On Insulting Men for Not Reading Novels

NOW and then, there is a lecture given to men about how they must read, chiefly novels, and how that would make them better people, like women. A few months ago the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column entitled, ‘Attention, Men: Books Are Sexy!’ This headline portended a genre of advice to men—that if they did what women did, they would be more attractive, perhaps even to 70-year-old columnists. You may have also come across articles that say, ‘Men: Doing chores at home is sexy’ and ‘Men: Listening is sexy.’ There is a presumption that men wish to be sexy.

Once, on a Goan beach, I was practising yoga, or what I think is yoga, when two white women nodded in appreciation as they walked by. What made me smirk in the warrior pose was not only their racial confidence in complimenting a native practising his own culture, but also the fact that what they approved of was a man doing peaceful exercises, instead of pumping iron like ‘toxic men’ do. I wanted to tell them I have read Sally Rooney too; they would probably have taken me out to dinner. If I said I have read Jane Austen, they might have swooned.

This is odd because I am humble when I am lifting large weights – fleeing death, fearing injuries, and wishing I had the flexibility of women, oh the things I would do in calisthenics if I had that. On the other hand, when I begin an acclaimed novel I am thinking, “let me see what this bloody fuss is all about, and I hope I don’t encounter yet another man who makes intricate observations on upholstery and knows of colours like ‘salmon’.”

Yet, if I were reading in an airport, a delicate observer may find it an agreeable act of tameness and may even feature me on Instagram. I suggest the caption, ‘Bros who prose’.

Dowd makes the rewards for men clearer in her NYT column: “It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.”

She does not mention if he was straight, which is a crucial detail. In the ongoing lament about the disappearance of men who read novels, there is a very clear acceptance among the mourners that most men who do read novels are not straight.

“I interviewed Ralph Fiennes, and it turned out that he loves Shakespeare and reciting Beckett at 3 a.m. under the stars,” she writes, I guess in an appreciative way and not in alarm at the mental health of such a man.

Alright, most men do not wish to recite an absurdist playwright who also happens to be from a race whose artists would not have been so famous if its merchants had not brutalised half the globe. Is that really a problem?

As an expert on men, let me explain why most of them don’t read novels. Because they find novels boring. There needs to be no other reason. Finding something uninteresting (including my own novels sadly) is a human emotion that does not need to explain itself. But still, you may want me to explain, so I will try: Most men have no curiosity about the lives of people they do not know, especially made-up people; and they lack the narcissism to connect the drama of fictitious people with their own lives. As a result, they are unable to overlook unremarkable plot lines and unremarkable scenes, particularly in ‘literary’ novels.

Also, if they are over the age of 30, they are entrapped by an imbecilic but powerful question: ‘What is the takeaway?’ If something is not entertaining, men can still soldier on, like going to a gym, but they need to know what ‘use’ it will be. I agree it is a foolish way to be, but this is how most adults, not just men, are today.

In my view, reading is the highest form of entertainment, especially when a book gets going, but I completely understand why some people might find it boring. As the American writer David Foster Wallace said, “I have friends—intelligent friends—who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored—there’s an almost dread that comes up… about having to be alone and having to be quiet.”

Actually, reading his ‘great’ novel, Infinite Jest, has been more dreadful to many people than loneliness. Also, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Their works are so dense that even fans admit to suffering through them. They do claim “rewards,” but that could be something they are trained to say by the establishment. I can see the point of working a bit to enjoy a work of art, but suffering it for weeks only reflects a lack of self-confidence to toss an acclaimed book aside as unworthy of your time.

Oddly, I get the sense that the chief patrons of these dense novels are mostly men. I don’t know of a single woman who would waste her time with a novel that gives her nothing but agony. So the irony is that men don’t read novels because they find even the good ones dreary, while those who do read the dense ones are usually male. (If you are one of those people who whine about “generalisations”, I like generalisations because they are humble forms of truth that accept they are not entirely right all the time.)

The veneration of novels as predominant temples of wisdom and schools of empathy is in great part the propaganda of writers and literary middlemen who have a vested interest in insulting those who don’t consume their goods.

First of all, the novel, especially the vaunted literary novel, is a luxury enterprise, the preserve of the upper class. Most of world literature is the point of view of the top 2%. I would even say all of literature is just that, when you consider that the top 2% regulates what is ‘literature.’ You don’t have to be in awe of it. But I would say this: of all the things the rich have made, this is probably the most enjoyable.

Women readers have been pushing male novelists out of the mainstream market because they are naturally drawn to what other women have to say. Perhaps this points to how natural it is for men not to be all that interested in the things that interest women.

As women are the primary market for novels today, they have created a world where the most powerful people in publishing are mostly women. Some male literary superstars have endured, but even their fate rests on a special quality of women — they are generous to men, in the sense that they are somewhat interested in what men have to say. Men, in general, do not have that generosity. A lot of men, in my experience, have no interest in reading the thoughts and stories of women. Here, there is no villainy as such; it is just the way they are. It is a bit like how Indians are interested in reading about America, but Americans have no such reciprocal interest.

Between the genders there is a cultural deficit in curiosity that finances the progress of men. That has been narrowing in literature and other kinds of fiction, to the point that the male view of the world is not saleable anymore.

(Manu Joseph is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’, which is not a novel.)