Consider the middle-aged male reader of literary fiction. Previous iterations purportedly read Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Cheever, Roth. Today, I suspect that middle-aged male readers of literary fiction may not even exist?
I scroll through the offline profiles of friends from high school: middle-aged, mostly white, male, college-educated, liberal or apolitical/independent; one reads thrillers, another specializes in (professionally edits) sci-fi fantasy, another prefers fat biographies/histories, one read American Psycho in 1992 but hasn’t mentioned a book since. I’m glad to be able to call 75% of these old friends readers in general but they are not readers of contemporary literary fiction.
Friends from college? Do any of them read contemporary literary fiction? And by read I mean do they always have a “literary” novel on them, contemporary or not? Do they prefer to read fiction that’s primarily based in reality, with an emphasis on the prose? Is reading literary fiction integrated into their life? Do they often read translated titles? Can they name a single translator? One male friend from college mentioned reading an Adam Haslett novel a few years ago and I suspect he reads regularly, or at least intermittently. Long ago, my first year out of college, he introduced me to A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, and noticing that I rarely read fiction originally published in English he encouraged me to read Carver and Steinbeck.
But generally you get the point: I can’t think of many male friends or acquaintances from my youth, high school, college, or even former or current male colleagues at work who I’d consider committed readers of contemporary literary fiction.
Of course middle-aged male writer friends are committed readers of literary fiction. But they don’t count. Among the civilian population, at most maybe someone brings up a random novel they’ve read recently — my current manager once mentioned enjoying Let the Great World Spin. He also mentioned going to see Beck. Just trying to make some conversation at a pre-pandemic social event, knowing I like reading and listening to music while I work.
I query the socials . . .
A bookseller knows many such middle-aged male readers but, like others, suggests they always have a manuscript lurking in a drawer. An exceptional Scottish translator knows “loads” of middle-aged male readers. An author/professor based in NYC knows middle-aged male readers, “definitely.” Women unaffiliated with “the literary arts” mostly reply that “yes” they know middle-aged male readers, but most actual middle-aged men who comment on my post say they aspire to read >12 reputable literary novels a year but truthfully it’s more like two, max, mixed with some non-fiction, hundreds of hours reading to children, and “a billion hours wasted” lurking on the socials.
So: OK. Yeah. Middle-aged male readers of literary fiction certainly exist. In some circles, particularly among urban intellectuals, they’re apparently even common. But in my isolated little human experience per my general sense of my current surrounding suburban environment, the middle-aged male occupants of the single-family homes don’t seem like big readers, or at least books never come up in conversations (distracted by children all around), although since we moved to this setting less than a year before the pandemic began I can’t really say I’ve had a chance to assess their bookshelves, let alone the existence of their bookshelves.
And honestly if I were to wander into our home without knowing me I would not be all that impressed by the books on the built-in bookshelves on either side of our fireplace — I’d have to be invited upstairs to my office to review my personal bookshelves, which previously in our Philadelphia rowhome had covered an entire wall of the first room when you walked in and could be seen from the street if the shades were up. So it’s possible that neighbors harbor sick personal libraries, rooms devoted to literary fiction, but I doubt it.
It’s also possible that the thing about the average American male middle-aged reader in the 1970s devouring Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Cheever, Roth, Nabokov, et al., is a total fantasy, but then again it was an era before the VCR, cable TV, DVDs, ESPN, the internet, quality video games, and Netflix. All the distractions they had back then were cigarettes, magazines, card games, hi-fidelity sound systems, wielding the soldering iron on a Heathkit project, and serious novels by men with two-syllable surnames (other than Roth and Nabokov) who sometimes published in Playboy.
And all there is now of course is a little bit of everything all of the time.
I feel like the time has come in this weblog post to transition to brief superficial impressions of newly published “major” novels by the middle-aged white male (and tall — both are also fairly tall) writers mentioned in the title.
I don’t have much of a sense of the EXISTENCE of middle-aged male readers, so as a middle-aged male reader myself, although aware that I am not representative of the middle-aged male reader, I suppose it’s possible that a shred of my middle-aged male readership can be extrapolated to encompass a more pervasive phenomenon among the middle-aged and the male who consistently read literary fiction? That is, simply, put, in short: maybe the following little story may resonate with far-flung middle-aged male readers: I pre-ordered the new Knausgaard and Franzen novels, excited when I heard about them. When I saw that initial reviews by lucky ARC recipients were favorable, I prioritized consumption (that is, I read them with coffee in the morning before getting to work instead of running, writing, reading the internet, or sleeping an extra hour before the day started).
About twenty years ago I read something about how Moody, Eugenides, Antrim, Franzen, and DFW had assumed the position of Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Roth, et al. (It’s possible I’m thinking of a DFW interview in which he lists white male writers over six feet tall who wear glasses?) Now it seems like any idea of constructing a short list of middle-aged male writers every middle-aged male reader reads, acquiring their novels new in hardcover as soon as they’re available, is impossible, or the preferences are splintered, or such writers are lampooned as the writers someone like me would write about.
There’s a sense that the whole notion expressed in this weblog post’s subtitle is fraught — why stop at age and gender? Why not include race, class, sexuality, and a dozen other phenotypical characteristics as well as not immediately apparent cultural-consumption preferences, abstract theological positions, and foundational solo/societal experiences until it’s clear we’re really only talking about one particular peculiar person who fits the heavily modified description of the word “reader,” that is, me, the author of this weblog post?
There’s also a sense that the whole notion expressed in this weblog post’s subtitle is stupid (for example, the notion that there is a monolithic entity out there in the wild known as the middle-aged male).
And further there’s a sense that the whole notion expressed in the subtitle of this little weblog post is “irrelevant” (how does any of this have anything to do with eradicating the coronavirus, reversing climate change, ensuring social justice, combating rising fascism, and championing all the other stuff deemed significant?)
But then with all that said or slurred or glanced at askance I’d say . . . oh, I really don’t want to start listing authors and then excluding them for one reason or the other.
Let’s just say that, for me, I can really think of only two white male middle-aged tall living authors either from Norway or of Norwegian descent who consistently publish work that 1) could be considered emanating from their prime (their best days are now and forthcoming) and 2) seem to have achieved at this point and to a degree something of a semblance of the readership among middle-aged male readers similar to that of the imagined ’70s heyday of Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Roth, et al.
And so in late September and early October 2021, when 666- and 580-page new novels by Knausgaard and Franzen were published, respectively, it seemed to me reasonable to post one particular/peculiar middle-aged male reader’s impressions of both novels, side by side in succession, like this:
The Morning Star
by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Martin Aiken)
Theological thriller, philosophical pulp, an extraordinarily well-characterized, dramatized elaboration of the internal/external worlds thematic focus of The Seasons Quartet, perfect for the longer nights and dark mornings of autumn, as neighbors decorate yards with plastic representations of skeletons and ghouls.
Through the first two-hundred pages I wasn’t sure about it, doubted its page count (666), thought it contrived and manipulated with prevalent one-sentence paragraphs like in a Blake Crouch novel. But then it started to take off, thanks in part to cliffhangers at the end of each section either for the new star or minor natural and some major supernatural oddities that began to proliferate, yet never in such a way as to overwhelm the emphasis on character and interiority — and I was in it to win it and very much recommend it, not just to Knausgaard fans (or middle-aged male readers).
Structured as a series of first-person stories, each titled by the narrator’s first name, many of which repeat, two of which (Arne, Egil) resemble Knausgaard, but also a few are women, a middle-aged priest of Norway, a young convenience-store clerk, a night shift worker at a mental hospital married to Jostein, a “hideous man”-type journalist whose idfulness and general hatefulness charge the pages through the middle and end like booster rockets whenever he appears. There are also two sections — one about a young rocker named Emil and the other about a 33-year-old curator mother married to a 60-year-old famous architect — that don’t repeat and seem almost like teases for future installments of what seems like it will definitely continue as a series.
Knausgaard proved himself a master of suspense during the rising waters in the Noah section in A Time for Everything, and here it’s really the same dynamic on a book-length level. Rising drama threatening everything we take for granted, all the little movements of the day, the common conversations and perceptions we barely register, especially all the time we spend trying to connect with loved ones but also find some time alone. In this there’s a bit about a car accident and how the seriously injured family members will never sit around the kitchen again in the same way as they ready themselves for school — extended over the course of the novel is the same dynamic, which infects the reader (me at least) with a sense of gratitude and amplifies perception of the everyday surrounding world, including thoughts and feelings and dreams, ie, the internal world.
But also this achieved simple straightforward spookiness. Yes, I was spooked one night as I put down the book and turned off the light, listening to insects, animals (owls, foxes, our cat), and distant thunder.
Only criticism is the Emil section where he talks about a band called Ohia (presumably it’s Songs:Ohia), but I did love when Emil talks about the warmth and effortless licks in David Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name” (cool to see a suggested Garcia reference in a Knausgaard novel). The site for the Norwegian edition links to Spotify playlists for each narrator.
Also liked that it ends with an essay, a la War & Peace, although the formal similarities end there.
I had hopes for this and looked forward to its arrival, thought it maybe a little hokey and underdone through the first two-hundred pages, but then couldn’t put it down until the end, reading 100+ pages a day. For a book in part about belief, let’s just say I remain a believer in this author — I’m actually low-key astounded by his ability to meld “high” and “low” literature in a convincing, moving, intellectually satisfying or at least intriguing fashion, all while evoking the world around Bergen, Norway, as well as believably describing worlds of the mind, imagination, and the beyond.
Also, not that any of this matters but this is printed on the softest, silkiest, thin-yet-not-translucent paper, which I noticed immediately when opening the book and again when opening the new Franzen book that arrived as I neared the end. The paper in the Franzen book seems like it’s much lower quality and the book itself is thicker (see green book above) than the Knausgaard book (see orange-ish book above) despite having 130 fewer pages. I should also mention that I did achieve a minor silly goal of finishing The Morning Star the day Crossroads arrived — middle-aged white male reader loser that I am, I wanted to read these two big fall novels back to back and see if there’s anything of interest there in the overlap.
Crossroads: The Key to All Mythologies #1
by Jonathan Franzen
So well-done, engaging, unpredictable, likeable, at times profound, moving at times, extraordinarily well-characterized, dramatic (plot-propelling conflict ever-arising), with stretches of believable, often religious/morality-related interiority, steady third-person focused on a Hildebrandt family member per chapter, dealing with all the vices and virtues of life, patient narrative pace that’s nevertheless always revved up in veering, vervy language, sentences so often starting with some clause creating anticipation for subject and verb, with the locations and psychiatric concerns and some thematics (dynamics of generosity as in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) related to DFW grafted into the novel’s structure and skin, especially with Perry (160 IQ, drug problem, so smart he’s essentially stupid, ultimately tragic).
Really enjoyed reading nearly 100 pages a day, could see the world and these people and care for them, appreciated and admired the novel, but also so often everything seemed to reflect on the author: the characters’ insecurities are the author’s insecurities (Russ’s envy of the cooler Ambrose suggests acknowledgment of Franzen’s status?) and the implausibly obsessive calibrations of interpersonal power and IQ seem to emanate from the author more than from characters. The world, although so vividly evoked and realistic, seemed mechanized if never false, arranged exactly this way by the author, the one true God of that world, each part orchestrated and intentional, rarely intuitive or inadvertent (KOK keyword).
The single lingering impression is that Franzen is a masterful author whose mastery is the single lingering impression — I don’t come away from the book thinking about its themes while otherwise doing dishes etc or with an image imprinted forever in my imagination (no matter how vivid the scenes are) or a sense of wonder or mystery or elevated perception of the inexhaustible abundance of life — I come away thinking Franzen has defended his status as a major American writer.
Which is weird. It’s like he gets an A+, like he knows the contemporary literary fiction novel production game and plays it so wonderfully well, but there’s a grade beyond grades that’s unattainable for him, in part because he’s too in control, there’s not enough room for the reader to co-create the text?
Laughed aloud twice although most of the book is written with a sense of humor, veer and verve — the humor is more in the implausibility of every family member undergoing a major life crisis at the exact time. Will definitely read Crossroads 2 and 3 and will probably even watch the related series on Netflix or HBO.
Of note, the guitar guy on the cover is playing a blues shuffle in A, like Johnny B. Goode more than Crossroads, but at least it’s a blues rhythm form — a meaningless superficial cover detail I liked.
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En conclusión: I recommend both these novels to all readers, regardless of age (neither are suitable for youngsters but one need not be middle-aged to enjoy them), gender, race, sexual/political/spatiotemporal orientation, Norwegian-ness, or height. Both novels are longish but compel consistent reading thanks to engaging believable character complexities, cliffhangers, plot propulsion, and multiple perspectives (various characters narrating each chapter in The Morning Star; close third-person POV following a different family member in each chapter in Crossroads). Both have a theological emphasis, a spiritual one, stating that God exists in the spaces between people. The spirituality in the Knausgaard is more mystical and individual, and in the Franzen it’s more related to service, community, and what it means to be good.
Overall, now a few days after finishing Crossroads and about ten days since finishing The Morning Star, there’s an image in the Knausgaard novel I can’t shake involving a humanoid in the woods confronting a naked escapee from a mental institution — there’s something about that image that opens a door in my imagination to the supernatural, to old ways of facing the infinite and the unknowable. And there’s something about that sense, being infected with it while reading one night, that Tolstoy believed was the highest achievement of art. Such infection has nothing to do with Knausgaard himself or this reader’s demographics or anything qualitative like that. When I think about these two novels and compare and also contrast them, both offer silent solitary absorption in their worlds, but only one activates the imagination in a way that achieves an atavistic evocation approaching magic.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).