If I’m being honest, I usually look forward to the periodic resurgence of “Men don’t read” discourse, because it boosts my fragile ego. I’m a man who reads a lot of fiction, including a pretty sizeable amount of novels and short story collections written by women, and I don’t care what you think about that. But then I’ll read an article that says men account for a small portion of the fiction-buying market and gives some blanket statement about how novels “just aren’t written for men these days,” and I’ll start to feel weird, like I caught the last helicopter out of Saigon for dudes who like books. Then another, darker thought usually crosses my mind: this is a bad sign.
As a hundred articles will tell you, other men supposedly don’t feel the same. There’s plenty of speculation as to why that is, from novels supposedly becoming “an arena for virtue-signalling and culture wars” to modern fiction becoming insufficiently masculine. But there’s no concrete answer, and nobody seems to have any ideas about how to get men to like fiction. I understand reading isn’t for everybody, but I’ve also talked with plenty of other men who told me they wish they could read more, and sitting with a 300-page book can take hours or days they don’t have to spare in our society where attention is treated as a commodity. Reading fiction doesn’t fit into the idea of hustle culture, and there are plenty of men out there with large follower counts on social media who tell subscribers that it’s a worthless, time-wasting activity just for women. The idea that’s put out is that there is nothing a guy who wants to be a real man can get out of picking up a novel.
Since I’m a writer and I’ve spent most of my adult life around other writers and people with different jobs in the publishing industry, I’ve often heard this discussed as some existential problem that might inevitably be impossible to tackle. It’s almost as if people have thrown up their hands and agreed that, yup, men and fiction just don’t mix. I’m always perplexed by this, as a guy who both reads and writes fiction, but lately I’ve started to worry about the next generations of boys and young men who will grow up without fiction—who’ll learn about the world through message boards, unverified Wikipedia sources and YouTube videos of dudes with muscles on muscles explaining why Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker had the right mindset to advance in a competitive world. I think about this a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion we’re going about fixing things all wrong. It’s not just about marketing, like some people in the publishing industry might say; it’s messaging. Fiction can be fun. It can entertain or challenge you, but you also grow from the experience. It’s a road to self-betterment.
I say all of that as somebody who grew up without any strong male role models, who found fiction almost by accident. I was your typical bored teen who liked hockey, skateboarding, and going to punk shows. I was also angry, misguided, and in embarrassingly stereotypical fashion, I got really into reading The Catcher in the Rye when we were assigned it in the 11th grade. The scenario plays out like a family-friendly sitcom after that, with the teacher of the class noticing me—the token weird kid in class—showing a fledging interest in fiction. She took me aside after class one day and said she thought I’d like a writer named Franz Kafka. She told me to start with his story “The Metamorphosis” and tell her what I thought and she’d give me extra credit if I did. So a few days later I walked up to her desk, told her I’d gotten a copy of Kafka’s stories from the library, and thought the thing about Gregor Samsa waking up to find he’d turned into a bug was hilarious. The teacher stared at me. She looked a little disturbed for a moment, shrugged her shoulders, and then told me if I read Kafka’s The Trial and wrote a report on what I thought of it I’d get an A in the class for the quarter.
My experience might be singular. Holden Caulfield to Kafka still feels like a funny jump to me, especially for a 15-year-old. But something about those reading experiences got me wanting more. I kept picking up books When I was 16, a bookseller told me if I liked funny fiction, that I should read Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. I finished it, loved it, but ended up thinking, “Man, I don’t want to be like that guy” about the book’s narrator, Alexander Portnoy. It’s a sentiment that’s reinforced for me to this day whenever I read one of Roth’s books. Roth left behind one of the strongest bodies of work of any American writer when he died in 2018, but the problem is that there aren’t many people telling young men at a crossroads, “If you read Philip Roth, you’ll see it’s less about hating women and more about his characters hating themselves, and how their actions turn off or push away nearly everybody around them.” Instead, the message I tend to see is “Philip Roth hated women.” And maybe that’s true—but if you actually read his fiction, you come away with a more nuanced view of things.
