The NY Times Still Cannot Talk About Class

Or, The NY Times STILL Cannot Talk About Class

Back when I was in the NYPD, my cop buddies ripped me for subscribing to the New York Times. Even before Trumpism barreled its way into my Squad Room circa 2015, reading The Gray Lady was derided as an act of liberal elitism. In police circles, that kinda behavior will get you labeled. And not kindly. Worse (in their eyes), I was a Democrat. I survived, I like to think, due to my endearing charm and Christopher Hitchens-like wit.

Um. That’s probably stretching things. Let’s just say I got by.

I never considered myself a liberal elite. How could I? I was born and raised in the Bronx, three generations sharing a two-bedroom, one-bath walk-up. Attended NYC public schools. Was the first college graduate in my family, a degree funded by Pell Grants and micro-scholarships. I worked part-time (for The Gap and Levi’s; I knew my demin) through high school and college, and was later a union member and delegate raised by my union-member grandfather. He was a WW II vet and lifelong laborer who read the Daily News always and The Times on Sundays. It was important, he taught me, to reach beyond your tiny patch of the world, or you risk staying there forever. Since retiring and pivoting to writing, I’ve kept reading the Times. More and more, though, I feel like it would rather I not.

Oh yeah, I’m a straight white dude. That’s relevant.

On July 3rd, the paper published The Death and Life of the Straight Male Novelist, by Marc Tracy. This comes shortly after a June 25th piece by Joseph Bernstein, Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?. Both are concerned with the much-discussed disinterest in reading or writing fiction among A) men in general, and, B) straight white men in particular. Given I’m an agented writer with a novel on submission (have I mentioned that?), I’m going to concentrate on that second article.

Bernstein opens by referencing Jacob Savage’s Compact essay on the Vanishing White Male Writer. I hadn’t read it, but had seen it referenced in Substack Notes and X/Twitter posts. Savage digs into data regarding literary award nominees, arguing that publishing has frozen out straight white males, who are “Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them.” Statistics can be manipulated to support an argument, though, and I’m more interested in Bernstein’s reaction to Savage’s essay.

In Bernstein’s piece, Francine Prose stated: “You’ve [white men] run the world for thousands of years, and now you’re feeling disenfranchised?” The novelist Rebecca Makkai said none of the several prize juries she has sat on — including for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards (a free expression organization that had to cancel its 2024 awards after a number of writers argued it didn’t condemn the Israeli incursion into Gaza strongly enough) — made decisions with the intention of excluding white men. “It was just that it was, book by book, the very best books we saw.” That may be true; art is subjective.

Bernstein goes on to reference the rise of “The Manosphere”, that loose collection of podcasts and online personalities discussing and prescribing how men should behave in this cultural moment. Bernstein generalizes them as “often coarse” and “right-leaning”. I don’t know if that’s true, cause I’m still out here reading books.

The thrust of the piece—or at least of some quoted therein—is that straight white men don’t write novels because publishing is no longer interested what it means to be a straight white man. It’s time for the lived experiences of long-ignored groups—Blacks, gays, women, queer, Latinos, transgender, etc…—to be heard. And they absolutely deserve that; read Percival Everett’s James or Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain or Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake and try arguing those novels don’t speak to a universality of human experience. You can’t, because they’re sublime. But those books are compelling not because of their authors’ identities—Black, gay, female—but because they’re flat-out good.

The support for author identity and lived experience mattering over (almost) everything else seems to come from the notion that white men have been in charge for centuries and fucked it all up. Again, maybe. The problem with that argument is that it assumes a universality of experience among all straight white men. In the Times piece, Bernstein writes, “Few are saying there ought to be no more male main characters. What they are suggesting is that such figures ought no longer have main character syndrome if they are to be responsive to this era’s gender relations.” Rebecca Makkai adds, “Right now one of the most important things being written about in America is identity.”

But she and Bernstein and everyone else quoted in the piece avoid that one issue the NY Times never approaches: class. You think my grandfather, who worked hauling crates of grade school lunches into his seventies, lived the same as some navel-gazing Iowa MFA grad? Or that I had a similar upbringing as David Foster Wallace, whose parents were college professors and lifelong academics? Lived experience, for many in publishing today, comes down to race or gender or sexuality or ethnicity. I suspect that’s because some (many?) white (male and female) writers, editors, and agents are comfortable apologizing for their whiteness, but not the inherited financial privilege that got them into their elite private schools and overpriced universities. Or got them through grad school debt-free. Or subsidized the insane rent NYC—publishing’s home—requires of those who want to live there. Cruise literary agency websites. Young white women will flood your eyeballs. Clock the Sarah Lawrence University mentions. You’ll run out of ink, fast. They represent a big part of the small group of gatekeepers determining who is worth reading, and what voices ought to be amplified. And many are, I think, disinterested in the experiences of straight, white, working-class men. Maybe because they’ve never been around any. In a recent Substack essay, Alex Perez speaks to the issues facing the American literary man better than I can. His work’s a must-read.

Before I was a writer, I was a reader. Born fatherless and urban-poor, I became a cop because it offered a reliable salary and solid health insurance. The concerns of the working-class are always financial. We couldn’t buy many books, but the Jerome Park Branch of the New York Public Library was a regular stop for my grandmother and I. She raised me on worn hardbacks wrapped in that crinkly clear plastic. I started on Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child and Dean Koontz and Stephen King (all white men, hm…), but they primed me for my later interest in Cormac McCarthy, Walter Mosley, David Foster Wallace, Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, S.A. Cosby, Colson Whitehead, George Pelecanos, John Le Carré, and James Ellroy.

I read women too, but listed these authors for a reason: I read male writers because I grew up without a father. That fact narrowed my life options from jump. Destined me for a small, cheap college and a career in civil service. It is as immutable as my skin color or my gender or my sexuality. The Nickel Boys and Infinite Jest may come from different places, but they each hit me deep. And not just because Colson Whitehead’s a Black man and DFW’ was a straight white man. There is, I hope, a lot more to great storytelling than writers’ demographics.

But I wonder: is publishing just serving the customer? According to a 2019 Guardian article, women buy an estimated 80% of all novels. Women are, broadly and perhaps stereotypically-speaking, more empathetic. They certainly support novelists. I write crime fiction and go to a lot of conferences. Women attendees outnumber men by a significant margin. Excluding my author friends, if the men I know read at all, it’s history and biography, exclusively. They say new fiction doesn’t speak to them. In May of 2024, I asked Twitter if men still read novels. The post got 43K impressions and a hundred responses (for scope, I have less than 700 followers). Clearly, something’s going on.

And dying media outlets seem uninterested in exploring what.