If men want to get published again, they need to write great novels.

Stop crying about the New Yorker. Self-publish if you have to.

The general worry about whether men are still able to publish fiction, — or whether the age of the Great Male Novelist is a lost age, and we are living through the feminisation of fiction,— is still, it seems, being played in the repertoire of cultural commentary, often, it ought to be observed, in pieces written by men. For my part, I couldn’t care less; I couldn’t care at all. Maybe men are being published less. I don’t know. No-one knows because no-one has counted. Until we have real numbers, this is a mirage, not a cultural crisis. It is quite possible that men are publishing novels which are failing. And because they fail, we pay them no attention.

I’m sure it’s true that no young¹ white man has published a story in the New Yorker for many a long year. What a base and miserable little complaint! Is the New Yorker the only place where the laurels are bestowed? Is this 1962? Have you no other model for a literary career than John Cheever? It has never been more possible for fiction to find its audience. Tony Tulathimutte has just published a book of stories called Rejection. It is garnering widespread admiration. The first story in the book (which I feel sure I shall never forget) went viral after being published in n+1 several years ago. He’s 41. Does he count? (No, see below.)

When I spoke to Brian Chau about this, I raised the possibility that women might be better at writing fiction. Recently, I saw someone complaining that they don’t want to read the sort of stories that women write. Is there such a sort of story? I don’t know, but can we really accuse Helen deWitt, whose new book I am waiting for with great impatience, of writing like that? Or Catherine Lacey? I deny that this complaint means anything at all, but it must surely fail on its own terms.

Perhaps this argument fails to concern me because I enjoy reading novels written by women. When I was twelve I read Judy Blume and now that I am in the beginnings of middle-age I have read plenty of the so-called “feminine middlebrow”² novels of the twentieth century. I would not keep the works of Martin Amis above those of Penelope Fitzgerald, nor would many critics of wide reading and impartial tastes. Maybe I am unconcerned because I am English. At the same time that these lost Great American Men were writing, so were Iris Murdoch and Rebecca West. Can we seriously have complaints about the system that has given us Piranesi, Pachinko, Beautiful World Where Are You, On Beauty?

Ah, they will retort, some of those novels are a decade old and the problem is right now. Perhaps. But I shall not accept their terms. Not every decade produces a work of brilliance to be read for all time. There was plenty of good writing in the 1790s, but I doubt you spend much time reading it. The Age of Crabbe is full of nice things, but it is not full of things as good as Wordsworth. I have taken to asking people what was the last really great English novel? (The American novel is quite healthy.) I think it was Piranesi. The other answers I get are hesitant and often not passionately argued. Will Lloyd even told me the last great British novelist of his lifetime was V.S. Naipaul.

But he’s not in despair. There is still a reading public. Plenty of very good novels are published all the time. Of course, we do not live in the 1850s. We cannot expect Bleak House, Madame Bovary, and Moby Dick to be in composition all at the same time. The novel will never again be as central to our culture as it once was. Radio killed that dream. But we do not lack excellent modern novels, especially once you factor in fiction in translation. Try Whale if you want a modern novel, written by a man, that is quite astonishing. It is from twenty years ago, but only just translated into English.

In the meantime, I suspect that plenty of men are getting published.

Naomi Kanakia

pointed out that what is happening is identity politics. No, it turns out, Tony Tulathimutte isn’t the solution to the “problem” because he’s not white. Maybe the “pipeline” really has been “shut down” for these authors. If they want to make a splash, get a big deal, be adored by the established reviews, maybe they really are facing barriers that are based on non-aesthetic reasons. Let’s assume that’s true. So have many, many writers throughout history! There is never a ready-made audience for greatness!

Read about John Keats and the snobbery of his reviewers! Hell, try reading the way a genius like Penelope Fitzgerald was being described as late as the 1980s as writing women’s novelettes (in, if I recall correctly, The Times). Virginia Woolf bought a printing press and published her own work. Margaret Atwood did something similar. Does anyone making these complaints even know the publishing history of James Joyce? At some point, these lost Miltons (can anyone name any of them?) need to ask whether they want to climb an established hierarchy or whether they want to write a great novel. This is art, for God’s sake, not a career path to a VP job.

Naomi also notes two men she knew who got very good publishing deals but whose books didn’t sell very well. There are perhaps more men being published than we might think. One problem might be the influences these writers choose to adopt. Every time this argument is made, the same names are rolled out: DeLillo and Updike and Martin Amis and so on. Wherever the new white male novelists come from, they will surely come from a broader tradition than that. I sometimes feel like I am being asked to believe in DEI for white male novelists who want to write sequels to the great novels of the 1970s.

The Common Reader is resolutely un-political. What matters is great literature, wherever it comes from. Arguments like these are not about the books but the culture, the corporations, the politics, the status, and the spoils. If there is a new David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo lurking out there, they will be able to find a way to get published. Romantasy is a global phenomenon that began in small, independent publishers.

Or they can do what

John Pistelli

did and self-publish on Substack! His new book Major Arcana is a strange, compelling novel. It is original and bizarre. You will be absorbed by it and challenged to think. Oh, and he’s a white man. Major Arcana is out in a couple of weeks. If you are truly worried about male novelists, pre-order it, read it, pass it to people you meet, write a review. (I also have people in my WhatsApp praising Ross Barkan’s forthcoming novel, but I haven’t read it.)

Naomi notes that white men will struggle to get published because men don’t read. “Most readers are women. And most women don’t necessarily feel obligated to inform themselves about the inner life of white men.” So these lost writers face a very familiar challenge. This is the famous quote that strangely never makes its way into the pieces worrying about the Fate of Male Writers.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

If white men are more marginal, they are also in the position that has historically been the means by which very weird books like Paradise Lost and À la recherche du temps perdu were published and became famous by creating the taste by which they were relished. Proust is explicit about this.

As Will Lloyd told me, “If writing is more marginal then it can also be more free.” Wherever the next set of great white male novelists comes from, freedom is what they need, not the schoolboy pleasures of being able to say they were published in the New Yorker.

1. I forgot, in the original version, to include “young”:—the complaint is that no white men “born after 1984” have been publish in the New Yorker.

2. Terrible term.