Why Men Should Read Novels
Men don’t need to read more novels. To fail to admit this is to advocate a lie. Men may find equivalent intellectual and emotional stimulation through other forms of media. Men who prefer action and practical problem-solving might find more satisfaction from hands-on projects, video games, or competitive sports. I like these too. Men with busy schedules may prioritize reading non-fiction or professional literature that directly contributes to career advancement and practical knowledge over novels, which might be seen as less immediately beneficial. Social or recreational activities that align with their interests can provide social time and fulfillment without opening a book with a sad watercolor of a mandolin on the cover. Men may prefer practical skills over introspection and aesthetic exploration.
As a famous man who wrote novels once quilled, “The important work of moving the world forward is not done by people who are overconfident but by those who strive to improve their own weaknesses.” That man was George Elliot. Men may have responsibilities, and typically, a pragmatic results-based attitude, that lead them to disdain silly activities of literature, such as worrying about the ontological status (the meaningful existence of) of fictional entities, or the ethics of imaginary harm in make-believe. I imagine the fact that make-believe is an activity for children does not help attract adult male interest.
Some women feel the exact same way. However, these are, I believe, some of the reasons why a 2021 report by Pew Research Center found that women are generally more likely than men to read any type of books for pleasure. Specifically, 77% of women reported reading at least one book in the past year, compared to 66% of men. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reported in its 2017 survey that 77% of women and 65% of men read literature (novels, short stories, poems) in the past year. This indicates a significant difference in engagement between sexes. Data from a 2020 survey by Statista showed that 55% of women reported reading novels regularly compared to 45% of men.1
Plot twist: This essay becomes a little more unhinged with each paragraph. What if the best reason men should read literature is not to become more empathetic2 or argue about “flat characters” and “round characters”—and characters who are “round in their flatness” and “flat in the roundness”?3 What if it’s to strengthen the mind to see how stories shape our understanding of the world and our place within it? Reading fiction is utilitarian in this manner, but broadly, distantly pragmatic.
You know about narratives: The classic plot narrative starts with an introduction of conflict, progresses through rising action, hits a climax, and ends with a denouement that resolves the story.
Do you know about metanaratives? A metanarrative is an overarching story or framework that provides a broad perspective on and interpretation of smaller, individual narratives within a culture or society. I don’t mean to imply that things aren’t true or false. But people don’t agree, or they are confused, self-interested, or inconsistent in their perceptions. It may not be clear how events align with truths. The stories help us organize our understanding. In contemporary U.S. society, the dominant metanarrative often centers on the idea of the American Dream. It frames success as attainable through narratives of hard work, individual effort, and innovation. This requires narratives of personal freedom and upward mobility.
An opposing metanarrative struggles to become dominant. It challenges the American Dream by highlighting what it calls systemic inequalities. It questions the notion that success is solely a result of individual effort. Instead it emphasizes narratives of social justice, collective responsibility, and systemic reform. This new metanarrative brings those narratives together in a conclusion for opportunity and equitable progress. These narratives have clashed before, more than once. Thank the Founders, we Americans have free speech to parse out the threads and complexity, to work out the contradictions and conundrums. “I am a gentleman, and I live in a country where a gentleman is allowed to think what he pleases,” wrote Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady.
These two metanarratives nest within an even higher order metanarrative: what is our relation to eternity? I’d like to believe, but cannot prove, that the process of make-believe in fiction strengthens a man’s ability to see and understand narratives and metanarratives. It does this by following the problem-solving and mistakes of fictional individuals, by analysis of situations, by recognition of narrative structures, awareness of cultural critiques, and by exploration of philosophical questions. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship,” as Louisa May Alcott wrote in Little Women.
The enduring impact of Shirley Jackson’s play The Lottery (1948), and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953) comes from their resonance, how they deal directly with problems in our American metanarratives. If you spend time on the internet you have seen people attempt to understand our current problems by comparing to what degree our problems are foreseen in 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, and so on. During the pandemic and its shut-down, I finally saw the movie Jaws, and was amazed to perceive the structural parallels… People prohibited from the public space (beach), business in conflict with safety, death, fear making people do strange things. Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros (1959) also comes to mind, people conforming, and/or charging forward into enraged, destructive ways; the individual who is still an individual stands alone, and probably afraid.
However, this is a pragmatic argument: literature of this kind helps men understand the world. I think this is true, but more obviously so in some works than others. It is frankly difficult to find as pragmatically true in some novels, plays, and poems. I myself do not want to read just any novel, play or poem. I do not want to merely advocate for dystopian classics. What about other literary works of high quality, the quality judged by you? Aren’t you curious?
Is your curiosity satisfied? I wonder if I am advocating for the arts in general. I wonder if this challenge I took up, to advocate for men to read novels, is any different from another recommendation I might make, for men to listen to string quartets. What are those benefits, and are they the same? String quartets offer profound, wordless emotional experiences. They direct you toward an awareness of music themes and techniques, and appreciation for complex sound structures, with attendant feelings. It is a cultural enrichment in an artistic tradition. It is intellectual stimulation, relaxation and relief, aesthetic enjoyment and advancing one’s sensibility. Are these not arguments to read good novels, too? The biggest difference is that one is an auditory experience, limited in time to less than an hour, and the other is a cognitive experience of imagination and verisimilitude (make believe, willing disbelief that the words somehow form another world) that takes hours, usually over days. Beethovan’s overture for Goethe’s play Egmont, helped me after my father died. While on a plane flying home, I listened to it seventeen times in a row. As long as I listened, my pain transformed to something strong and beautiful.
In joy and in sorrow, be thoughtful;
Long and fearful in suspended pain;
Rejoicing to heaven, grieving to death;
Blessed alone is the soul that loves.
And then the music stopped, and the pain returned. The music reflects the themes of the play. Egmont found a place where the aspirations of freedom, self-sovereignty, and republican nationalism met personal sacrifice and triumph in pursuit of it (from Romanticism). The individual man stands silhouetted on the horizon, aware of forces vastly stronger, yet he remains resolved, proud, hopeful, doomed. After the American revolutionary success, and the French revolutionary debacle, metanarratives clashed in culture. All the ideas of liberation gather their opposite, a processes of enshitification that we may be familiar with in our time, whether it be the Reign of Terror, Napoleon crowning himself, or the Monarchic reaction across Europe after he fell. The gift of Beethoven’s Egmont is the presentation of a pure, living fossil of the moment. What I think a novel can offer is something similar. “To be free is not to be without chains, but to have the power to break them when one wills.” Another novelist wrote this, another man named George, George Sand.
The craze gathers, the inspiration and mystery! Why and how did Egmont take my pain away, and change it into acute listening? I am sensitive to its themes, its aesthetics. I felt that I understand it. I need pain, but I don’t want it. I want dreams. Freedom aches. I don’t want manifestos. I want to make jokes, world-crushing jokes! “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” wrote another man, a man named Currer Bell. “I am a free human being with an independent will.” What I think he was getting at is—since the head most unlike a birds-nest is bald—have you ever seen a bald man reading a novel? No, you haven’t, and no one has, and no one ever will. I will now explain why, my man friend: When you read a novel it stimulates the smarter parts of the brain, roistering the synapses, and electrifying the skull. Of course this tingles the follicle roots. David Foster Wallace wore his bandanna to try to slow down all the hair growth. It killed him. Poor man! There is risk involved. Reading a novel is a risk. Wearing a bandanna is a mistake. Remember what a man named L.M. Montgomery wrote in his novel Anne of Green Gables: “Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
But mistakes we will all continue to make. Even if we don’t make a mistake, things go wrong. A friend of a friend is a famous movie director and producer, born wealthy, and even more wealthy now. His childhood was chaotic and unhappy from an alcoholic parent. His current family… just imagine: his child is dying of leukemia. It’s not possible for anyone to live a life without suffering, in small everyday ways and large. How, what and why? What does it all mean? Is your curiosity satisfied? Mine is not. I want to know. I want to feel. What are we missing? Can novels help? I think so. We learn about the meaning of the world through stories; it takes make-believe to move forward. In fact it takes make-believe to stand still. We organize information through stories. We both escape and explain the world through stories. You need to find ways to be stronger, to find entertainment and solace, to exercise your mind, and to laugh. Stories punctuated by laughter bring their own form of resilience. I believe that, like all arts and assuming quality, novels can strengthen you by helping you understand in new ways what the hell is happening to you.4 If you choose your novel well, you’ll find it’s worth your time. A novel is best when it pounds at a mystery to make the mystery shine a light beyond words you could restate.
In Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the main character Jake lives with a humiliating war injury: he is impotent. He and Lady Brett love each other, and she has needs, but what can he do? He procures a matador for her to bed. As a famous politician once said, “Women have always been the primary victims of war.” What is Jake's solace? The beauty of the landscape, and drinking and fishing with Bill, his buddy.
In Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall, Captain Grimes can't find a job. Due to his bad behavior, debts and woman problems, he has to flee. It is then, at last, but when he can't accept it, he receives a job offer to go to pubs and sample beer. When the protagonist Paul Pennyfeather goes to jail unjustly for his fiancee's criminal enterprise, he is finally happy because now he has peace and quiet to read novels. Captain Grimes arrives. Under prison surveillance, no talking allowed, they use the Christian hymn “The Old Hundredth” for covert conversation. To get the joke, as you read the following, sing it in your head to church music:
Paul Pennyfeather sings:
"What are you doing here?"
Captain Grimes sings:
"I am not here to be idle."
Paul Pennyfeather sings:
"But why do you stay?"
Captain Grimes sings:
"Because I must, like you."
Later... Paul sings:
“I’ll see you when I
get out. Good-bye!”
Grimes sings:
“Don’t leave me here, you
damned fool! I’m in a
terrible mess. Help me!”
Given life’s adversity, sometimes taking the form of mere boredom, can you see how both novels I cite above make you tougher? In both novels, life is unfair and cruel. What happens is arbitrary. One with pain and solace (friendship, booze, and beauty), the other with laughter? Don’t forget laughter. It’s not possible to live a life without suffering. You need to bend, to bend and laugh. Not every man wants to laugh, I know; you have work to do. Please, do it. But still you need to gather strength after defeat. Humor can help. From Homer to Confucius, from Aesop to Chaucer, ancients agree, “A reed bends before the wind to live on, while mighty oaks do fall.” But novels require sustained effort, time and work from the reader. When Aristophanes came to Sparta and performed one of his comedies, his humor perplexed the Spartans. They asked him to explain why people laughed. Aristophanes replied that they laughed because his jokes were clever, to which the Spartans responded with characteristic deadpan: “In Sparta, we prefer our jokes to be straightforward and not need explanations.”
Why pick up your shield? Why pick up your spear? You don’t really have a choice. What did Spartan mothers say to their sons? “Come back with your shield or on it.” Don’t drop your heavy shield as you flee battle; mama would rather your phalanx comrades carry you home on your shield as a corpse. Sparta didn’t want walls to hide behind. It wanted to be ready to fight and win. Sparta fell to the Macedonians anyway. Don’t tell me laughter wouldn’t help you. Explanations might help sometimes.
I know, I know. I know that, like me, and most men around the country, you are thinking about the Roman Republic, how it fell. And the Roman Empire! It fell too. “A civilization is not destroyed by a burst of gunfire or a tank. It’s destroyed by a long, slow, grinding process of loss and despair,” wrote a man, a science fiction master, James Tiptree Jr. And you! I see you! I hear your loss, I see your despair. I hear you slow down your rate of page-flips. But if you do feel weary, feel loss and despair, embrace the word pain. Do it! Embrace it! Your ancestors watch you. Pain and despair are your friends when you read a novel.
Verisimilitude, a fancy word you should know as you prepare to rise, means you will your disbelief that the fiction doesn’t exist. You will it into being. You see, you feel, you rise, you laugh, you fly. As a man reader, you become an independent Yeoman of the Republic, armed with a rifled musket. The barbarians have taken our eagle: you must go in the forest and take it back. The grim joy of losing yourself in a good story means you are building something and going somewhere, somewhere… you know not where. This does not require you to ask directions, of course. Don’t ask directions, you’re embarrassing me. Just take the risk, read on, and you’ll get to the end. So, grab a novel and start reading. You might just end up taller, stronger, more charming, more martial arts capable, hairier in a good way, with a spark in your eye, and more empathy for America. As they say, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, so when you finish, tear it off with a loud grunt!” That’s what I do!
Some book covers you could tear off after reading:
These numbers seem high to me, but that’s what the Internet claimed.
A disputed point anyway, used so often it works a counter-purpose to its goal, in my opinion.
This college lecture stopped my brother from reading novels for years. E.M. Forster, in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927), discusses the distinction between flat and round characters:
“The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. A flat character, on the other hand, is one that does not change throughout the course of the story, and whose actions are predictable and consistent with their established traits.”
In a Substack post published the day before this one, Sherman Alexie wrote,
“I love novels of aristocratic social manners. I love their cultural specificity—their studies of cultures that are not mine. I especially love Edith Wharton. Growing up inside an Indian tribe with intense social rules, I highly identify with Lily Bart in House of Mirth.
My joke is, “In my tribe, you also have to know exactly which fork to use at dinner. The difference is that our forks are eagle feathers.”