Literary Cooties

Too many cool girls in literature, not enough cool boys

Recently, I stumbled upon this New Statesman piece titled The curse of the cool girl novelist, thanks to the Woman of Letters Substack. The piece is a carpet-bombing of a sub-genre that’s rife with lonely young female protagonists who are highly intelligent but passive, and happy in their sadness because their authors believe it makes them more interesting, profound, and beautiful. Those who read the piece will undoubtedly recognize this type of novel, even if the category doesn’t have a widely agreed-upon catchy name yet. The author, Charlotte Stroud, lists some examples like Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, The New Me by Halle Butler, plus all of Sally Rooney’s oeuvre.

I’ve read several of those books, as well as some others that would probably fall into this sub-genre like Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados and Luster by Raven Leilani. Stroud is definitely getting at something truthy, even if her piece suffers from a lack of specificity. Her argument would’ve had more bite if she’d really dissected and drilled into some examples, rather than talking in evasive generalities as if the books she most hated had actually been written by her best friend. Sadism is great to read about, but sad-ism—whether it’s sadgurl or sadboi narratives—can get very old, very quickly.

Speaking of sad boys, right after I finished reading about how cool girls were ruining literature, I found another piece about how uncool it was for boys to be involved with literature at all. The decline of the Literary Bloke proclaims that the male writer has become “terminally uncool,” noting how the latest Granta’s list of the 20 best young British novelists only features 4 men (for comparison, in 1983, that list featured only 6 women).

Blaming coolness, or lack thereof, characterizes the lack of male writers as more of a supply, not demand, problem. A demand problem would mean there are lots of male writers who are producing all sorts of works, but there are simply no takers. But even this would probably result in some underground scenes, at least, even if nobody in it is going to be featured in The New Yorker. A supply problem hits earlier in the timeline, where there are almost no young guys who want to be writers in the first place, so they don’t even have a chance to be rejected either by the critical or consumer market.

It’s a chicken-or-egg scenario, since fear of failure is a great incentive to never try. If young men don’t see a lot of celebrated young male writers, or they don’t like the stuff that’s being written by other young men, or they feel the things they want to write about will result in dismissal or censure, then why try in the first place? Or is it a playground cooties type of situation, where men see literature being thoroughly dominated by women, and that automatically makes the field uncool to them? If so, that would be thoroughly childish, not to mention foolish, to preemptively quit such a fundamental and important field such as writing. Some might say that men simply don’t like to read, but if so, why is Reddit and 4chan, which are all about text, so male-dominated?

Will Lloyd, the writer of the literary bloke piece, cites the Irish writer Megan Nolan who said that male writerliness was uncool these days because there were no “cool, sexy, gunslinger” types for guys to look up to. She has a point in that Stroud could write a whole piece bemoaning how fiction for women was hampered by too much coolness, whereas Lloyd has to reach for old Martin Amis to find some kind of male equivalent of the same problem.

But what would this gunslinger even look like? Not literally, since it’s an iron law that no writers can ever be handsome (that’s why we wanted to become writers: less competition). My guess at what Nolan meant is that male writers these days are boring. Or worse, insincere about who they really are and what they’re really thinking.

Lloyd brings up John Green as the death knell of cool male writers:

Unlike Wallace, who was both a genius and a bad man, or Franzen, who wrote with skill and ambition, Green wrote nothing ambitious and is nothing like a genius, while being a very nice man. He wrote a series of lachrymose novels about men who cry at the appropriate times, who never lie to their girlfriends, and who have never farted, and certainly never masturbated.

- The decline of the Literary Bloke

Great takedown, but then why does Lloyd himself exemplify this Green-like attitude when earlier, he apologizes for having bought Jonathan Franzen’s Purity on its release day? Is it because he thinks Franzen is an embarrassingly bad writer whose lowness infects even his readers? I don’t think so, since he praises him as a skillful writer. So it must be because Franzen has that reputation: the haughty white guy who thinks he’s too good for Oprah’s Book Club. It’s a reputation that will invite tsk-tsks to anyone who praises him too unconditionally, at least when among a certain crowd. But The Corrections is a great novel, and why is Oprah’s Book Club sacred?

I can’t help but think of Alex Perez’s definition of masculine writing in his Hobart interview:

Masculine writing=writing about heterosexual male concerns from a non-feminist point of view. It doesn’t mean that the masculine writer can’t be a feminist or write about feminism or whatever, but he can’t care about not being seen as a feminist or an ally, which is the main concern of most male writers now; this is why the writer you mentioned apologized. If a man is worried about what feminists will think of him, he’s not a masculine writer because he’ll never be able to write honestly about the male condition. He will be the worst of all creatures: the mushy male feminist.

- Alex Perez on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Baseball, Growing Up Cuban American in Miami & Saying Goodbye to the Literary Community

The writing I despise the most is dishonest writing, especially dishonest writing aimed at image-protection. One of my favourite novels is We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver because of her honest and harsh exploration into how some women just aren’t hardwired to be mothers. I admire Loner by Teddy Wayne so much because Wayne must’ve known that readers would think the creepy psycho protagonist was autobiographical, but he didn’t care. Earlier this summer, I went to a literary event where one of the readers was Delicious Tacos. I vaguely knew of him because of his internet notoriety. I can’t say I’m a fan of his work because I haven’t read any and I only half-paid attention to his reading as we all tend to do at these events, but at the very least, he’s honest about his own depravity. Certainly more interesting than Colson Whitehead or whichever PEN/Hemingway-approved male writer.

The question then is, do women want to read about what men really think? Or rather, before we get to that point, do men want to read about what men really think? And if they don’t get it in literature, they’ll seek it elsewhere. Lloyd concludes that in the end, it all comes down to status, and that if young men see no future for themselves in literature, they’ll “look for other landscapes to colonise.” That would explain the podcast and Youtube spheres.

But as I mentioned earlier, writing (along with reading) is such an intrinsically human endeavor. It’s one of the first higher-level skills we learn and we carry with it for the rest of our lives. To say that it’s okay for either men or women to self-exile from this arena would be to further impoverish our collective culture.

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P.S. The New Statesman pieces are paywalled, but if you do a free sign-up, you get 3 free articles a month.