while i was not writing anything interesting here, katie roiphe (i wonder how you pronounce that last name) wrote something interesting in the new york times. i don’t know if i’d say it was good, but it was interesting and, i think, mostly right. the reason i don’t think it was quite good was that the examples she used were not very good. but i don’t think that in the way everybody else did (about which more in a second).
here are the reasons the examples aren’t good:
- while i (in some cases reluctantly) accept that wallace, franzen, chabon, foer, and eggers might be considered the heirs, from a sales and reputation standpoint, to roth, mailer, bellow, and updike, the inclusion of kunkel proved she was looking for strawmen (although it did lead to that funny graph with the cuddling).
- she didn’t provide context for the quotes she used, and sometimes the quotes did not back her point in context.
- though i think, for the purposes of the essay, she was not wrong to focus on straight white males, she didn’t really demonstrate an awareness of that focus. in other words, there are other potential successors to the mid-twentieth century “greats” she refers to, but many are non-straight, non-white, and non-male.
- the conclusion she comes to about the way the new guys write about sex (narcissism) is true, but yet another symptom, as opposed to the cause.
you’re just going to have to accept this stuff for now so i can move on.
anyway, the article caused a big stir, and the internet proved once again that it can’t read, despite all the words on it. the standard response seemed to be: the new guys do so write about sex (especially wallace! who we say we love even though any idiot can see we never understood a word he was saying) (seriously, y’all, give the guy credit for being a complex human), when roiphe hadn’t suggested anything to the contrary. her thesis is right there in the lede paragraph where it should be:
“…the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.”
in other words, she ain’t necessarily saying they don’t write about sex; she’s saying if they write about sex, they do it twee, or they condemn it when it’s done the way their proverbial daddies did it.
bang the drum
the defenses of wallace in the blogs were the funniest because wallace explicitly went out of his way to repudiate the way the oldsters wrote about sex, both directly in essays and interviews, and indirectly in his fiction. the dude wrote a whole collection of stories structured around fictional interviews about sex and romantic relations and, in case it wasn’t clear enough that the men in the stories were pathological in their “aggressive virility,” he called them “hideous” in the title. that should be hint enough for you to find it on amazon.
so roiphe’s conclusion — that they’re a bunch of navel gazers. true ’nuff (though i really love wallace’s work and have liked franzen) (haven’t read chabon) (draw your own conclusions about the ones i left out). but like i said, that’s just another symptom. here, some of the blog responses weren’t that dumb. one was that the aids crisis put a damper on things. another was that the novelty had warn off. both of those are also true ’nuff. but i think it’s probably worth pointing out that there are non straight white males whose demographics were more affected by the aids crisis and/or who are just now getting the opportunity to experience the novelty of showing off their aggressive virility in public, and some of them continue to express their aggressive virility at times.
the real reason, then? there was a time when being twee and repudiating aggressive virility could get you the chance to be aggressively virile in private. writers are notoriously behind the times. indie rock has already moved on. or died. i can’t remember.
oh that would have been a good ending, but i’ve got some shit to tack on here.
see, just before that roiphe article, i read the moya book i mentioned, which has a narsty (i meant to spell it that way) sex scene that involves smelly feet. i’m still trying to formulate what i want to say about it (the book, not the sex scene), but i wanted to point out that i did read a contemporary straight guy who was okay with getting gross without having to explicitly point out that his character was hideous.
and then, just after the article, best-dude-ever levin sent me a care package containing two hard-ish to find kosinski books. i’d never read kosinski before.
holy shit.