Yet More Men Don’t Read

I do not argue with numbers, but the publishing industry’s “wisdom”  that men do not read is based on simple statistical surveys, especially among people who read more than ten books in a year.

At issue is why this should be true. Perhaps the market does not supply men with books worth their time.

Publishing is dominated by women who came of age  and were educated in elite schools where gender politics is blood sport.  Educated by ardent feminists, the notion of “quality” is divorced from pure literary judgment to one of political efficacy.  Political efficacy means the exertion of power, and power is the ability to make others do one’s bidding. Quality, therefore, in those elite classes, becomes intertwined with whether a writer serves a political cause, that cause being the elevation of women.

There’s nothing wrong with elevating the social perception of women in America, not when disparities in salary and status still abounds. The cause is a good one.  I write as father to a daughter.

However, subverting art to social ends has never produced great art. Soviet Realism comes to mind, approved authors and those whose work was circulated by samizdat, the kinds of apparatchiks  who found Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova unacceptable because they did not adhere to a party line. Unfortunately, a  number of less-than-clear thinking champions of feminism cannot imagine how to promote an agenda without recourse to one of two awful strategies:

• male bashing
• claims of victimization

Neither of these stratagems elevate the perception of women–they do keep men out of bookstores. And, as Katie Roiphe pointed out in  The New York Times Book Review in January this year, a generation of male American writers have simply denied male sexuality — as a stratagem to be published at all.

In publishing, therefore, among the elite school A students now executives, a “good” book is one that adheres to a party line:

• depicts men abusing women, or
• one that is about a woman victimized by a man,
• or one that shows men behaving badly, or
• one that depicts a man passively devoted to a dynamic woman.

The question needs asking whether “men don’t read” is a “fact” in publishing because the industry lacks the imagination to publish books that show men as they are.  A “man’s book” turns out to be software for film–action, adventure–pot-boilers with no real insight to character and how we–all of us–live in our time.

Give men books worth reading, and they will buy books.   Give us John Irving and Richard Russo and Kent Haruf and Ian McEwan and Michael Chabon. Give us Tim O’Brien and Ron Hansen and Ron Carlson. Give us short fiction with plots.  Give us poets like Sydney Lea and Mark Doty.

I’ll see you in the bookstore.