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
Some come up, some go out. And so for me, it's observing that trend.
It's a large part of the country, right? I think you have a lot going on with young men today, white and non-white alike, straight men. They are falling behind academically. They're increasingly alienated. They're increasingly angry. They are increasingly online. And fiction, in my view, is not grappling with all of that.
He's a fantastic writer. I'll start there. He's a great pro stylist. There's a short story I love about a young Asian man who is having these very lurid sexual fantasies about dominating other men. Fantastically written. He's sort of the Roth of our era in terms of his ability to make a sentence really sizzle.
But, but, but, but, this is the caveat which people seem to be afraid to point out, but I will point it out. It's not a straight male fantasy. Could Tony have written a straight male fantasy of wanting to subdue a woman the way that character wants to subdue men? Tony himself is straight. It was an interesting choice there to inhabit A gay character, nothing wrong with that.
Writers should write about whatever sexuality. I don't believe in limiting anyone in that way. But I thought it was a choice, right? Because straight male lust is very... Disconcerting. It's not easy to write about. What do men think about? The novel isn't really, the modern novel, the current novel in my view, and this is an argument someone can push back, is not addressing that enough.
The nasty, nasty men. The men who are not – maybe they're good at heart, but they have a lot of bad thoughts and they take bad actions. You don't see that much in fiction today, I would argue. But it's not just portraying incels, but even – the sorts of men who came in mid-century novels who were suburban husbands trying to do their best and maybe having affairs as well.
And I think any time literature only focuses on one thing, if it neglects the working class, if it neglects the black experience, neglects the Asian experience. We've seen a lot of great work being done to account for perspectives that were left out of literature for a long time. But I also think it's important to know for better and for worse what the men of the 2020s are up to.
Yeah, no, I'm sympathetic for sure. I think that's an honest argument. The problem is you'll hear from people who say this isn't happening, and I find that very tiring. I think the honest thing to say is that it's time to rebalance the scales or turn the tables. But look, there are winners and losers, right? Women were losing. Now men are losing.
But I will say there's no solace offered to the 26-year-old male who must pay for the sins of the past, right? The reality is... You know, you live one life. You've got one shot for success, for glory, for all those things, or any appreciation, right? If you are...
blocked from that in some way due to some rebalancing of the scales and you are the loser at the end of that equation, you're not going to be happy. The young male writer can't sit at home and think, well, golly, it was good Norman Mailer and John Updike had such a great run. I'm happy for them. I never met these men. They died before I was born. There's only so much you can do with that, right?
Only so much comfort you can take in... the prizes Saul Bellow won and Philip Roth won. It's a difficult thing, right? What do you say to the person that they're sitting on the sidelines because of something that their grandparents did?
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