Men Read online

  One notes a certain mocking tone on Rosin’s part when it comes to men getting thrown under the employment bus. They’ve lost, we’ve won: hooray for us! But maybe the triumphalism is a bit myopic, given that it was the ruthlessness of winner-take-all capitalism that chewed men up and spit them out when their services were no longer necessary (then the so-called jobless recovery kicked them in the nuts for good measure). Sure it’s the new social reality, but is it really anything to crow about?

  And maybe women have been a little too adaptable? Yes, the job market has flipped toward us; yes, we now hold more of the cards—except, unfortunately, when it comes to heterosexual women who want some kind of equal partner as a mate, or any mate at all. With men transformed into soft-bellied unemployable losers, more and more women are left high and dry in the romance and mating department. One option Rosin offers is for men to become the wives while women go to work. The problem with this scenario, as Rosin herself acknowledges (though only in passing), is that these new jobs women are procuring aren’t especially high-paying. The dirty little economic secret of the last forty years is that the job market played women off against men to depress everyone’s pay.1 Which is to say (though Rosin doesn’t) that the real winners when it comes to the influx of women into the job market during this period have been our capitalist overlords. Still, why assume, as Rosin seems to, that it means the overlords should get to dictate the terms of the social bargain?

  This is why I’d like to suggest—returning to the juicing epidemic and my own propensity for situational ethics—that playing by the rules of whatever industry currently employs you may once have been a premise with some moral force, but now it’s just obtuse. That’s how you get rooked. If women are more employable these days because bosses like how well we play by the rules, allow me a moment of appreciation for some good old-fashioned rule-breaking of the sort men have had more opportunities to perfect, as emblematized by the long parade of big-time juicers ritually hung out to dry in the media.

  Take Major League Baseball star pitcher Roger Clemens (indicted for perjury and obstruction of Congress after his testimony denying steroid use), cyclist Lance Armstrong (stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping), the embattled A-Rod, or any other sports world miscreant of your choice. But I’m also thinking of juicers closer to my own professional neck of the woods, namely authors of factually dubious memoirs such as James Frey, publicly indicted for lying about his past in his 2003 bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. To refresh your memory, Frey was the former junkie who produced a swaggering account of self-destruction, criminality, drug addiction and valiant recovery, though it turned out that he’d made up a lot of the best parts. This is supposedly verboten in the memoir-writing business, though the perimeters of the genre have been (as with doping, until recently) selectively observed at best. Or there’s Mike Daisey, the political monologist who massaged some of the details in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, his theatrical piece about the gruesome labor conditions at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing plants, saying (when exposed) that it was dramatic license.

  Like Clemens and the rest, Frey and Daisey illicitly boosted their games too, by employing prohibited substances—not anabolic steroids or EPO, but fictional experiences in supposedly nonfiction genres. Now, none of these guys is any sort of prince, apparently: Clemens is, by all accounts, a major jerk; Armstrong lied about doping for years while suing and maligning anyone who tried to tell the truth; and about A-Rod, the less said the better. Frey was given to bouts of eye-rolling braggadocio and self-regard, and let me add that I was never a fan of his writing despite thinking he’d been turned into a scapegoat for the publishing industry, which has always talked out of both sides of its mouth about memoir factuality, especially when it comes to commercial blockbusters. As for Daisey—well, he trades on liberal guilt, which is the worst thing I can find to say about him. Let’s leave him aside.

  They may be problematic characters, but none of them were talentless schlubs either. No one got where he did on sheer fakery. What they did was augment the talents they had to stay competitive. The aging Clemens wanted to eke out a few more playing years—a few more wins, maybe a World Series, before being tossed out to pasture. Frey, an aspiring writer, wanted to publish a novel, which he submitted to seventeen publishers. No one would buy it, though when he mentioned that it was based on his own life, he got offers—an unknown recovery memoirist is a more commercial prospect at the moment than an unknown first-time novelist, even when it’s basically the same story. For Clemens and the rest of the jocks, the problem is that bodies aren’t indestructible; for Frey it was that he actually wasn’t enough of a reckless law-flouting desperado to satisfy the addiction-memoir readership’s demand for life stories that read like novels but are packaged as nonfiction. So they tweaked their games to meet the performance demands of their industries. In Rosin’s language, they retooled.

  Which brings us to another knotty issue: ambition. Now, I don’t wish to obscure the essential obnoxiousness of possessing overly copious amounts of the stuff, but what a lot of hypocrisy attends this subject! Please be aware that when I speak of ambition’s excesses, I offer myself as a prime example, which no doubt explains why I’m so guiltily fascinated by contemporaries who’ve been raked over the coals for their immoderacy. Still, my question is, who decides how much is too much?

  As we know, modern market societies require ambition, because they’re premised on social mobility, which is essential to a flourishing democracy. Ambition is a social good because we believe in growth and innovation, and meritocracy is supposed to promote such things. This is our modern religion. The problem, of course, is that ambition is distributed a lot more liberally than talent or ability. The founding principle of democratic society is supposed to be that your position in the world derives from your capacities and achievements, not your origins: call it the myth of the “level playing field.” But the painful truth is that talents and capacities are just as inequitably distributed as noble birth once was—there’s no democracy of talent, there’s no equality of ability. Those not lucky enough to have been blessed with one or the other are just out of luck, and headed for the lower ranks in a system like this one.

  But even for the lucky few favored with some quantity of talent, it has to be the right sort of talent for your particular time and place. Meaning that in a market society, it has to be a monetizable sort of talent, because talent is only measured according to what someone’s willing to pay you for it. In other words—to return once again to myself—a talent for wishy-washiness is no talent at all in a critical “meritocracy” based on ruthless moral severity.

  I mean, how come when they were handing out moral seriousness, Leon Wieseltier got so much and I got so little? What kind of level playing field is that? Even for those with relatively modest ambitions, how can you not resent people who rise faster or further based on genetic flukes or temperamental happenstance? Why them, not you? Frankly, if they distilled moral seriousness and sold it in dime bags, I’d be shooting it up like there’s no tomorrow, until I was bristling about everyone else’s moral bankruptcy and intellectual shabbiness too, just like my steely ego ideal (who not so long ago won the half-million-dollar Dan David Prize for his achievements in cultural standard setting, by the way—speaking of monetizing your talents).

  From where I sit, it’s not difficult to see how the ambition-afflicted keep falling in the soup of professional scandal. We’re just trying to rectify life’s inequities—maybe boost our position in the world a notch or two by patching up the weak spots, where necessary: a bit of muscle mass here, some dramatic incident there, or whatever it takes. Sure, anxious types get over-zealous: inventing degrees, fudging scientific data, cribbing sentences, and onward into ignominy. Transfusing your own blood to win a bike race is a little creepy. But when I think about what I’d do to boost my performance, I can’t get that judgmental. And let’s not forget the tens of millions who can’t get throug
h the day without their little performance enhancers: the Prozac, the Viagra, or whatever you take to sleep at night to be on top of your game tomorrow.

  So basically, when I look at the juicers, the boosters, and the fakers, moral relativist that I am, I see hopeful strugglers and stragglers just trying to get some love back from the world. Like me: I fake certainty and strong opinions, whipping myself into a high fury about every last thing, since if I didn’t, who’d want to read what I write, and going unread is not exactly going to get me any love from the world. Oh, maybe I’d get a crumb or two if I played clean, but for all of us whose ambitions exceed our present status in the world, it’s never not depressing that someone’s invariably getting more than you.

  Also, there’s another inequity to contend with that I’d like to mention. Why is “doing whatever it takes to win” excessive for an Armstrong competing in the Tour de France, but not for his former corporate sponsors when they do what it takes to win: outsourcing jobs to sweatshops abroad (thank you, Mike Daisey, for the reports) or whatever their insatiable drive for love—I mean, obscene profits—demands? Why are individuals supposed to uphold some antiquated pre-capitalist code of honor when their employers and industries honor nothing in return? They definitely don’t reward loyalty—it’s not exactly breaking news that players wreck their bodies to cultivate a 95-mph fastball, then get put on waivers when their value drops for owners. Or take everyone’s favorite liar, James Frey, who was apparently supposed to thrust aside commercial pressures in a grand romantic gesture, because it was up to him alone to singlehandedly contest the momentum of global capitalism and the corporatization of publishing.

  There’s a curious anti-capitalist romanticism in the finger-pointing at juicers, even from those who have no gripes at all with the market system otherwise. You find this sort of thing a lot at the movies, where turning down money is a sign of integrity (the “You can’t buy me” moment—always amusing to see the highest-paid stars playing heroes who can’t be bought). At the same time there’s quite some reverence for the superrich—the tech-bubble billionaires, the self-promoting real-estate magnates with strange hair—to whom we turn for life lessons and character tips. Our relationship to capitalism is rather schizophrenic, in other words, though it’s no mystery why. Apart from a few iconoclasts who live off the grid or the lucky few who live off inherited wealth, we’re all tailoring ourselves to marketplace logic in ways large and small: hoping to get an edge, find an angle, raise our games. Yet in the contemporary moral-monetary equation, market-driven behavior is coded as “selling out”—it makes you a whore. “He’s such a whore,” someone’s always proclaiming righteously about the coworker or friend who’s been a bit too visible about self-marketing, too much of a kiss-up to the boss. Frey: a major publishing whore, everyone said. Linguists call this “therapeutic slang”—a way of letting ourselves off the hook for our own weaknesses or hypocrisies. It’s the language of self-exoneration: denying awkward truths by tossing the ball to someone supposedly worse. (Also not very fair to actual prostitutes, who end up doing double duty, linguistically speaking—shouldering the burden for everyone’s self-hatred about peddling our wares in the marketplace too.) But no one ever said that negotiating the emotional fallout of life in a market society was an easy business.

  I’m all for anti-capitalist romanticism, though one doesn’t wish to become a moral poseur in its service. Poseurs have immutable principles and categorical imperatives at their disposal, coupled with vast certainty about their own capacities for integrity. They use other people’s public foibles as an opportunity to fantasize about how admirably they’d behave in circumstances they’ve never actually faced. Of course, moral relativists are no less fantasy-prone: we fantasize that the world will someday stop blaming individuals for the systemic inequities they find themselves battered down by. We wish to point fingers at the structural determinants of behaviors that moral poseurs want to hang on individuals alone. Some of us also overidentify with scofflaws and boat rockers, not all of whom are nice people. Whereas the poseurs are content to simply cut them down to size, and luckily for them, there’s always another delinquent on the public chopping block for one thing or another.

  Recently an email arrived with the subject heading “Plagiarism,” which I opened immediately, heart in throat, assuming I was being accused of it. I was already plotting my Doris Kearns Goodwin defense (plead shoddy notetaking, follow with private settlement), but it turned out, my correspondent informed me, that someone with the enviable name of Lianne Spiderbaby, who reviews horror movies—and was on the cultural radar because she’s successful, attractive, and dating Quentin Tarantino—had been caught lifting sentences from other people’s writing and including them in her reviews. Despite the relatively mundane level of this transgression it was the Web scandal du jour, at least in that particular subcultural corner, and may have even put the kibosh on Spiderbaby’s forthcoming book deal. Initial reports were that Quentin had been set to write the foreword, but the publisher dropped the book. The publisher tweeted that the author herself had withdrawn it, then deleted the tweet. Spiderbaby tweeted an apology to her fans, then deleted that too. She shut down her website, suspended her Twitter account, and has disappeared from sight so effectively that she seems to have vaporized.

  The commentary about all this was exceedingly vicious—the familiar stink of an online lynching, replete with the usual gleeful malice. Another overambitious writer reaching for the stars, then crashing to earth amidst the jeers of the crowd. Spiderbaby’s lifted material included some sentences of mine, my informant—someone previously unknown to me—wrote. He seemed to expect a show of outrage, but I confess I was flattered. It was validation, a sign I’d made it, a tiny shot of love from the world. Though hardly enough of one—I found myself wishing I could have been plagiarized by someone a little higher up the literary food chain. I bet Leon Wieseltier attracts a better class of plagiarists.

  When is enough ever enough when it comes to these bottomless wells of yearning for love and recognition? The fantasy of success isn’t just about the concrete rewards—fame, money, sexual opportunities, and so on. No, it’s the fantasy of an existential cure-all: an end to painful doubts about your self-worth, a massive fuck-you to everyone who ever dissed or doubted you, the assurance of your parents’ undivided love.

  Sure, I worry my ambitions are excessive, though I suspect that ambition is excessive by its very nature, predicated as it is on desire, which is calamitously inexhaustible too. I suppose it’s why I’m still dwelling on James Frey’s little ruckus these many years later: his excesses took a familiar shape. If I ever find myself on the receiving end of a national pillorying, no doubt it’ll be over something I’ve published too. Until then, Frey is sort of my personal avatar, breaking the rules and taking the hits, while I watch from the bleachers. Maybe men have come to the end of their run, but they still have their uses, including as surrogate ids and superegos, waging big moral dramas on the world stage like action heroes trying to pummel each other to smithereens.

  II

  NEUROTICS

  The Victim

  Rushdie had the Ayatollah, Job had God, and James Lasdun has Nasreen—or that’s what he calls her in his memoir Give Me Everything You Have—the former creative-writing student who harassed him for five years, and at last word was apparently still at it. As Lasdun remarks mordantly, she made stalking into something of an art form.

  Now, it’s worth remarking, as regards this sort of protracted misery, that until fairly recently it’s likely that no one but Lasdun’s closest friends would have been privy to knowledge of it. But the New Man is no silent sufferer—recall Martin Amis’s observation that the distinguishing feature of the type is a propensity for drawing attention to his wounds. Accordingly, no longer are today’s male authors as inclined to sublimate their sufferings into the literary formulas associated with traditional masculinity, namely the Great American Novel. Increasing numbers are instead following em
otive lady authors into the noisy wilds of the first-person confessional. “I always used to feel sorry for myself, having suffered four debilitating episodes of clinical depression and many years of moderate-to-severe dysthymia,” is the way one male author recently opened his review of another male author’s memoir about his chronic anxiety. Even if it was Rousseau who got the whole thing off the ground originally, and some classic bad-childhood memoirs by men are landmarks of the genre, it’s tended to be a female-dominated form. Confessionalism had social urgency for women, especially when it came to matters conventionally screened from public view—incest and other childhood abuses, addictions, mental health glitches.… Writing a memoir was a way of refusing to be shamed about shame-ridden topics, which lent an aura of bravery to the enterprise, or did for its earlier practitioners.

  Then everyone wanted to get on the bandwagon, to the point that memoirs began vying with the novel for literary cultural dominance, and may well have nosed ahead, in sales at least. But even if it’s widely suspected (or muttered) that rampant narcissism more than bravery now fuels this sort of thing, luckily there’s a corresponding rampant voyeurism about other people’s private pain on the part of the reading public, who can’t seem to get their fill of real-life miseries and foibles.

  With male writers increasingly swept up in the confessional momentum, at least we’re getting a less mythical vantage on men’s inner lives, and closer-to-the-gut material than the familiar Successful Guy musings about careers well played and lives fully led. There’s more vulnerability on view: anxiety and depression, divorce and destitution, urinary and other embarrassing conditions—the sorts of afflictions and woes that were once the hallmark of women’s memoirs. It turns out that women have no monopoly on even classically “female” ailments: men have eating disorders too, men have trouble “down there,” and now comes news that men too get sexually harassed, sometimes for years on end.