It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard: a man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.
At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But, no, this guy really wanted to read Northanger Abbey.
Men are reading less. Women make up 80 per cent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J Morris wrote in a New York Times essay titled The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.
The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called Hot Dudes Reading.
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Some of the most charming encounters I’ve had with men were about books.
The film director and comedian Mike Nichols once turned to me at a dinner in Los Angeles and told me his favourite novel was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.
I was startled because I have read that book over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics: someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)
I went to interview the playwright Tom Stoppard in Dorset, southern England, a few years ago. The playwright has no computer and is not on social media. He writes with a Caran d’Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel.
Stoppard had a romantic-looking bookcase full of first editions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. He complained that his book collection was regularly raided by “American burglars”.
It was fascinating. I felt the same when I interviewed the actor Ralph Fiennes, and it turned out that he loves Shakespeare and reciting Beckett at 3am under the stars.
He recalled that his mother, a novelist named Jennifer Lash, read him bedtime stories from Shakespeare, including Henry V and Hamlet.
“My mother said, ‘I’ll tell you a story. There was this young man and his father’s died, and he’s a young prince’. And she told it to me in her own words.”
The US president projects a crude, bombastic image of masculinity. I can always escape by rereading Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and falling back in love with Eugene Wrayburn, an indolent, upper-crust barrister who turns out to have every quality a man should have.
I asked my friend Richard Babcock, a former magazine editor and novelist who taught writing at Northwestern University in Illinois, about the male aversion to reading. His new novel is called A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon, set in the Nevada desert in 1954 under the shadow of nuclear bomb testing.
It follows three people whose lives are entwined. “The book is about guilt, adultery, murder, a chase through the mountains – you know, the usual day-to-day stuff,” Babcock said wryly.
“Not to blame the current cultural landscape on Ronald Reagan,” he said, “but I think the obsession with money and wealth that arrived in the 1980s may have encouraged the false idea in men that there was little to learn from a novel. If you want tips on how to crush your rival, better to read nonfiction.
“Similarly, with the education focus turning to math and science, gateways to good-paying jobs, the value of the humanities has been degraded. And we don’t hear enough about how novels, sweeping over landscapes, personalities, ideas, events can open perspectives and discipline the mind.”
The writer Susan Sontag once said novels can “enlarge your sympathies”, preventing you from “shrivelling and becoming narrower”. That’s more essential as everyone is hunching over fiendish little personal devices.
She called fiction an axe that “kind of splits you open”, shakes you out of your crusty habits and preferences “and gives you a model for caring about things that you might otherwise not care about”.
As Babcock pointed out, the decline of literary fiction with everyone has left romance and historical fiction, traditionally favoured by women, the dominant genres.
Still, he said, he was “a bit distrustful of the men-don’t-read-novels lament”, noting that “my friends eagerly read novels, even returning to the classics such as Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. Some wonderful male writers are turning out thoughtful, dramatic books such as Daniel Mason’s North Woods and Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound”.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how getting my master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University underscored for me that we needed the humanities even more when technology was stripping us of our humanity.
Works such as Frankenstein and Paradise Lost shed light on the narcissism of the powerful, male tech geniuses birthing a world-shattering new species: artificial intelligence.
After that, a New Yorker named Paul Bergman emailed me an invitation to his book club – all men, lawyers and a judge who had got to know one another from the Brooklyn US attorney’s office.
“For the last 45 years,” Bergman said in his email, “we’ve been sharing our thoughts on books we’ve read.” Would I join a few sessions on Middlemarch?
Dear reader, I did.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
