Whatever Happened to Masculinity?

Cul de Sac
Scott Wrobel
Sententia Books, 2012

Cul de Sac Release Party
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
April 20, 7:30 p.m.

A month after AWP 2012, MCB still recalls its high points. For inspiration and motivation, there’s much to gain at AWP, despite the beginning writer’s despair at vanishing in a crowd of 10,000. Of course MCB never left Minneapolis, experiencing AWP through the lens of social media. Whether or not it happened the way MCB images is unimportant. It’s what’s taken away that counts, including the laughs. The image of Jarrett Haley, for example—editor of Bull: Men’s Fiction—defending his enterprise of masculinity against a rightly suspicious crowd of authoresses and editrices, conjures a fast-talking high-voiced politician who can’t quite make eye contact with a contracting circle of thoroughly pissed voters.

In reality it isn’t that funny. Nor, however, is it that one-dimensional. In an industry dominated by male authors and supported by female readers, a magazine promoting “men’s fiction” seems at first glance unnecessary and insulting, like tax breaks on the wealthy. Yet, as a male reader, Haley’s defense is provocative. The heart of his goal is to change publishing’s dynamic, at least in the sense of the men-don’t-read myth. While the real solution would start with an entire redesign of society, addressing gender inequality, empathy, all those wonderful things, and end with something like a book review publication geared more toward masculine sensibilities, Haley’s attempt is at least admirable. More importantly, it hints at something missing. While masculinity certainly exists in contemporary fiction, it seems polarized. Speaking purely in the realm of literature, you have hyper-masculinity as an exclusion of all else—something like McCarthy or Roth, if you want to go after the heavyweights—and the hyper consciousness of masculinity that portrays it as something in need of suppression and refusal (often portrayed ironically, with brutal, sociopathic narrators). This reflects our culture’s view of masculinity itself—as a joke, an exaggeration, or an intrusion of base animality into our thinking, feeling society. While the work and ideas of men are taken seriously, men themselves are not. There’s been a reduction of the male complexity, and masculinity has been relegated entirely to the realm of sex.

Before this descends into a chauvinist manifesto, let’s talk about books.

The Search for the Literary Mecca

What bookish type hasn’t had a fleeting fancy of moving to New York? The so-called Book Capital of the World, the city is legendary for its literary history. In today’s New York, scores of writers are taking root in Brooklyn, driven out of Manhattan by high rent and commercialization. Brooklyn—they say it’s the new Mecca for writers, a place where book stores thrive, where—unless you’re capable of tearing the fabric of space-time—you literally cannot attend every reading. It sounds delightful.

It’s because of this reputation that the mention of bookish New York has always struck a chord with the rest of the country, whether it be a chord of inspiration or a chord of aggravation. Not everyone wants to move to New York. Why, we wonder, should New York get all the glory? Sure it’s the locus of almost every major publisher and literary agent. Sure it’s where the majority of our nation’s top writers live. But is there really something intrinsic about New York that instills within writers some kind of literary spirit?

Tom Lutz of the Los Angeles Review of Books doesn’t think so.

A Book Lover’s Anxiety

One never wants to begin with a cliché. Surely, when we say that ignorance is bliss, our first authorial instinct is to cross it out and think of another way to say it. That’s what a writer would do, in fact. If there’s anything we learn from books it’s to recognize what has been said before. But that’s the darling thing about clichés: they carry more connotations that your average sentence, baggage hidden within each reader. Ignorance is bliss, when you think about it.

Most of us read the news. It doesn’t matter where we get it, as long as it’s news, even though when we say news what we really mean is updates. Here’s what’s changed about this war, here’s what hasn’t, here’s what you’re paying at the gas pump and here’s why, here’s what might lead to a new war, here’s why we’re too nihilistic to take war seriously these days.

One’s tempted to say we’d be better off not reading the news.