Young Male Novelists, Endangered Species
Coverage Check 10-11/2021 (Part II/II): Bland sex scenes and bad interviews
Geoffrey Mak likes couples. He likes hanging out with couples, he discovered this fall, at dinner with one such couple, where they discussed Semiotext(e) and Dash Snow among other art or art-adjacent topics. I know all this because Geoff told me, or rather everyone, via his missive, the inaugural 7 PM gossip column on Spike. I know (of) Mak only through Twitter. He’s the author of the upcoming Mean Boys and a former Berlin it-boy [also one of my favourite writers]. He too knows a lot of people on the internet. Perhaps art now is an interrupted or broken succession of DMs, mentions and tags [and emails if you work in PR, cos calling is still not back in vogue somehow]. Three openings later, he crashes a party, but as the night progresses nothing has happened [as far as a gossip column is concerned that is]. In his missive, he references the “literary controversy” around Sam Pink and Sean Thor Conroe. The sad part of this ordeal (in retrospect) is that no one slept with anyone’s girlfriend, no one stole anyone’s boyfriend, no one got in a punch up. One person got an advance, the other legitimacy via proxy without having to sign a contract with a major publisher. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re writing a gossip column, but there’s no(t enough) gossip, invite me along - I might just go off the rails again just to make something great happen. Mak offers a breakdown of market categories clarifying distinctions that few people seem to understand [myself being one of these people], but annoyingly his missive doesn’t offer much of a resolution as to whether sex sells.
Paul Dalla Rosa bagged an interview with Dean Kissick (perhaps the most name-dropped person in NYC, according to Mak) for the fourth edition of Bad Artist Statement. In his recent visit to Italy, Kissick had many “small epiphanies” precipitated by his visits to Rome’s art spaces. He attributes the absence of an ecstatic experience during his sojourn to his [subconscious] resolution to force one. Whether this is one of the epiphanies he enjoyed through his art marathon isn’t clear, but what’s certain in this interview is Kissick’s desire for the next stage in his life: to be married and have kids.
Kissick intentionally created a packed schedule for himself, seeing as much as possible in as short a period of time, mirroring how he experiences a large scale event, an art fair or a biennale. In this latest marathon, he kept himself caffeinated, writing at cafes in between seeing things, which he describes as the best way to live [whether this is specific to Rome isn’t clear]. His interest in novels seems to outshine even that of art. He considers the novel to be the highest form of art, but believes certain of its qualities, described here as a “transcendental ambition or magical urge”, have been lost. He tells Dalla Rosa he’s “always working on a novel,” has been for the past half decade. “That’s what I’d like to do with my life, write a good novel.”
Marie Calloway got her LONG, FAR TOO LONG overdue reevaluation (and retribution, somewhat) without even getting involved. Reese Witherspoon would butcher her vision, but I have to agree with Scott McClanahan’s idea that her work should be let loose on the moms of America.
Ed Luker read Beautiful World, Where are You and found its sex scenes mundane in the first of a two-part essay-cum-memoir on below deck. Luker isn’t impressed, but he believes the novel to be “honest” as it embraces the first person narration of how fame isn’t all that good as it turns out and hasn’t brought the protagonist self-enlightenment or whatever she thought she’d get with it. “Shatter all the exhausting lies,” is how he presents it - and he’s exhausted. In the second part, he references an idea he had for an essay in the first half of the 2010s that he never wrote and contextualises his Substack as an attempt to not let go of ideas, to not let them “haunt the graveyard of my imagination.”
John Phipps is splitting his focus from books to also consider paintings. “We are gonna try some stupid stuff at some point too,” he promises in his latest, reviewing Constable at the RA, which had him thinking of the inevitable ending of all things, the past and how it is pondered on by the present, as well as the present and how it might be pondered on by the future.
Rob Doyle (one of the few writers published by a major press worth reading according to Adam Lehrer) was interviewed by Berlin’s Shakespeare and Sons describing Autobibliography as his pop book. In typical fashion, this interview doesn’t seem to go anywhere. “Let’s start from the beginning,” the interviewer says, but the question isn’t about how he lost his virginity? Doyle lists his fav spots in Berlin - KitKatClub, Berghain and “grimy dive bars scattered around the city” - but no one thought to push further, to get him to talk about just what it is that makes them so special and what he’s gotten up to in these places over the three years he spent in Berlin, what “chemicals” best go with an one nighter and which ones are better if you’re partnered up but planning to fuck in the back rooms of Berghain. “Existence alone has never been enough,” he says in a Lana-esque moment, “I’ve always been compelled to search - in high and low and sometimes very frightening places - for a meaning.” What those places are is never discussed. When interviews could be used to push the subject of a book further, get the author to spill even more than they did in the book itself, everyone seems to be playing it so safe leading this reader to ask - what was even the point of it? Doyle is off to Asia at the beginning of the new year, so at the very least there’s a new book to look forward to when he returns and has metabolised the experience.
Barry Pierce got a lot of heat when he pointed out the lack of young male novelists in contemporary publishing.
Ever the enfant terrible of criticism, he ended up writing on the subject for Dazed further expanding his mission to making books and writing about books cool again [unwavering in his belief that to do so book criticism needs to move from the stuffy environs of broadsheets to glossier outlets].
Pierce is hardly the first to explore the territory. In fact, his piece can be read as the final part of a trilogy that began back in 2020 with Luke Brown’s Emasculated: The Problem of Men Writing about Sex and continued earlier this year with Johanna Thomas-Corr’s How women conquered the world of fiction [out of the three writers Thomas Corr, it should be noted, received the grandest level of vitriol online precisely because she is a woman and in writing on the subject was effectively branded a “gender traitor”].
Pierce’s piece doesn’t pretend to have the solutions. As he points out, “you find yourself going in circles” when attempting to figure out the reasons behind this. His distinction, however, is an important one: it is *young* male writers that are the endangered species. In an Elephant write-up on Marlowe Granados’ debut Happy Hour, Eloise Hendy proves Pierce’s point by only referencing male artists who are either long dead or 100, as evidence of an unfair imbalance of who gets to engage in hedonism [in writing]. Eliza Clark agrees with Pierce: “If we wish to truly champion diversity, we must include men.” Megan Nolan went a step further: “It seems fairly unbelievable to me that there is such a drought of weird, brilliant, dynamic, shocking novels about men by men being written at the moment.” Pierce believes the issue to lie at an industry level. Men are writing, but they’re not getting published. Alex Allison was dropped when his sophomore attempt, a Premier League football gay bash, did not agree with his agent. Looking outside the scope of *young* male novelists, the overall state of affairs isn’t faring that far better. Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, will be publishing his next book with Unbound (?!), effectively resorting to crowdfunding its release.
Part of Pierce’s polemic, he says that writing novels isn’t “chic” anymore. The sentiment he expresses can partly also be reflected in an essay by John Merrick in Soft Punk: “Culture may be for everyone, but clearly not everyone wants the kind of culture they are given.” Merrick interrogates the publishing industry with a class focus, but arrives at a similar conclusion: “Books are less central to the overall shape of culture than they once were.” Pierce traces this issue in the bizarre fixation with privacy, resulting in a lack of libidinal energy in the book world. Still, he believes the voices of young men are important, especially during “our current politically and culturally fraught times.”
Is 2022 the year male writers get their balls back?