One of the few reasons I look forward to reading Sunday’s Chicago Tribune is John Warner’s Biblioracle column. He’s one of my favorite reviewers. He’s an enthusiast, not a “critic. He helps point me to books that may have escaped my attention, in particular novels, which leads me to the real subject of this piece.
In addition to commenting on particular books, Warner keeps an eye on trends in the book business. In a recent column he cited a stunning piece of gender-related data. 80% of book buyers are women. Warner couples that with another shocker, an estimate by another literary critic that there are only 20,000 people in the country who read serious literary fiction. Even if that number is off by a factor of five or even ten, that’s a tiny speck in a country with a population of more than 300 million. If we accept Warner’s numbers, that means that there are only 4,000 men among that anemic population of readers of serious fiction. It’s not clear, by the way, whether Warner is talking about buyers or readers because, clearly, every buyer represents a significant multiple of readers.
Let’s stop for a minute and clarify what we mean by “serious literary fiction.” A student once challenged my making a distinction between John Grisham and, say, Thomas Hardy. It’s not easy to explain to an unsophisticated reader what it means to read work by a writer who is concerned with the quality of the language he uses and the depth of the characters he or she portrays. Grisham and writers like Colleen Hoover may produce books that are entertaining despite the fact that they feel like they have been industrially extruded rather than hand crafted. Serious literary fiction can also be deeply engaging, but it also has a gear beyond that. Those are the books we’re addressing here.
It’s common knowledge that men, if they read at all, are more likely to be reading non-fiction rather than novels, especially self-help books. Warner attributes that to gender expectations that require that men are expected to be “productive.” Therefore, they are drawn to books that produce a “meaningful payoff.”
I would argue that a lot depends on what you mean by meaningful payoff. Serious literary fiction, particularly the kind favored by women, tends to be heavy in introspection and in examination of characters’ personality and motivation. There’s lots of payoff in that, if you’re a CEO managing large numbers of staff and employees or a politician whose success depends on building coalitions and persuading people to follow his lead.
I’ve quoted the following more than once in these postings, but it’s profound enough to merit repetition. The late novelist Julius Lester regretted that candidates were often asked what they were reading, a question that usually elicited safe, familiar titles like Nixon’s Six Crises or a volume of Winston Churchill’s work. However, he contends that the correct and more revealing question is “which novels have you read recently?” The novel reader is absorbing lessons in understanding human behavior and is exercising the capacity for empathy. What could be more “productive” than that?
As a charter member of the group of 4,000 male serious fiction readers – please take that number with a grain of salt – I recently finished Colm Toibin’s latest novel, Long Island, in which he projects Eilis Lacey, the protagonist of Brooklyn some twenty years into the future. She is no longer the shy, innocent Irish immigrant girl of the earlier novel, but the unhappy wife of an Italian blue-collar guy deeply enmeshed in his extended family. She is paying her first return visit to Ireland where stuff happens upon which I will not comment, other than to encourage you to read both stunning books for yourself.
I had already become a devotee of Toibin’s work after reading his earlier novel, Norah Webster, the story of recently widowed woman living in a small Irish town who is searching for a way to carry on alone after her husband’s death. I’ve written about this book before but putting it together with these tandem novels of immigration and return, l am awed by the author’s ability to write so accurately and with feeling about his women characters. That’s a challenge that many male writers of considerable accomplishment have failed at. Men who limit their reading to non-fiction or to novels of adventure and action are missing out on worlds that could both move and instruct them.
I know I’m tiptoeing through a minefield of dangerous gender stereotypes, but I fear that male and female reading habits are one reflection of a growing gap in the way men and women experience their friendships, their intimacies, their work relationships. We see this gap most glaringly on our national political scene where one of our candidates, who I can guarantee has never read a novel in his adult life, expresses a profound ignorance and disrespect for women that threatens to erase fifty years of progress. In the words of his opponent, “We deserve better.”
