The “vibe shift” of 5 November was never going to be felt with equal intensity in all walks of life. Even high-Richter scale events quickly dissipate away from their epicentre, as they reach corners of the culture with a slower political metabolism.
In papers and newsrooms, with their psychologically unhealthy receptiveness to barely detectable swings in the public mood, there was of course an immediate, erotic thrill in the air the morning after Trump’s victory. Finance, and other parts of the private sector too, were apparently eager to toast important political victories such as their newly regained freedom to use words like “retard” and “pussy” with impunity.
The ivory tower of higher education, on the other hand, absorbs tremors such as the vibe shift in the manner of a studiously tremor-proofed Japanese skyscraper, the people on the top floor barely sensitive to the shuddering ground outside. Publishing, too, one might have thought. But a few weeks ago came the news that the first male-only publishing house, Conduit Books, is to be launched in an effort to undo one of the most remarked-upon literary trends of the “woke” age: the death of male novelist.
Until fairly recently, even mentioning that the male novelist had died was the kind of conversational gambit liable to provoke wilfully confused or overdrawn reactions on the part of whichever literary types you were talking to. To go so far as to suggest an industry-wide initiative to save the male novelist would have sounded akin to a recruitment appeal on behalf of spinster librarians or homosexual choreographers: a basically pointless intervention. Even now, mention his death in a certain kind of bien pensant company, and you should expect your interlocutor to oscillate in a characteristically inconsistent way between denying that he really has died and insisting that it is a good thing that he has.
That he has, in fact, expired, seems to me a question no longer much worth debating. The evidence is in. A recent cultural autopsy report in the American magazine Compact laid out the statistics with arresting clarity. Over the course of about a decade, the once-dominant figure of the white American male novelist has simply vanished from longlists and shortlists, from the ranks of prestigious literary fellowships, and from the end-of-year fiction round-ups of magazines, even those outwardly geared to male readers. Most astonishingly, not a single white male born after 1984 has ever had a piece of long fiction published in the New Yorker. A similar story could no doubt be told about the UK. By my count, the number of male millennials to have ever been shortlisted for the Booker Prize comes in at a grand total of three. Though any one of these facts could be brushed off as an anomaly, collectively they are much harder to dismiss.
Less obvious than whether the young male novelist is actually dead, is the matter of whether he was hunted to extinction, or died out as a result of ecological changes in the wider cultural environment — to which he couldn’t adapt quickly enough. Perhaps instead of being actively discriminated against, young ambitious men are simply self-selecting out of the literary scene. Faced with the appearance of collapsing industry-wide sales, and a remaining readership of literary fiction largely composed of women, that would certainly be a rational market response.
Explanations like those might settle the question, were it not that writing has always been a comparatively unpromising path. What remains particularly striking about the present day is the total absence of even a single outlier case: an instance of the competitive, prototypically-masculine male novelist for whom the culture was spoiled for choice only a few decades ago. More pressingly, what has happened to the kind of helplessly inventive, self-driven artist who can do nothing but pursue his calling, whatever the costs or barriers? His disappearance suggests there may be something more insidious at work in the structures of contemporary publishing.
The theory that there are more subtle ways of creating an unfavourable environment for specific kinds of people or behaviour is one that has been richly developed by progressives in other contexts; but they apply its lessons in unprincipled ways, forgetting it entirely in cases that risk producing politically unwelcome conclusions. Though the feminisation of publishing — today, 68% of those employed in it are female — and the accompanying feminisation of the tastes that rule it, are one possible explanation, there is another more obviously culpable development.
That trend, which mirrors a wider one in all artistic enterprises, could be glossed as the replacement of merit by perspective as the governing priority of cultural life. Any book reviewer who has glanced through the promo material for a debut novel in recent years will be familiar with the mandatory references to the author’s backstory, whether eccentric or mundane; their lived experience; their “unique” “authority” to “tell” this particular “story” from whatever marginalised perspective they feel best placed to make a claim on.
Such desperate self-siloing is a marketing technique that is the natural counterpart of the invidious identitarian prohibition on writing from any politically-salient perspective other than one’s own, a transgression that one senses is fittingly regarded by some as a kind of creative theft. What, on the other hand, is virtually never front and centre of the publishers’ sales pitch is any suggestion that the book might be “good” or the author “talented”. All fiction, within this framework, is a mode of biography, its value that of an elevated kind of social commentary.
The assumptions of this cultural turn have become so widespread that it can be difficult to recall how tedious and dysfunctional they are. They amount to the gradual corruption of artistic activity by outside concerns. At the limit, the view that art’s value consists in shedding light on extraneous social issues or political identity is one that denies art any kind of distinctive value at all, since other things achieve those tasks too — and often more effectively.
“The view that art’s value consists in shedding light on extraneous social issues is one that denies art any kind of distinctive value at all”
Philistines have always held the view that art’s value is at best derivative; that this view should have become the reigning ideology within cultural life itself, however, is perverse. Yet skim, for instance, this year’s Observer magazine splash celebrating the best up-and-coming novelists of 2025 and you will find the inclusion of virtually every entry justified on the purely instrumental ground that it addresses some extraneous social theme or other. Pieces like this read like a greatest hits real of all the most eye-rollingly worthy subjects you can think of: “coercive control”, “queer romance”, “the opioid crisis”, “toxic masculinity”, “the northern black experience”, “empire, populism and global warming”, “male violence”, “taboos around the body”.
As many of the more generic social themes get done to death, it clearly pays with publishers to get a little more specific. One listed novelist claims to be channelling the disarmingly specific “feeling of growing up after 9/11 in an Iraqi-Pakistani household in Manchester”, another the experience of turning “16 the year that section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988” was passed. (I conjecture that someone who can directly feel the passage of local government legislation needs a doctor, not a book agent). Then, with the usual comic twist, one of the novelists announces their book is interesting because they are “dyslexic” and the list mercifully comes to an end.
What is to be done? Conduit Books and the new publishers for men to the rescue? Hardly. A quick glance at its self-characterisation, and recent comments by its founder Jude Cook, reveal it to be yet another symptom of the disease it claims to fix.
Speaking to The Guardian, and with appropriate anguish, Cook dutifully acknowledges the “toxic male dominated” scene of the Eighties and Nineties. This, he tells us with a strange combination of vagueness and inaccuracy, was the tail-end of “3,000 years of patriarchal domination”. But in recent years, as the reading public will have noticed, an epoch-defining event has taken place in which literally thousands of years of artistic injustice have been set in reverse by the arrival of “Sally Rooney et al” as a “timely corrective”. (If three thousand years late now counts as “timely”, I feel considerable reassurance about my own filing habits).
Still, Cook can’t help but notice that the anti-male correction may have been an over-correction. There’s something wrong with today’s crop of up-and-coming novelists. The men all write like women, and the women all write like Irish women. And where’s the — buzzword coming — diversity there?
Men, Cook imaginatively suggests, are the new font of “overlooked narratives”, their voices in need of amplification and platforming as they describe their very own lived-experience of “fatherhood, masculinity, working class male experience… and negotiating the 21st century as a man”. And just in case that doesn’t sound dull enough, Cook adds the oddly neutering constraint that it “cannot be over-stressed” that his new press will not “seek an adversarial stance”. Indeed so keen is he to trip himself up in pursuit of his stated goal, that Conduit is actively soliciting the work of “queer, non-binary and neurodivergent” authors in its attempt to court the lost male market.
There is a lesson here: both in Conduit’s wonky diagnosis of what has gone wrong in literary life, and its ill-conceived attempt at a cure. Thinking about the problem in perhaps the only way he knows how, Cook has attempted to conceive of young men, the only demographic that still robustly resists such treatment in the social imagination, as constituting yet another dimension of potential political marginalisation. As his framing dictates, male artists’ only possible artistic interest could be to act as a filter for the kinds of social experience typical of their group. Though it parades as a solution, this is an expression of exactly the same diseased thinking that got us into this mess to start with.
It is not that young white men need to be added in, like an almost-forgotten ingredient, to the stew of social morality tales from which the literary world may draw. It is that no such extraneous social priorities should ever have been imposed on literary activity to begin with. They are the kind of thing bound to artificially constrain creative work in ways more likely to generate failure. It is hard enough, for writers of either sex, to produce intelligent art to begin with — without further forcing it to pass irrelevant tests as demographic survey or social commentary. But perhaps there is no way to force the publishing industry to internalise this simple lesson, short of some up-and-coming writer authoring a debut novel about the oppressive social experience of having to deal with an industry whose first response to identifying the consequences of its own errors is to implement its mistaken theory with more determination than ever.
