But why do they want to?

[oursin]

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

You know, women are notably broader in their reading parameters? I'm not convinced by this argument:

He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Or maybe it just Wasn't All That?

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Because the damselly laydeez never, ever dabble in the waters of crime or genre fiction....

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

This whole myth that middle class white guys are being squeezed out of authorly fame by the unwashed and unworthy is so tiresome.

And yes, it's about the Kultural Kred! They are too above it all to make money writing dreck like that silly Tom Clancy or that dreadful Robert Patterson.

Sheesh. Let's shed a tear for the menz.

Thanks for the post.

[mirlacca]

Maybe they want to grown up to be Truman Capote. Or Tennessee Williams.

[oursin]

Or maybe they just want to Grow Up and leave the Island of Lost Boys, harrumph.

[kore]

“If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Jesus Christ.

[used_songs]

Right???? My eyes rolled so hard at that!!!

[bibliofile]

OR NOT.

[conuly]

“If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Not unless it was romance.

[heleninwales]

Or crime fiction, or fantasy/SF or indeed any of the popular genres. There is a limited readership for litfic. (Which in my view is it's own genre, but literary writers will never accept that.)

[silveradept]

I suspect someone has an inflated perception of how excellent their prose was, and what audiences and advances they could command with such things. But also, it is one of those persistent myths that true status, fame, and fortune comes to those who write the Great [Country] Novel, and that all other forms of writing are to be dismissed as bill-paying at best, and soul-destroying, cheap hack work at worst. Even if there are far more people remembered and reprinted for their genre works than for anything more Literary than that.

They mostly can't believe they aren't receiving what they believe they're entitled to, and they are looking for the most obvious scapegoat, and seem to have settled on "there's so many women in editorial positions, so therefore the men must be getting gatekept from things, it's real gatekeeping, not like the thing that women have been claiming men have been doing to them since forever."