and women) because literature seems irrelevant or unimportant to them. // Who is writing a novel today that captures how the 2020s feel to a wide range of people, not just a novel that resonates with a small niche who all have the same taste profile[?]"
michaelochurch: "The reason for the anti-male bias isn't that people in publishing all hate men. (There are a few Karens, but they're not the norm.) It's more than choice-by-committee amplifies existing biases, especially when people start having to anticipate others' biases just to be taken seriously, and so men are getting squeezed out without it being anyone's explicit intention."
LilaBackAtIt: "Working class white men were once trailblazers of literature, now [they] are considered the antichrist lol honestly it’s sad."
These TrueLit commenters touch on something that Professor Morris glosses over: a large portion of today's women's "literature" is really just pornography, and often rather aberrant pornography, e.g., with elves or aliens. Everyone would be better off if it simply weren't published.
It's as you describe but also spread via social-media "book" networks. These networks are invariably dominated by women and invariably push authors like this Colleen Hoover to the top, one of the most-successful published authors of the last decade judged on book sales.
If you're not familiar with "BookTok," spend a few minutes searching around for what people say about it and its terrible, destructive, but 'awe-some' power.
The young male readers are on places like Royal Road reading stuff like isekai, litRPG, cultivation and harem stories.
None of these stories are going to become the Greatest Novel of All Time but are way more fun than the woke drivel churned by feminized publishing houses.
I take you to mean that feminization of an institution will turn men away.
Ironically, the meek arguers you hear of late, including the good Professor Morris here, who pop up stating that "we need men in the writing world," these people usually argue from the premise of the feminized 'paradigm'. They say, in effect, and to appropriate your phrase, "Males deserve to get a turn, too." (Or other variants of feminized discourse; such as Morris' "men who read literature would treat women better").
If you want to talk about women writing influential novels, we could start with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, recalling Abraham Lincoln's remark to her about it.
Then we could mention Helen Hunt Jackson, whose A Century of Dishonor (granted, nonfiction) and novel Ramona, changed Americans' view of Amerindians and led to major changes in government policy toward them. (I think a Ramona pageant is still held every year in Hemet.)
Then we could mention Pearl Buck and Nora Waln whose novels and memoirs created intense interest in and sympathy for China in the 1930s just when that country found itself at war with Japan. It's doubtful without Buck's series of popular novels about China and Waln's memoirs of her life in China, The Street of Precious Pearls and House of Exile, that Americans would have cared much about a fight between two Oriental countries on the other side of the world.
Waln's The House of Exile especially impressed many influential people; even Adolf Hitler, when Waln met him, told her it was his favorite book. It may have influenced him favorably toward helping China in its fight against Japan in the late 1930s.
It seems to me, as I've studied President Roosevelt's plans for remaking the world with American power, that the sympathy for China these books created he found frustrating as he wanted American attention to be focused on Europe. But the American people adamantly did not want to get involved in Europe's wars again. (Of course, some would argue that Roosevelt found a way to make use of that sympathy.)
Even Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, his short stories and his play The Fifth Column, while popular (well, not the play), didn't seem to create any particular sympathy among average Americans for anti-Franco forces in Spain, let alone the general situation in Europe.
But I suppose none of this worrying about who writes novels and who writes the important ones matters. It's not only that fewer and fewer people read novels, but other things as well.
Other things like Microsoft's recent announcement that it was entering the publishing business with a plan to publish 8,000 books a year. Oh, great, you say, a wonderful opportunity for new authors.
Um, no.... The company says it's not accepting manuscripts. And guess what the name of the new publishing company is called -- 8080 Books, named for the Intel 8080 microprocessor credited with creating the microcomputer revolution.
Who wants to take a SWAG at who -- or what -- is going to be writing those 8,000 books a year.
'Cabin' is good but also a tract, as 'Atlas Shrugged' is. I've never heard of Jackson or Waln. Buck was someone they tried to make us read in high school. I couldn't stomach it.
"This leads to a lot of pretty good books by women, but fewer great ones"
It's intriguing how often this pattern plays out: Men at the extreme ends of success and failure, with a higher proportion of woman in the middle of the curve. Men lead armies far more often than women, but get slaughtered at a higher rate. Men create world-shifting startups and sit on Fortune 500 boards at higher rates than women, but are also more likely to end up addicted to who knows what while living in a sidewalk tent.
How much is the absence of men in literature due to female takeover versus men just dropping out in favor of newer forms of entertainment like video games, social media, etc.?
How much indeed? Are any new readers being minted? Are we readers like Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders. Aging out and dying while no entry level riders are consuming the company's product even in small amounts. YA fiction is still being published but I have my doubts that any young adults are reading the stuff.
Funny, I’ve been wondering that myself lately. When I was young, my father turned me on to classic fiction, i.e. English and Russian lit, Hemingway, Kafka, etc. Reading about all those books, you got the sense that you were joining this big world of ideas and personalities.
Now I look around and wonder if anyone else reads any of it anymore. Doesn’t seem like it. Maybe it is a gender thing. None of the women I’ve known who were into books cared much about classics, they were more into Oprah books of the month, Devil Wears Prada, etc. Stuff that’s already forgotten.
Maybe Greatest of All Time lists aren’t the only male thing here. The people who get curious about a book because it’s part of a literary canon mostly seem to be men as well.
I remember the apotheosis of this TV-led book revival as the curious decision by the high school to have all the kids incoming to 9th grade, be asked to read the same book so as to have something to discuss, right away, in class. Maybe this was related to Mayor's Book Club type stuff that was then in the air. The Mayor's Book Club choice was always something about a magical abuela. But that was to be expected.
The choice of Oprah-stamped book "The Secret Life of Bees" for all the kids, male and female, to read before showing up for the first day of school - was pretty crazy, and at least to me, pretty funny. It was hard for me to imagine the conversations around that, given that for many of the kids it would be the only book they read that summer (very likely the kids who didn't read it at all, in fact read other things) but they were surely pretty female-centric.
"OMG I've got it, I read a book recently and it was sooooo good."
"Great!"
It was not an isolated example, of current books that (the teachers and administrators had read/been able to read?) finding their way into the classroom; it was as if in say the 1950s they had put "Peyton Place" on the school curriculum the moment it came out.
I think they might have found a little pushback, at least on gender lines if nothing else, because the next year the book that was purchased in the hundreds, was an as-told-to story about a refugee, a guy, from Rwanda.
Gen Z reads much, much less than previous generations. When I lived in NYC I joined a writer's group. Most of the people in the group under 30 said they rarely read; "I listen to podcasts," they said. Or TikTok. Insta. Etc.
75% of my children are more or less voracious readers. They’re late teens to early twenties. The boy can hardly be bothered with fiction. He read A Farewell to Arms a few weeks ago and labeled it a chick-flick book with some decent parts. The girls read almost entirely fiction. I’ve looked through some of it and it’s mostly bilge, or worse.
I worked in a library and the readers among the librarians themselves, though grown women, mostly stuck to YA. It pretty much replaced romance novels (often now with worldbuilding!). Or maybe you'd say it replaced that dowdy Mary Higgins Clark type "woman being pursued/evil surprise doppelganger" stuff. The success of the Twilight books had a few years earlier temporarily buoyed the fortunes of the book - or at least the library book - industry, enough so that when the library embarked on a renovation, they displaced the audiobooks in their clunky covers, gave the additional shelf space to the YA they themselves devoured, and moved it to pride of place in the middle of the space.
The checkouts of YA by teenagers had by this time dried up though. Screens had triumphed over books - and maybe the reading kids did read a YA book now and then on their screens. But mostly it seemed that no new "Twilight" series came along to draw in teenage (tweenage) girls. Needless to say, no boys ever entered the YA section. I'll be charitable to the genre and say that I imagine *some* boys might have liked some of what they found there, but it was so overwhelmingly girly - or I guess we have to say 20-something-womanish - that it would have taken some social courage to do so.
Yeah, YA was the craze five years ago...less so now but still read. There's a lot of ideological capture in the genre too though.
Mine made it through: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/my-ya-novel-got-an-awesome-review
People do read YA but so much of it is captured by Woke ID politics
Not mine though: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/my-ya-novel-got-an-awesome-review
Over the years I have amused myself by trying to guess which pseudononymously male authors were in fact female. Now I try to sus out which are AI.
The Greatest American female novelist of the 20th Century wrote about Architects, Inventors, Philosophers, Industrialists, and Lady Railroad executives. She has a lot of male fans. Wonder if he thinks she’s unappreciated?
"Atlas Shrugged" is a fine novel yet its weakness is that virtually all the characters are cardboard cut-outs of who Ayn Rand thinks are morally evil and morally depraved. John Galt, Dagney Taggert, Hank Reardon, Francisco d'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold and Ellis Wyatt are great. James Taggert, Wesley Mouch, Dr. Robert Stadler, President Thompson, Orren Boyle, Kip Chalmers, Tinky Holloway and Cuffy Meigs are evil. There's few people in between. Eddie Willers is morally sound but not a great man. The Wet Nurse learns from Hank Reardon and begins to become morally sound before he's killed. Cheryl Brooks is morally sound until corrupted by James Taggert.
And yet you remember them! Her characters aren’t “realistic,” but she rejected realism. They are memorable and interesting, though. And anyone who thinks Oren Boyle, James Taggart, and Wesley Mouch aren’t realistic never lived or worked in the Washington, D.C. area.
I’d say the biggest flaw is the frictionless way that Dagny shifts between the three alpha males vying for her attentions and their quiet acquiescence to being supplanted. I can believe a motor that works on static electricity before that. Rand’s attempt at casual polyamory in her own life was an absolute disaster.
I found that amusing as well. In real life, none of the three would just acquiesce in Dagney's romantic merry-go-round.
I made it a few chapters through 'Atlas Shrugged" as a tween and gave up when it began to strike me as a very strange tractlike piece of work that is not at all like a novel. Later, I was astonished to discover it being praised to the heavens by MIT graduates. The works of greats such as Tolkein, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, Del Rey, Dysart, Blish and Herbert were much more fun and, in my view, successful as novels.
Well, she isn’t for everyone. Lots of people love her work, lots hate it. I did read Tolkien, but I have to say it was kind of a trudge. Lots of walking, and quite a few pointless digressions. My aunt gave a box set of CS Lewis to correct my incipient irreligiousness. This did not work, but I quite enjoyed the work. I was more a fan of Heinlein and Asimov and Poul Anderson. I did like Dune, but the sequels lost me.
If you're a cereal lover, Ron Dysart was the anonymous editor of The Chex Press (dating myself) and many outstanding and funny works of science fiction.
I'm not a cereal fan at all. I'm a low carb heavy on the meat and lift heavy things kind of guy.
I got about two chapters in before I had to put it down. I couldn’t handle the writing.
Rand has never been known for the greatness of her novels. She was first and foremost a polemicist. There has been some re-appraisal, particularly of her non-Atlas Shrugged works; but this is mostly conducted by committed Randroids, and has not penetrated wider literary circles.
Yeah I read her collected letters once and they were fascinating.
The testimony of a survivor of communism should always be welcome even if difficult to endure.
Maybe the problem is the wider literary circles, not her.
I loved Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves books. Have not read him in many, many years. But I still remember the prolific Rosie M. Banks!
Coincidentally, the latest news is that apparently many Harvard and Stanford students simply never read books at all (not even "novels," just 'books" in general).
Maybe, even aside from the gender question, reading novels is going to become the domain of a highly selected subculture of people, like going to the ballet or the opera.
(Ross Douthat thinks that movies too are going in this direction. The same lack of attention,.focus, and concentration that keeps people from reading novels, also keeps them from watching an entire feature-length movie.)
https://stanfordreview.org/levin-interview/
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/12/5/miller-harvard-books-course-requirements/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/oscars-movies-end.html
The alternative is:
A cultural adjustment by which a revolt against "TikTokification" emerges in the coming second quarter of the 21st century. Similar in scope, maybe, to the turn against the former norm of smoking to the cultural ghettoization of smoking familiar in polite company by the early-21st century.
The arguments against Tiktokification (and audio- and video-"content" writ large) are strong. Those formats are, most of the time, inferior to information conveyed through the written word, across a range of criteria.
There are podcasts and "Youtubers" and others who could take a full hour to get around to making the same points that Steve Sailer makes in one single written-word post, like this one, that can be consumed in full in mere minutes. Content lifespan for the written word is also necessarily going to be a lot longer, on average.
But most importantly, people will (should) come to the realization that Tiktokification, as I've here called it (far from being the first to coin the term), and addiction to things like Instagram "feeds" and the like, are bad for the brain. Transfer all that time to well-produced books and the like, and you win a kind of intelelctual-psychospiritual jackpot.
Reading takes more mental energy than watching or listening. We forget that 99.9% of humanity never knew how to read, and those that did were either the super-smart (priests, engineers) or the wealthy/powerful (kings, courtiers, lawyers) because it was necessary for their jobs.
Gutenberg's printing press started the whole "reading to expand the mind" with The Bible, but the idea of "reading for pleasure" was a 19th-Century invention for the middle class as cheaper printing methods for novels and monthly literary magazines (e.g. The Atlantic is from this time period) that serialized works. So in the 19th century you could find middle class people willing to sit down and read a novel or a book of short stories.
But with every technological innovation fewer people wanted to spend the mental effort to read a whole book. Radio and movies are easier to relax to than reading for most brains. Television--the boob tube---was a further step forward in cutting down reading, as legions of books and short stories decried. The internet was another step forward, most especially tube sights like YouTube and TikTok, which are far easier to watch than reading anything longer than a few paragraphs.
So its not surprising kids's aren't reading novels anymore.
Kudos, this is fascinating perspective. Every day is an education.
This explains a lot about Gen Z.
So, women are complaining they're not responsible for writing the books that turn people off from reading?
—In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.”
I said this same thing here a few weeks ago but as I am not a public figure, I was safe from being forced to attend a Struggle Session to recant the crime of speaking a politically incorrect truth. There are benefits to being a nobody!
Of course the 21st century's Children of the Permanent Revolution need and want to have a mirror in front of their faces at all times, but it must be a self-flattering mirror that erases all blemishes—esp the blemish of possibly being a punitive enforcer from the Thought Police, when all the cool kids know that's impossible, as they're way too edgy and believe in sex changes for kids and other transgressive sacraments.
Wanting to be any kind of writer in modern America is akin to wanting to be a saint in Calvin's Geneva—you must live in anxious terror of a punishing god and must always be publicly performing your devotion to him, except ours is the post-Christian Victim God, one of Jehovah's bastard grandchildren. And the most popular way to display your piety is to craft a therapeutic narrative about our new Hero's Journey, where the narrator shows her scars, catalogues her stigma, let's you know she's either a genuine sacred Victim or at least an ally, and then achieves redemption by defeating various bigots and -isms (or that Great Satan, the Patriarchy) and ascends to become her True Authentic Self™.
As this canned contrived narrative involves an enormous amount of shameless whining and an obsessive neurotic navel-gazing, all of it heavily basted in self-pity and desperate need, it's no wonder that no self-respecting male wants anything to do with it. There are times in history when all art, thought and literature go fallow and are replaced by a mountain of monotonous political and theological tracts—and this is one of those times.
Thanks for this; love the Calvin analogy.
thanks!
That's horrible. But it's true. I wrote about my personal agent experience with my YA novel: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/literary-agent-rejections
Wodehouse is so good. I find ghosts of his sensibility in the Flashman books funnily enough.
David J. Morris' article in the NYT is an interesting subject with major importance and "implications" (as some like to say). But it's a poorly executed writeup.
Morris's essay here makes a splash but then muddles along and whimpers out. He is scared to actually make the points forcefully, or even coherently-defensibly. It almost resembles that terrible bane of writing in these times which we call "clickbait." For one thing, he retreats immediately from the claims he has just staked out. So the whole thig is disappointing, confused, and puzzling. The body of the text, in other words, fails to live up at all to its billing.
Morris should've put more effort into his essay here, maybe gone through a few more drafts. Admittedly, making the points "forcefully" within the New York Tines would require great finesse, skill, and courage -- and this is not it. Because it achieves something of that worst-of-all-worlds aspect you sometimes see with even well-intentioned essay writing: it leaves one asking, "What's the point?"
Yeah. Major pussy-ness in the end. Make the argument and do it with guts.
"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.
Mr. Morris teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas."
So to be entirely consistent in his views that male dominance in the writing field is a no-no, then he should in fact do the honorable thing and resign, or allow his job to be taken from him by a DEI--I mean, a more capable, younger female professor. After all, in the Current Year, ONLY other women can TRULY decipher, as well as interpret great literature that is written by women.
Why should MEN professors be teaching what WOMEN authors write?
Therefore Mr Morris should be given the sack immediately, and out he goes to make way for a woman professor--she's certainly going to be much more knowledgeable about what women write than he could be.
Unless of course Mr Morris becomes Ms Morris, due to reassignment surgery because H/She suddenly decides in early middle age that he/she is now a woman. Then of course that might be considered acceptable, and Ms Morris could keep her job.
"Wodehouse wasn’t the most masculine of male novelists,"
Oh? He wasn't?
So Woodhouse had something in common along the lines of say, a contemporary British author, W. Somerset Maugham?
But then one certainly won't mistake Wodehouse for Ernest Hemingway.
Wodehouse might actually be the British author of the first rank who had the most genuine passion for modern sports like golf and cricket. His adopted daughter married a cricketer, jockey and horse-trainer to the Queen Mother.
I doubt he was much like Maugham. According to Christopher Hitchens, Wodehouse was probably asexual.
Perhaps he was a bit autistic, or Asperbergers.
Steve Sailer writes: "I found the Publisher’s Weekly list of top 10 bestselling novels each year from the mid-1890s onward"
The important caveat:
'Bestselling' and 'Best' are different categories.
How would the graph's percentages look different if some neutrally created Best (not Bestselling) list? I believe I've seen some Best lists that have about ratios in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in which the male:female author ratio is as high as 10:1.
Best Selling is objective. Best is subjective. When comparing years, objective is much better than subjective.
No, it's not. This is akin to looking for your lost keys under the streetlight despite having lost them in the darkness.
Once again, why not just write a good declarative sentence rather than trying to be clever. Any list of the "Best" Novels in a year would probably be based upon a set of awards and would just result in an argument over if the novel should be considered the best.
Excerpts from the discussion on this article by the Reddit "TrueLit" people, one of the most-honest and best forums for literature discussion and not-unfriendly to males (as BookTok and many other forums would be, including Reddit's r/Books forum):
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/1h934a5/the_disappearance_of_literary_men_should_worry/
The discussion there includes criticism of the general weakness of Morris' article, including it "not saying anything new," relying on weak data and vagueness, and being overly short. A traditional strength of male writers is boldness and willingness to break taboos or consensus. But Morris, he retreats from his own points. Should we give a lot of benefit to this doubt, and interpret this seeming weakness to have been an intentional meta-point on how male writing has declined? (As Morris 'declines' to even make his own point in any kind of forceful way.)
The Reddit r/TrueLit commentariat offers a range of valuable views that make points often more interesting than Morris makes:
Reddit-commenter proustianhommage says: "[T]he fact that women dominate the book market, while said books are generally just copy-and-paste genre fiction, doesn't convince me that it's only men who are becoming less literary. It seems like even people who go for English degrees are completely uninterested in what I might call 'serious literary fiction'."
From icarusrising9: "If you 'don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction' and say that 'male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers', then why would this even matter to you? And are we really to believe that educational disparities between genders are related to young males' consumption of "video games and pornography"? Really? Hyper-sloppy opinion piece."
From Giant_Fork_Butt: "I am a man. I'm in my early 40s. [...] [M]ost women I meet think reading is weird, and most women who do read only read self-help, NYT best seller stuff, romance/erotica and Netflix novels. [...] My interest in literature and writing largely serves to alienate me from the vast majority of people, who become disinterested or hostile when I mention that I read, and what I read. It's seen as pretentious and a waste of time, and if I am reading I should be reading something 'productive' or to 'help me grow as a person' i.e. self help nonsense."
ksarlathotep: "[I]f the difference between men and women readers is largely made up by Romantasy and Colleen Hoover and faerie smut readers then idk what to tell you. I think playing Call of Duty and reading faerie porn are about equidistant from reading meaningful literature."
Smart-Locksmith3180: "The last time a small portion of men got interested in reading they were derided as 'litbros' whose sole purpose in life was to suck off DFW because they hate women or something. If you're a young man, particularly a young white man, you just have to accept that the academic establishment has decided that there is more money to be made and power to be seized in ostracizing you rather than working with you. This strategy will not pan out for them in the long term."
Kloud1112: "I feel like in the past few years there hasn't really been a big lit debut by a young white male writer. Maybe I'm wrong though. Can anybody name any?"
axolotlorange: "I’m almost middle-aged and male. And I have increasingly felt boxed-out of most fictional literary genres over the last twenty years. And the list keeps growing. I read the old favorites, classics from several genres, [...] I get the feeling of feeling abandoned by the market. But I also get that the market doesn’t exist for me. It is a peculiar feeling."
New-Energy2830: "[T]he truth is that book clubs are all women, editors are all women, and most importantly, literary agents are all women. Most of them in their 20s and 30s with a real act to grind about no more white male writers, please."
unbotheredotter: "The issue is that literary novels are overall significantly less widely read than they were in the past. They have lost more male readers than female readers, which means publishers are now looking for books that appeal to a smaller, more specific audience. This doesn’t mean that publishers need to publish books written by men to bring back more male readers [...] To reverse this trend, the literary world would need to produce more works (written by either men or women) of high quality / wide interest that would attract the attention of readers who have tuned out (both men and women) because literature seems irrelevant or unimportant to them. // Who is writing a novel today that captures how the 2020s feel to a wide range of people, not just a novel that resonates with a small niche who all have the same taste profile[?]"
michaelochurch: "The reason for the anti-male bias isn't that people in publishing all hate men. (There are a few Karens, but they're not the norm.) It's more than choice-by-committee amplifies existing biases, especially when people start having to anticipate others' biases just to be taken seriously, and so men are getting squeezed out without it being anyone's explicit intention."
LilaBackAtIt: "Working class white men were once trailblazers of literature, now [they] are considered the antichrist lol honestly it’s sad."
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/1h934a5/the_disappearance_of_literary_men_should_worry/
These TrueLit commenters touch on something that Professor Morris glosses over: a large portion of today's women's "literature" is really just pornography, and often rather aberrant pornography, e.g., with elves or aliens. Everyone would be better off if it simply weren't published.
It's as you describe but also spread via social-media "book" networks. These networks are invariably dominated by women and invariably push authors like this Colleen Hoover to the top, one of the most-successful published authors of the last decade judged on book sales.
If you're not familiar with "BookTok," spend a few minutes searching around for what people say about it and its terrible, destructive, but 'awe-some' power.
The young male readers are on places like Royal Road reading stuff like isekai, litRPG, cultivation and harem stories.
None of these stories are going to become the Greatest Novel of All Time but are way more fun than the woke drivel churned by feminized publishing houses.
Ah yes the woke drivel. My favorite :)
Women seek consensus and everyone getting a turn; men seek superiority and excellence.
I take you to mean that feminization of an institution will turn men away.
Ironically, the meek arguers you hear of late, including the good Professor Morris here, who pop up stating that "we need men in the writing world," these people usually argue from the premise of the feminized 'paradigm'. They say, in effect, and to appropriate your phrase, "Males deserve to get a turn, too." (Or other variants of feminized discourse; such as Morris' "men who read literature would treat women better").
If you want to talk about women writing influential novels, we could start with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, recalling Abraham Lincoln's remark to her about it.
Then we could mention Helen Hunt Jackson, whose A Century of Dishonor (granted, nonfiction) and novel Ramona, changed Americans' view of Amerindians and led to major changes in government policy toward them. (I think a Ramona pageant is still held every year in Hemet.)
Then we could mention Pearl Buck and Nora Waln whose novels and memoirs created intense interest in and sympathy for China in the 1930s just when that country found itself at war with Japan. It's doubtful without Buck's series of popular novels about China and Waln's memoirs of her life in China, The Street of Precious Pearls and House of Exile, that Americans would have cared much about a fight between two Oriental countries on the other side of the world.
Waln's The House of Exile especially impressed many influential people; even Adolf Hitler, when Waln met him, told her it was his favorite book. It may have influenced him favorably toward helping China in its fight against Japan in the late 1930s.
It seems to me, as I've studied President Roosevelt's plans for remaking the world with American power, that the sympathy for China these books created he found frustrating as he wanted American attention to be focused on Europe. But the American people adamantly did not want to get involved in Europe's wars again. (Of course, some would argue that Roosevelt found a way to make use of that sympathy.)
Even Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, his short stories and his play The Fifth Column, while popular (well, not the play), didn't seem to create any particular sympathy among average Americans for anti-Franco forces in Spain, let alone the general situation in Europe.
But I suppose none of this worrying about who writes novels and who writes the important ones matters. It's not only that fewer and fewer people read novels, but other things as well.
Other things like Microsoft's recent announcement that it was entering the publishing business with a plan to publish 8,000 books a year. Oh, great, you say, a wonderful opportunity for new authors.
Um, no.... The company says it's not accepting manuscripts. And guess what the name of the new publishing company is called -- 8080 Books, named for the Intel 8080 microprocessor credited with creating the microcomputer revolution.
Who wants to take a SWAG at who -- or what -- is going to be writing those 8,000 books a year.
It ain't gonna be you or me.
I’ve never heard of any of those writers except Hemingway, who is one of my favourites.
Actually, I have heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe. I've never been tempted to read her though.
'Cabin' is good but also a tract, as 'Atlas Shrugged' is. I've never heard of Jackson or Waln. Buck was someone they tried to make us read in high school. I couldn't stomach it.