But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.
This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.
As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.
Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.
Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.
I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.