Ross Barkan
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ross Barkan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Most of the classic examples of prestige white male authors are now middle aged or senior citizens. Jonathan Franzen is 65 years old.
Certainly the elephant in the room is that there were once a lot of young white male authors, and now there aren't.
Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there. Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal.
So for many decades, there were prominent young male authors in the literary world, whether it was Norman Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth.
Through the end of the 20th century, you know, with the emergence of Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Leatham and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Jonathan Franzen is here.
Into the beginning of the 2010s, Chad Harbach with The Art of Fielding. And then there was a shift. The young male author started to disappear. The male author under the age of 40 in particular and under 30 even more so. And
While my essay does not grapple with race to any great degree at all, certainly the elephant in the room is that there were once a lot of young white male authors, and now there aren't. There's less of them. If you look at the prestigious, successful contemporary novelists under the age of 40, they're mostly women. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
I'm just pointing out a fact, whether it's Sally Rooney, Emma Klein.
those are the writers who are at the top of this particular literary space. And that was not true from most of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st century.
35.
Correct.
I think so. Yeah. I think there's less of me, for sure. I mean, there would be an era where there were a lot of novelists like myself, Jewish. I mean, Jewish or not Jewish, but certainly white men.
Jonathan Lethem.
Not in the real world. In the real world, I have enormous privilege. But no, in the literary, in all seriousness, to an extent. I mean, in the 2010s, the literary world was less interested in what straight men were publishing. I think you have a general lack of the heterosexual male perspective in newer fiction.
There's a long history of writers portraying toxic masculinity and rough male characters, and it feels that you see less of that today. I also think at the same time, young male writers, white and non-white, we're taking less of an interest in fiction. It's a chicken and egg challenge where is it –
the publishing industry deciding this is no longer something we're going to push or take a real interest in, or is it market forces as well?
I think you hear it behind the scenes. It's that you're never told to your face. And I'm not complaining. I don't consider myself a victim. I've had a successful career. I'm very happy with it. I really have no complaints. But my book was rejected a lot by a lot of publishers, but so are many books too, right? You never know why a book gets rejected.
I mean, I appreciate your equanimity, but... To echo Joyce Carol Oates in a sort of notorious but not wrong tweet from several years ago, and I'm paraphrasing, is that Agents and editors are at least in the 2010s and early 2020s were just less interested in male straight male fiction. I want to broaden it a little bit because you see even among like black and Hispanic readers.
Asian straight men, there are some, but it's less common. And certainly the white male is now even less common. So I think publishers in general in that era were trying to diversify, which was fine. You had social justice politics. You had what they call woke. And in a way, woke worked because it – broaden things out and broaden new voices. But, you know, it is also zero sum, right?
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