Why Doesn't Johnny Read Novels Anymore?

What's happened to the male fiction reader? Some answers you won't see in the NYT.

Quite a few years ago, I did a book signing event with several other novelists at a mall in suburban Pennsylvania. Actually, it was in a hallway at a mall. Few readers came to our table. Then a young man with a shaved head and an Anthrax t-shirt glanced at our dustcovers as he passed by and announced, “If one of these books has the word ‘fuck,’ ‘shit’ or ‘Satan’ in it, I’m buyin’ it!”

“That’s nothing,” I told him. “I have all three words on every other page.”

Which was pretty much true of my writing in those days. Unfortunately, the mass market paperback edition of my book cost $4.99 and the young man, who told me he was called “Stony,” only had four dollars. So I spotted him the difference and hoped he’d remember me for future books.

I never heard from Stony again, but I think about him often. Especially these days, when there’s a lot of talk about the disappearing male consumer of fiction.

Since the start of this year, the New York Times has run several pieces on the topic, provoking a deluge of letters and comments. The Atlantic, Vox and Literary Hub have also weighed in. When I read at libraries or appear at bookstores, a good ninety percent of the audience is usually female. And the men who are present are often older and flagrantly falling asleep. When I speak to friends who teach creative writing, they tell me they rarely have a straight man in their classes, and not that many gay men either.

A counterargument says the issue is overblown, and the frequently-cited 80-20 female-to-male reader split is poorly sourced. But in the words of the esteemed author Lenny Dykstra, I call bullshit. Look around any subway car or airport lounge, and tell me it’s a golden age for men reading novels.

It was not always this way. The fiction bestseller lists used to be bursting with testosterone. You had your John Updikes and your Philip Roths at the high literary end, and your slightly-less exalted Leon Urises, Mario Puzos and Herman Wouks somewhere below them in critical regard but above them in sales, and then your Mickey Spillanes and your Harold Robbins.

These days, it’s a lot of Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas. Good for them – and good for their readers. Making a living as a novelist is harder than ever – it was never easy – and everyone I know in a book club cherishes having a novel as a pretext to get together with friends.

But as a grumpy old guy who writes novels, I have a personal interest in figuring out what’s happened to male readers. But there’s also a broader social question about their scarcity.

Let’s tick off the obvious reasons and get to the less obvious ones.

1. People, in general, don’t read that much these days. Or they don’t read the way they used to. Yes, they look at short pieces on the web and social media posts. But, duh, attention spans are dwindling. It takes a lot less effort to get into a TikTok video or an Instagram post than a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. True, some version of this has been going on since the invention of the printing press. But the technological and digital target advances of the last couple of decades have eroded our ability to absorb longform narratives at an alarming rate of acceleration .

And let’s face it, a lot of guys would rather get the immediate dopamine rush from playing Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2 than the delayed gratification of slowly turning pages. “At least I get to win sometimes when I’m playing videogames,” a dude who works at CVS told me not long ago.

2. The way literature is taught in schools mostly sucks and turns off male readers. This is part of a general long-term trend in education with boys feeling alienated in the classroom and falling behind girls in academic achievement. You can read all about it in an important nonfiction book called The Trouble With Boys by Peg Tyre (and let me assure you that I have absolutely no ulterior motive for trying to get you spend your hard-earned cash to enrich the author’s lay-about husband). Annnyway…

Most boys come out of school thinking reading is a drag and novels have nothing to say to them. Or nothing they can use in their lives. Instead, the dreary apparatus of critical interpretation is imposed on what could have been engaging stories and kills whatever interest a boy raised on videogames might have had in All Quiet on the Western Front or To Kill A Mockingbird. Which leads to --

3. Men no longer see the point of novels. There is a saying, “Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” People used to read novels for two big reasons: escapism and information. But the novel itself moved away from the information business in the decades after World War II. If you look at reviews of novels by Dickens, Balzac, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, you’ll see critics praise them for conveying a sense of life. If you read Anna Karenina, you’ll not only learn a lot about marriage in 19^th century Russia, you’ll learn a lot about crop rotation while getting a total banger of a story.

Serious post-war fiction often turned inward or drifted toward metafiction, while the escapist market turned more dominant on the bestseller lists. Men get their information – and misinformation – elsewhere nowadays. And it’s not that people don’t write good realistic novels with a lot of information anymore – Jennifer Haigh’s industrial-strength Heat and Light is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in the last 20 years – but it’s hard to imagine such a book getting much traction in the current attention-deficit economy.

Men like getting information from other men. They don’t believe they get that out of novels anymore. Novels feel like work you don’t get paid for. And no one wants to work without getting paid.

4. The Oprahization of Fiction. I want to be careful about this one, because I think Oprah Winfrey has been a big net plus for the modern fiction market. A lot of the books she’s recommended are really good ones – including Anna Karenina, East of Eden, and yes, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (thanks a lot for blowing it, Big Mouth, when you said all those nasty things about her other picks). But for reasons that aren’t really Winfrey’s fault, her book club has led some readers to focus mainly on narratives about characters “who are just like me.” In other words, you’ll read a novel like Where The Crawdads Sing or She’s Come Undone because you directly identify with the suffering of the female protagonist. That’s great. Most of us are driven to read by a sense of recognition. The problem is that a wall goes up and many people won’t try to scale it. “Talk to my wife, she reads novels with her book club,” a lot of guys say when I meet them at social events. “I watch sports.”

5. There’s not enough naked people in serious storytelling anymore. A young man of my acquaintance (okay, actually, my older son) recently said, “When you watch The Sopranos, you’ll have a lot of really thoughtful, well-written scenes and then you’ll go to the Bada Bing.” When I started to debate that, he pointed out, “Dad, all the 70s movies you recommend have naked women in them” (in my defense, I’ll say he still hasn’t watched all the neo-realist Italian and French movies from the 40s that I’ve recommended). Along the same lines, Playboy used to publish stories by the likes of Doris Lessing, Annie Proulx, and Jorge Luis Borges on either side of its centerfolds.

Of course, that era is long-gone. And I’m actually not sure if it’s true that there’s not enough sex and nudity in modern fiction. But what I do think is true is that novels for a certain kind of male reader used to hold the promise of the forbidden. Novelists said things in their stories that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – be said in polite society, and could feel like a subversive activity. Personally, I’m never any good unless I’m saying something that I’m not supposed to say in a novel. Now that sense of transgressiveness has migrated to podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, the vast far reaches of the internet, and, I’m sorry to say, Donald Trump’s White House.

Meanwhile, fiction and, more specifically novels, have become the province of book groups and certain shrinking corners of academia. Those circles are largely female and largely well-behaved. There’s nothing wrong with being female and well-behaved. In fact, I’ll gladly admit to being one of those men who thinks women are generally smarter, less boorish and more perceptive than men. But if you’re sitting around with your friends and having a warm empathetic conversation about the latest Barbara Kingsolver or Ann Patchett, it’s not quite the same thing as reading Portnoy’s Complaint or page 27 of The Godfather in 1969.

That’s not to say that reading is just about greasy adolescent kicks. A little more than generation ago, Tim O’Brien wrote the following in his great book of short stories, The Things They Carried:“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

Anyone with a modicum of life experience can tell that’s an authentic voice speaking to the reader. But few men turn to novels looking for the kind of honesty now.

And that’s a shame, I think. Because we’re living in a fog of lies at the moment, some generated by political propagandists and corporate mouthpieces, and some created by AI creeping inexorably into our lives.

Earlier I reeled off a list of novels published in 1939, when the world was on the verge of a war that still defines us in many ways. I think we’re on the edge again right now. Guys could use some good human stories to get through all the bullshit.

And just in case, you think you get everything you need from YouTube or some streaming show, let me leave you with a quote from the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman. Grossman, who was one of the first eyewitnesses to write about the Holocaust as a war correspondent, said the following in his epic novel Stalingrad:

“When people read obscure novels, when they listen to over-complex music or look at a frighteningly unintelligible painting, they feel anxious and unhappy. The thoughts and feelings of the novel’s characters, the sounds of the symphony, the colours of the painting—everything seems peculiar and difficult, as if from some other world. Almost ashamed of being natural and straightforward, people read, look and listen without joy, without any real emotion. Contrived art is a barrier placed between man and the world—impenetrable and oppressive, like a cast-iron grille. But there are also books that make a reader exclaim joyfully, “Yes, that’s just what I feel. I’ve gone through that too and that’s what I thought myself.” Art of this kind does not separate people from the world. Art like this connects people to life, to other people and to the world as a whole. It does not scrutinize life through strangely tinted spectacles. As they read this kind of book, people feel that they are being infused with life, that the vastness and complexity of human existence is entering into their blood, into the way they think and breathe.”

I’d like to believe Stony, the kid I gave that dollar to, kept on reading novels like this.

But he probably didn’t.