THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE SEASON.

Is a lament about male "underrepresentation" in so-called literature really worthy of an Instalanche?

[B]rowse The New York Times Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.”

Yawn.  Seriously?  Yawn again.  Vanity Fair?  The New Yorker?  The Atlantic?  Esquire?  Disturbed people detailing their disturbed lives in more detail than the admittedly rudimentary Diagnostic and Statistical Manual can handle?  But so it is with the "literary novel," particularly if you're trotting out Updike or DeLillo or Roth and the disturbed sort of "middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience" implied thereby.

That's going to be the case, whether "creative writing" workshops are run by the woke or not.  "Maybe Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante are not that interesting, and maybe scolding young men for not being girly men is not the way to get them interested in reading them, or matriculating at university and concentrating in writing, or voting for Democrats who scold them."

The problem, though, is captured by Compact's Jacob Savage.  "If you’re a normal white male millennial you probably roll your eyes."  We could gain greater generality by striking the "white" and "millennial," and by extending a subsequent observation of his.

The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation (all three of the above authors graduated from Iowa). Workshopped to death, shorn of swagger and toxicity —and above all, humor—these books serve more as authorial performances than as novels, a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones, my heart is in the right place.”

Having your heart in the wrong place, unfortunately, isn’t quite the answer either. The best stories by the flamboyantly transgressive and politically incorrect writer Delicious Tacos capture a wonderful samizdat feeling, but anti-woke literature exists in a sort of mirror opposition to a more dominant sensibility. The gonzo provocations of Peter Vack (Sillyboi) or Matthew Davis (Let Me Try Again) tell us less about the world than about how the author wants to be seen. These too are performances.

Dear reader, haven't we been at this place ever since the creative types sold the academic humanities, and the right well-heeled patrons, on the notion that their mental disorders, or perhaps their simple attention-seeking, were Profound?  Mr Savage has his grouse about what passes for literature these days.  We could be contemplating architecture.  "Perhaps it takes the bully pulpit of a president to call attention to the clique of prestige architects who would rather assault the eye than oh, provide a proper setting for a trial, or a workshop, or a serious game of chess, or boarding a train."  But there are those juried exhibitions, and those acceptance letters from The Atlantic.  "Yes, and like tenure music, it exists in order that insiders can validate other insiders with their awards and prestige contracts."  Never mind that Taylor Swift or Dolly Parton sell a lot of stuff with relatively simple plot complications.  "I call that contemporary stuff tenure music, and it neither passes the hearing test at Cold Spring Shops nor market tests in the wider world, all that intellectualizing about 'composers with their ears set further forward' or 'not letting the ears rest in an easy chair' notwithstanding."  On the screen, you have the class of insomnia aids the intellectual types refer to as filllm that, while it might draw the awards and the academic kudos, repeat audiences are harder to find.

Maybe, rather than fretting about what the "gross nexus of higher ed and yawny high lit" rewards, the people in charge of the writing workshops ought reorder their priorities.

Steven Mintz contemplates the low estate of academic humanities.  "There’s a pervasive sense among many adults with humanities degrees that In the wake of deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, semiotics and the cultural, linguistic and discursive turns, literary studies, in particular, like other core humanities disciplines, is in deep trouble."  Yes, I too have thought that, and written about the phenomenon, whether in sorrow or in anger I can't always tell.  As an academic field, it's losing both postulants and archbishops, attracting more anger than sorrow.

The rot has been a long time in coming, as the corrective will be.  "The social destruction that erupted in the 1960s began with the premise that the machinery of prosperity would always be working, no matter how outrageous the mockery of the avant-garde or the hippies or the race hustlers was. Woodstock could always coexist with moon shots."  Look, this is not difficult.  "I'd be happy if English stayed away from dabbling in political economy, and exposed students to examples of good writing, in order that senior compositions might not bog down in jargon and elegant variation."  That way might also be more readable fiction, whether short stories or novels, and more of those missing men.