If you read any contemporary fiction at all—at least any that has been written by men—you doubtless know the type already. David Foster Wallace’s hideous men, Keith Gessen’s sad young literary ones. In a classic New York Review of Books essay, ‘Great American Losers,’ Elaine Blair highlighted the work of Franzen, Shteyngart, and others, too. In the man who feels himself unloved and unlovable such writers had invented a new archetype, she suggested. His loserdom, she wrote, is total. It extends to his stunted career, his squalid living quarters, his deep unease in the world.
You can see why I have brought this up.
In the totality of this loserdom, though, Blair detected a kind of bad faith bargain with the reader. We fervently promise, she imagined these authors saying, to avoid the mistake of the late Updike novels: we will always, always, call our characters out when they’re being self-absorbed jerks and louts. As a result, their characters—often well-educated men like the writers themselves—feel almost like fictional confessions in advance, self-flagellating and repentant. They read a little like pre-emptive apologies to women on behalf of guilty bastards everywhere.
It is not that these characters are villains or anything. As Blair makes explicit, they are losers. But as Adelle Waldman once noted, discussing the essay in an interview, these authors, even as they appear to be writing in penance, also go to considerable lengths to distance themselves from their characters. They render the hideousness of them overwhelming, the intensity of their sadness absurd. The totality of their loserdom is towering, stultifying, unbound. This sets them apart from ordinary men—male authors, say—and renders them especially deserving of every sleight and humiliation coming their way. By creating such men, Blair and Waldman suggest, these authors are making a subtle attempt to circumvent charges of misogyny against themselves.
In the opening pages of The Only Story, Julian Barnes writes about the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic. Making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise, he says. It strikes me that this is what these authors are doing in creating the characters they do. We know that men are terrible, they say. But by acknowledging this—by writing about it—have we not proven ourselves to be less terrible? Anyway, they add, holding up their grotesqueries, their Steadmanesque lizard-people and gargoyles, get a load of these reprobates. Aren’t you glad we’re not like them?
At least Werther—the original sad young literary man—killed himself in earnest.
It may seem I am anticipating blowback as well, though that would also be to anticipate readers. It may seem I am apologising advance. But because my story actually happened, I face a different problem, a different challenge. I would like to apportion blame proportionally. I would like to think, as Tennessee Williams once said of A Streetcar Named Desire, that there are no good or bad people in this tale. That some were a little better or a little worse, but that all were activated more by misunderstanding than malice. I would like my story to be more nuanced than it is. I would like to think I am not a hideous man.
It is true I did not behave in a manner like the Attorney-General was alleged to have done. It is true I had not masturbated over anyone’s desk like a Coalition staffer on a tear. I had not, like the Queensland MP, taken lewd photographs or been a bully, or, like Adam Cullen, shot my biographer in the leg. But what sort of self-defence is that? Australia is not the sort of country where protesters are met with bullets in the street. I had always thought of him as a good bloke. Aren’t you glad I’m not like them?
She used to tell me I used too many quotations. That I should try to have an original thought. But there is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible to have one. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. I believe Mark Twain said that.
I am merely putting off the inevitable. I am not a good enough writer to skirt or shirk blame. I am not enough of a politician. Here we go, then. Hold on tight. It’s a long way down from here.