It’s hard to take a film critic who raved about James Mangold’s lousy A Complete Unknown (“I can’t imagine a better cinematic effort to remind all of us who are Boomers or Gen X why we adore [Bob Dylan]”) seriously, but The Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith isn’t a three-legged squirrel from the funny farm. He just acts like one, and that could be purposeful: provocation, scattered with a few jokes that’re hit or miss, and an occasional insight. Not exactly a compliment, but he doesn’t share a dorm room with the dregs of arts reviewers.
I was combing through the Journal last week and came across Smith’s “Free Expression” column that, not originally, slags the book publishing industry for its bias against white male writers. The sub-hed read, “The literary world has zero interest in publishing novels for heterosexual men,” a blanket statement that as a white, heterosexual man who reads a lot of fiction, I found borderline fatuous.
Smith writes: “Talk to anyone in publishing [is that number now around 42?], and they’ll agree, either with a shrug or a smirk, that though they put out fiction for women, and for gay men, and for teens and tweens (mainly girls), there’s not much point in publishing novels for straight men. That audience has disappeared.”
Maybe—and his (again, unoriginal) point that that the educational system today “is so thoroughly feminized that men, having turned away from college in large numbers, are now being actively recruited to come back, in a sort of broffirmative action scheme” has validity—but I haven’t found it enormously difficult to buy and read books that appeal to “that audience” he claims is dead. Naturally, one of Smith’s pegs is the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which he says “heralded something like the end of literature for straight men.” He then lists male authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John Updike, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who “were bros before there were bros.” He didn’t include Tom Wolfe in that coterie, but maybe, inconceivably, he believes the brilliant writer was an honorary feminist, because of his persnickety, and meticulous fashion style. Smith’s also a fan of Jonathan Franzen, a novelist who irks me just as much as Timothee Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob Dylan.
This could be an ungenerous tic, but I find it weird that a 60-year-old man like Smith peppers his prose with words like “bros.” No “relaxed fit” jeans for him!
If Infinite Jest, published in 1996, was the end of straight-man novels, I’m not sure what to say. Richard Russo, one of America’s finest novelists, still writes (his last was Somebody’s Fool in 2023), and his books can’t be categorized as feminine. Michel Houellebecq’s 2022 Annihilation, is anything but, just like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (my favorite novel of 2023) and Colin Barret’s Wild Houses and short story collection Young Skins. Jonathan Coe, Jonathan Dee, David Szalay, the late Denis Johnson, Ian McEwan and George Saunders don’t fit into the “bro” category. Fredrik Backman, the prolific Swedish author, although not as nasty and sexist as Mailer, has a catalog that puts Smith’s contention to ridicule: the Beartown trilogy, A Man Called Ove, and last year’s Among Friends are superior fiction. Irish writer John Boyne, who’s gay (unlike those authors listed above), nonetheless writes from a point of view that excludes no curious reader, such as his Elements quartet from last year.
The accompanying picture, a New Jersey shot of my parents and oldest brother, is tangential to this Kyle Smith criticism, except for the fact that all three were never without a book, on the bedside table, car, or, I’ll bet, in their bicycle baskets. My mom was, like millions, taken in by the Book of the Month Club (I never went that route or the similar deal for albums) and was diligent not to get taken advantage of by the small print. I remember she read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Portnoy’s Complaint when they came out, wasn’t crazy about them, but gave them a whirl. The Theodore White The Making of the President series also arrived at the house, which I found useful at a young age, before Hunter S. Thompson changed the way writers analyzed politics.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Eugene Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano, is performed in Paris; Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced, Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins, Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, and John Steinbeck’s Burning Bright are published; A.B. Guthrie Jr. wins the Fiction Nobel Prize; Disney’s Cinderella is released; the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel is opened in NYC; Truth or Consequences debuts on CBS; Stevie Wonder is born and Max Beckmann dies; and “Goodnight, Irene” by the Weavers is a top hit.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023