Search Results
7/17/2025, 5:02:38 PM
>During the imperial heights of the “G.M.N.s,” Bellow’s Augie March could begin the novel that bears his name with the announcement, “I am an American, Chicago born” — a thrilling act of “assertive gusto,” in the words of a besotted Roth. Contemporary novels, on the other hand, might find insight by depicting straight white men as more ancillary in the broader sweep of the culture.
>An example I have noticed, as a straight white man who reads novels, is the use of the N.B.A. (the National Basketball Association, not the National Book Award) to ingeniously explore contemporary masculinity. Four recent books, not all by straight white men — Andrew Martin’s “Early Work,” Jackie Ess’s “Darryl,” Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” and Leo Robson’s “The Boys” — show male characters’ discursive encounters with that arena of transparently sublimated male (often Black male) ambition to suggest the characters’ status as spectators.
>Others have dramatized privilege and its discontents through plot. Writing in The Point, the critic Martin Dolan praised Andrew Lipstein’s recent novel “Something Rotten” — about a young, moderately canceled stay-at-home dad’s cosplaying embrace of a more retrograde idea of manhood — as signaling a way “that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.”
>Novels that honestly explore young straight white men, and their inner and outer conflicts with our era’s changing ideas about masculinity, gender, sex and power, will endure.
>And when they do, it will not be simply because they offer an alternative to the manosphere. “Is the idea that literary novels will save white men from the Tate brothers?” the novelist Sam Lipsyte said in an email. “I’m not sure I see that. Goebbels wrote a novel, you know.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
>An example I have noticed, as a straight white man who reads novels, is the use of the N.B.A. (the National Basketball Association, not the National Book Award) to ingeniously explore contemporary masculinity. Four recent books, not all by straight white men — Andrew Martin’s “Early Work,” Jackie Ess’s “Darryl,” Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” and Leo Robson’s “The Boys” — show male characters’ discursive encounters with that arena of transparently sublimated male (often Black male) ambition to suggest the characters’ status as spectators.
>Others have dramatized privilege and its discontents through plot. Writing in The Point, the critic Martin Dolan praised Andrew Lipstein’s recent novel “Something Rotten” — about a young, moderately canceled stay-at-home dad’s cosplaying embrace of a more retrograde idea of manhood — as signaling a way “that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.”
>Novels that honestly explore young straight white men, and their inner and outer conflicts with our era’s changing ideas about masculinity, gender, sex and power, will endure.
>And when they do, it will not be simply because they offer an alternative to the manosphere. “Is the idea that literary novels will save white men from the Tate brothers?” the novelist Sam Lipsyte said in an email. “I’m not sure I see that. Goebbels wrote a novel, you know.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
Page 1