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The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."
Just some scattered thoughts.
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
...
It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.
For whatever reason, women seem more interested in fiction novels and men seem more interested in video games. There's some amount of crossover of course, but they're exceptions that prove the general rule. It only makes sense that women would dominate the field considering they're far more interested in it.
Of course there's the societal issues when reading of any sort, including vapid fiction novels, is held on a ridiculous pedestal whereas video games are seen as a vice and a waste of time. In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.
It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.
Are they not? They absolutely were when I was in high school, including problems of girls reading Twilight and Harry Potter during class time.
Edit: I guess I can't say for certain the hrs/day, but it was very common to see girls reading the YA craze du jour during lunch, free periods, or basically any other time they could.
It's interesting that Harry Potter (maybe Hunger Games but definitely not to the same extent) was as far as I know the last book to really have mass, cross-gender appeal among the youth. I think the male-female split on Potter fans was, maybe not fifty fifty, but probably closer to such than any fantasy YA book since. Doubt we'll ever see another such phenomenon.
It’s hard, and probably not predictable, but…is there anything stopping it from happening again?
No appetite. I really can’t see this being the case, but include it for completeness. The upside is just too huge.
Business model. The existence of HP means that authors and publishers know a book can make it that big. I’d HP benefited from the shock of its success, a snowball effect, maybe that can’t replicate. Not sure about this.
Cultural inoculation. The concept of a multimedia empire is more familiar. Maybe cynicism would keep another property from getting such clout. You see it with MCU exhaustion, which is sort of its own phenomenon. If this were going to make the difference, I think it would have reared its head before HP. Star Wars or something. Unlikely.
Author inoculation. Maybe everyone writing children’s books, now, is familiar with HP or was even raised on it. Like fantasy authors desperately trying to avoid imitating Lord of the Rings. I don’t think this works for the same reasons as 1.
Market crowding. Is it possible that the saturation of good books, and connection to reviews and recommendations, would prevent any one from getting such share? I could see it.
We have [new book] at home. There are now parents who grew up on HP. What’s to stop them from just giving an old copy instead? It still holds up, though new readers will not benefit from the bizarre cultural fervor. I don’t think this alone preempts other novels, but it could contribute.
That seat is taken. Sort of a combination of 5. and 6. If HP really filled an unmet demand in children’s publishing, then Rowling may have broken the dam. But why would that prevent new kids from joining their own trend? Is their energy all going to some other form of media?
All in all, I feel like it could happen again. It’d be a black swan, or whatever the positive equivalent is, but there are a lot of people trying to hit that jackpot. In the absence of a really strong structural factor, I would expect kids to latch on to something. Then again, I was a nerd who read waaaaaay more books growing up, so I might have the wrong baseline.
If true, I'd guess a combination of 1 and 2: boys are so toxic, the upside of providing something they would want to buy is more than offset by the social consequences of doing so. It is therefore safer to intentionally exclude them.
Not a chance.
No, seriously, where are you getting this idea? Have you seen evidence that publishers are thinking like this?
Because I’m having a hard time imagining anyone actually endorses that.
Book publishers specifically, no, it's not something I follow. But this seems the be a trend with other products that have previously considered what boys and young men like: movies, comic books, and video games. Beer... They will happily alienate their male audience if they believe it will be a political liability.
Women control the majority of consumer spending. Punching down at boys and men is just good business.
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