The Vanishing Brotherhood of Dirtbags
What contemporary fiction does the straight, white male read? Does the straight, white male read contemporary fiction?
David Foster Wallace, JD Salinger, Bukowski, Mishima, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Reading playboy “for the articles,” Jeff Vandermeer, The Beats – but they’re mostly poets, Nick Cave, Hemingway?, FAULKNER, Kafka, George saunders, Baldwin?, Murakami, Jurassic Park ?, Steinbeck, Bellow, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Heller…
There exists an ever-shrinking cohort of male readers in the United States who belong to a niche literary boy’s club of Beats, Caulfields, and “sprawling family sagas.” They are the unicorn of white, straight men who still read contemporary fiction — refusing expropriation to genre fiction, WWII history tomes, pseudo-scientific writing, or nothing at all. As a bookseller, they are my white whale. I dub them the “Vanishing Brotherhood of Dirtbags.” They should get merch.
A customer came in and asked for a good book recommendation. After the run-of-the-mill banter from my end — “Good books? We don’t have any of those here.” — and subsequent diagnostic questions — “Fiction or non-fiction? Hardback or paperback?” — and some more light flirting — “Fiction? Good, that means we don’t have to walk downstairs!” I walked him over to the T-Z shelves.
“Have you read any Vonnegut?” I asked far too sincerely, forgetting I was in Brooklyn. The guy parroted back my question in mock disbelief before reaching down to pull off his sweatshirt and reveal his forearm tattoo which read: “And so it goes….”
Having not read Vonnegut beyond Cat’s Cradle, I used my sharp college graduate skills of deduction to infer this was an important line from the author’s most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five. In the end, the customer left with a copy of Cat’s Cradle, himself having also only read one of Vonnegut’s works.
Later that week, I had another man in the store asking for recs, citing Bukowski as a favorite author. I knew nothing about Charles Bukowski other than overhearing my manager affectionately call him a “dirtbag,” so I ran with that. He went with Jonathan Franzen’s book from 2021, Crossroads. Jonathan Franzen is an author you either think is this century’s greatest American novelist, or you have never heard of. We keep a perfunctory paperback copy on the shelf for the former. In fact, the only person I’d known to have read Crossroads was my 32-year-old co-worker at my last bookstore job in New Hampshire. A former LA screenwriter, he came back East for the pandemic to work part-time and flirt with every nineteen-year-old girl who worked at the store, later going on to date one of them. When he talked about books he liked, he used the term bread-and-butter. “American letters is really my bread-and-butter and Franzen is one of the best.” I found this term endearing while we were bantering behind the desk until I heard him use it on a customer two days later.
Contemporary literary fiction1 exists in a highly feminized space in the 21st century.2 It has also become increasingly queer and POC in the last 5 to 10 years, as these authors and texts move out from their marginalized sub-genres and specialty imprints. Names which dominate: Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, RF Kuang, Yaa Gyasi. Of the 1,000 best-selling books of 2020, only 341 were written by men.3 Of course, there are many men — even straight men!— who still read contemporary literary fiction.
On the other hand, there remains the traditionally male space of genre fiction: sci-fi, mystery/horror, graphic novels, fantasy. As contemporary literary fiction grew less male-centric over the last thirty years, men started jumping ship to genre fiction. This is not to say genre lovin’ men don’t read genre fiction written by women, queer people, and writers of color, it is to argue that genre fiction seems 1. More masculine than literary fiction and 2. Where many, if not most, male readers reside.4 Not to mention most of nonfiction, excluding memoir and self-help, is palatable to, if not marketed intentionally for, straight men.
But what about the secret third option? Men who do not read new contemporary fiction — what I position as more feminized — nor genre-fiction and nonfiction. They are the men who stay loyal to a certain literary fiction yet refuse to read anyone beyond their dirtbag wheelhouse. They are the men who follow me to the fiction section to show me their tattoos and get very confused when I pull out Frankenstein. Is it because they rarely read so they stick to what they know? Or, they only associate with similar men who then recommend similar novels? Or, is there actually something to Infinite Jest that I’m simply not seeing!?!
And next I wonder: who do they have left? There were the men of the turn-of-the-century: Salinger, Hemingway. Then the Beats, Vonnegut, Bukowski. They pulled from translation: Mishima, Murakami. David Foster Wallace in the late 90’s and early aughts. Now, Dave Eggers? George Saunders? Franzen?
I had a male friend reach out and ask my opinion on Kerouac. I responded that he was spiritually flaccid — Kerouac, not the friend — and he readily agreed, offering “he has this vague notion of Buddhism that he utilizes to serve selfish and deeply Westerns ends.” I then inquired why my opinion was ever needed at all. This same friend loved Mishima, a Japanese author and later-turned fascist who had a lot of thoughts on sexual repression — the author, maybe also the friend. Another boy I knew advised me at a college party to stay far away from men who admired Mishima. This boy knew because he was writing his thesis on him.
Despite my manager often repeating the phrase, I still do not entirely grasp what the “dirtbag” entails beyond L.A., chain-smoking, disrespecting women for literary effect, and finding the meaning of life. I am wary, however, of a reading public that refuses to look beyond its hyper-niche canon and glorifies the lives of dudes who were kind of the worst, in fiction and elsewhere.
Most of the members of the Vanishing Brotherhood of Dirtbags are young and still in college (or dating girls still in college.) They ask me questions about books they don’t actually want my answer to and pass copies of Mishima around their grimy frat house (this actually happened.)5
This is not to say we shouldn’t read these authors. I am sure many of them are great writers. I’m also sure a few of them suck. But I do not mean to disparage the canon in favor for new fiction. Most new fiction is also very bad. Yet, members of the Vanishing Brotherhood of Dirtbags seem to believe the truth of the world can already be found in their canon, and the truth is that we can and should act as Dirtbags, as Salingers (sleeping with our students) and Kerouacs (fake white Buddhists.) The Vanishing Brotherhood of Dirtbags are certainly not as violent or extreme as incels, but they incubate disquieting politics, bolstered by respected literary thinkers rather than crazed Manosphere influencers. They maintain it is pointless, if not childish, to search for meaning in any other literature, or, God forbid, find some insight in other fiction. We can only hope they vanish completely or at least stop reading On the Road.
When I say “contemporary,” I mean books about “real life” as a very insufficient gloss. When I say “literary” fiction I mean books that are not “genre” fiction.
Is it wrong to say a genre is more male or female? Masculine or feminine? Gay or straight? The concept of “genre” is purely a marketing strategy to more efficiently sell books, an organization tactic for your local bookstore, a set of tabs on Goodreads. It follows, then, that certain commodities are marketed towards different demographics. I would argue putting to words the personality of a genre allows us to better understand the ways in which the market influences what books we read, who gets published, and what political possibilities exist for the genre.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/how-women-conquered-the-world-of-fiction
And just why does genre fiction feels more “masculine” — is it simply because the genre was pioneered by hypermasculine, pro-military, racist white authors?
Interestingly, American fraternities began as “literary societies” that organized conversations about various topics often excluded from university curriculum, like slavery. Over time, these literary societies have been bastardized into Alpha Chi’s and Kappa Kappa Gamma’s around the country.
This rocked me
Jeff VanderMeer slander