A Los Angeles father, once an aspiring screenwriter and now a professional ticket-scalper, spends his spare hours calculating the extent to which younger straight white male novelists have been frozen out of the literary world. He pens a jeremiad against both publishers and critics who, he avers, no longer value great writing and a cadre of writers who are no longer interested in telling the truth about society.
It sounds like the premise for, well, a literary novel. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who wrote defiant letters to personages living and dead, meets the 21st century. Watch the advance money, sales and recognition roll in.
Or not. It is the contention of a polemic published in March in the online magazine Compact by the writer Jacob Savage — dad, ticket-scalper, former screenwriter — that today, such a novel would not receive acclaim commensurate with its quality, a claim he backed up by showing a dearth of such authors from lists of prominent literary honors. Moreover, Savage argued that what he saw as these novelists’ self-censorship, whether provoked by timidity or rational self-interest, meant that such a novel would not even be written.
“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” Savage, who is 41, wrote. What they do write, he added, avoids “grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.”
Savage’s essay has attracted both derision and amens in newspapers and journals, on social media and Substacks, over drinks and in group chats.
“I think the nerve I hit is fairly obvious,” Savage said in an interview, adding, “being able to put numbers behind it was cathartic to some people and triggering to others.”
Humming underneath the disputation is a less tangible but more significant question. Let us say the perspective of the straight white man is being dampened in the world of literary fiction. Should we care?
For some observers, the complaint is roughly translatable as, “Won’t somebody please think of the straight white men?” “If a very small number of people who are not white, male, heterosexual gained a (likely temporary) foothold in a fringe cultural practice — which is what literary fiction is — there has to be a raging sense of privilege, neo-Trumpist or outright Trumpist, to claim that that constitutes a crisis,” the Bosnia-born novelist and screenwriter Aleksandar Hemon said in an email.
Francine Prose, a novelist and critic, was similarly skeptical: “You’ve run the world for thousands of years, and now you’re feeling disenfranchised?”
But to others, the straight white man’s persistent “raging sense of privilege,” however destructive or just plain annoying, is exactly why this trend cannot be ignored. At this moment, straight white men and their interiority — the great preserve of the literary novel, which for centuries has claimed an unparalleled ability to spelunk into the depths of human motivation — seem as important as ever.
A backlash against the advancements achieved in recent decades by women, racial minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people reigns in politics and culture. The collection of podcasters and YouTube personalities known as the “manosphere” has responded with its own coarse, often right-leaning and, to many, compelling set of answers for how straight white men ought to adapt to changing times. The Democratic Party has strapped on its pith helmet and sought to understand young men.
The feeling of alienation among those with historically advantaged identities actually seems like exactly the sort of thing best tackled by the novel, which from “Don Quixote” to “Anna Karenina” to “Herzog” has brokered the soul-aching discrepancy between subjective experience and objective reality.
“A lot of the frustration being expressed in the manosphere is the external form of quiet frustration male authors haven’t expressed,” Sam Kahn, a novelist and the editor of Republic of Letters, a literary journal on Substack, said in an interview.
“The rise of Donald Trump or Andrew Tate is not because of hordes of male novelists who didn’t get published,” he added, referring to the online influencer who, along with his brother, Tristan, is facing criminal charges of rape and human trafficking in Britain. “But the two aren’t totally unrelated.”
Yet it remains that the literary novel — “a fringe cultural practice” according to Hemon, one of its foremost practitioners — has perhaps not been so peripheral to the culture’s white-hot center in 150 years. It may no longer be up to its historic task.
A Real Decline, an Open Question
The dynamic Savage and others have outlined — that male, white male, straight white male and young straight white male novelists’ work is of diminishing interest in the literary world — is broadly if not unanimously accepted. The haggling is more over the cause: self-censorship, industry disinclination, elite approbation.
Savage found increasingly few young white men on The New York Times’s year-end notable fiction lists as well as equivalents at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Esquire. No white men are among the 25 most recent nominees for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction, the 14 latest millennial finalists for the National Book Award or the 20 current fiction and poetry fellows at Stanford’s eminent Wallace Stegner Fellowship.
The numbers only constitute circumstantial evidence. The sample size is small, some argue cherry-picked (regarding the Young Lions prize, the writer Jay Caspian Kang said on his podcast, “Time To Say Goodbye,” “I don’t even know what that is”).
The novelist Rebecca Makkai said none of the several prize juries she has sat on — including for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards — made decisions with the intention of excluding white men. “It was just that it was, book by book, the very best books we saw,” she said.
But if the figures are less than comprehensive, they are also real and, say many, troubling enough.
One literary agent, who represents several prominent novelists and who requested anonymity to discuss the industry candidly, believed the numbers were accurate and called it a form of overcorrection. “It is no more the case that, all of a sudden, in the last 10 years all of the best writers in America became writers of color or women or other marginalized identities, than it is that prior to 10 or 15 years ago, all of the great writers were straight white men,” the agent said.
A second agent, who also represents prominent novelists and also requested anonymity, added that the trend will most likely continue because it is driven by the industry’s desire for marginalized voices as well as female writers, as women are the primary buyers of fiction.
It is not exactly news that, as Mark McGurl, a professor of English at Stanford University, said in an interview “in aggregate white men are much less interested in literary fiction.” As creators and consumers, plenty of young men are moving away from reading toward the multibillion-dollar video game industry or outrageously popular podcasts.
The decline in male novelists, Sarah Brouillette, a professor of English at Carleton University in Canada, recently argued in Defector, might track the decline in the novel’s cultural and financial capital.
And it is not clear exactly what might fix the problem, if there is one. “Writers (including male writers) should just write, try to put out the best work they can, and let the chips fall where they may,” said Andrew Boryga, a novelist who has weighed in on the debate on his Substack and the “Time to Say Goodbye” podcast, in an email. “The market’s always shifting.”
The ‘Great Male Narcissists’
If you read only the beginning of Savage’s polemic, you might come away believing that his primary antagonists are industry gatekeepers: agents, editors, publishers, awards juries, booksellers. But he reserves the majority of his opprobrium for young straight white male novelists themselves.
“Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists,” Savage wrote, “but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.”
The contrast hardly needed to be stated: The American novel was in recent eras defined by straight white male novelists’ ambitious, grandiose and not infrequently successful attempts to do exactly that.
Well into the 1990s, it was rare for the National Book Award for fiction not to go to a white man. Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and another for nonfiction; Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1969, America’s top-selling fiction book, according to Publishers Weekly, was not a genre potboiler, but a novel about a young man from Newark named Alexander Portnoy. (The Jewishness of many of these novelists did give them a more angled perspective on some questions of identity.)
A new generation of novelist responded with a more apologetic brand of manhood. In a New York Observer essay published in 1997, David Foster Wallace deflated the “Great Male Narcissists,” or “G.M.N.s” (he cited Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth), with their “radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.” Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and others seemed to write with more explicit self-awareness about the fact that they were writing as straight white men.
Yet into the ’90s and 2000s it was still widely accepted, by both the novelists themselves and the industry and critical apparatus, that exploring the lives of hyperbolically male characters — a deeply troubled tennis prodigy, say — was the valid way to explore the American psyche.
“These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition,” Choire Sicha wrote in a 2008 essay about a yet newer generation of novelist headlined, “Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?”
In the early 2010s, the ground again shifted, in a quietly drastic manner. The culture industry was reckoning with the legacy of the “G.M.N.s” in ways that anticipated the #MeToo movement with novels like Adelle Waldman’s “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” about a straight white male novelist making his way through Brooklyn’s dating scene; movies like Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” about an older, Roth-like writer’s mentorship of an anachronistically toxic younger novelist; and television shows like Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” in which Dunham’s heroine visits a charming straight white male novelist to discuss accusations of sexually predatory behavior.
“I envisioned he was a person with status in part because he is male,” Waldman said in an interview about her nuanced hero, Nathaniel. She imagined that “a bookish male who’d graduated from Harvard and had a certain self-presentation would strike people as an up-and-coming intellectual before he even had to do anything, in a way that just isn’t the case for women,” she said.
There was a broader point being made. The earlier model had it that the interiority of men, white men (with allowances for some Black men) or straight white men could stand in for everyone. A new model, by contrast, could not abide the earnest universalizing of that identity.
The End of ‘Assertive Gusto’
In recent years, novelists could be seen embracing the straight white man’s (slightly) less central status.
Savage praised Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 story collection “Rejection” for capturing “millennial rage and anomie,” but noted ruefully that Tulathimutte had “felt the need to publicly distance himself” from the central story’s badly behaving protagonist. Savage read the ending of 2019’s “The Topeka School,” the third novel by Ben Lerner, as the straight white male narrator’s allocution about “how he’s unlearned his white maleness.”
But others suggest such choices do not represent a cowed holding back. What if instead they are deliberate self-effacement intended to offer a glimpse at these groups’ vexing situations today?
“Right now one of the most important things being written about in America is identity,” said Makkai, the novelist. “If you’re talking about a young, straight, white, able-bodied man with English as his first language, I can understand it would be hard to write about identity with anything other than guilt or anger. Neither of those necessarily makes for the greatest subject matter.”
Few are saying there ought to be no more male main characters. What they are suggesting is that such figures ought no longer have main character syndrome if they are to be responsive to this era’s gender relations.
During the imperial heights of the “G.M.N.s,” Bellow’s Augie March could begin the novel that bears his name with the announcement, “I am an American, Chicago born” — a thrilling act of “assertive gusto,” in the words of a besotted Roth. Contemporary novels, on the other hand, might find insight by depicting straight white men as more ancillary in the broader sweep of the culture.
An example I have noticed, as a straight white man who reads novels, is the use of the N.B.A. (the National Basketball Association, not the National Book Award) to ingeniously explore contemporary masculinity. Four recent books, not all by straight white men — Andrew Martin’s “Early Work,” Jackie Ess’s “Darryl,” Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” and Leo Robson’s “The Boys” — show male characters’ discursive encounters with that arena of transparently sublimated male (often Black male) ambition to suggest the characters’ status as spectators.
Others have dramatized privilege and its discontents through plot. Writing in The Point, the critic Martin Dolan praised Andrew Lipstein’s recent novel “Something Rotten” — about a young, moderately canceled stay-at-home dad’s cosplaying embrace of a more retrograde idea of manhood — as signaling a way “that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.”
Novels that honestly explore young straight white men, and their inner and outer conflicts with our era’s changing ideas about masculinity, gender, sex and power, will endure.
And when they do, it will not be simply because they offer an alternative to the manosphere. “Is the idea that literary novels will save white men from the Tate brothers?” the novelist Sam Lipsyte said in an email. “I’m not sure I see that. Goebbels wrote a novel, you know.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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