Boys Don’t Try
The way books are marketed is one reason people think fiction is for girls. The other reason? Many men just hate reading novels
BY Tim Falconer
Illustration by Kristi-Ly Green
In March of 1979, I was miserable in Montreal. Of course, March can be maddening anywhere in Canada, but Montrealers know the occasional spring-like day is just a tease because the ear-biting cold and sock-soaking slush won’t really leave until April. Still, the weather was the least of my problems. Not quite 21, I already didn’t like the way things were turning out for me. My love life was a shambles and I was studying a discipline—mining engineering, of all things—that I had no interest in and, given the rate I was successfully completing my courses, no apparent aptitude for. But the second of the four Marches I spent in Montreal was also the month a book changed my life.
In the midst of my funk, the McGill Film Society screened East of Eden. I’d never seen a James Dean movie, though I’d heard of him, of course. Like people who’ve never read Ernest Hemingway and think they know what he stands for, I saw Dean as the poster boy for the dream of living fast, dying young and leaving a pretty corpse. And that was a dream that held considerable adolescent appeal.
The movie was so good, I bought the book. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a big novel, and I am a slow reader, but I inhaled it. Ignoring triple integration calculus problems, geophysics lab reports and the other assignments piling up on my desk, I read Steinbeck.
This tale of good and evil soon began to inhale me and, a few days later, I reached the last page at 5 a.m. It’s always the biggest novels that we don’t want to end and I have a friend who, upon reaching the end of a great book, goes right back to the beginning and starts again. I might have done that or, considering the time, I might have quite sensibly gone to bed.
Instead, I picked up Of Mice and Men, a shorter and better-known Steinbeck book. Maybe I just wanted to make sure my reaction to East of Eden hadn’t been an angst-induced false epiphany or some other fluke. But even before I finished the novella, I knew, with a certainty I’d never before allowed myself to admit, I wouldn’t be a mining engineer. (That career path had been my father’s dream for me, not mine.)
In September, after a memorable summer working in a Yukon mine, I switched into English literature. My stock joke was that English was the logical choice since it followed engineering in the McGill calendar. Still, even back then—before the deep, job-destroying recessions of the ’80s and early ’90s—a lot of people thought such a move ludicrously imprudent. Perhaps they had never read anything that changed their lives.
Admittedly, the March when I was 20 was a particularly vulnerable time for me. And it’s true that any one of many wonderful novels might have convinced me to spend my life with words instead of rocks (in which case, I suppose, I should thank James Dean as much as John Steinbeck). But in this timeline, East of Eden was what I picked up when I was trying to sort myself out and reading it gave me the courage to make a decision I haven’t regretted for one second in more than a quarter of a century.
Now, I am not saying that East of Eden is the best book I’ve ever read; it’s not even, truth be told, my favourite book. Nor can I finger any one element—the multigenerational narrative, the richly drawn characters, the passionate writing—for making me fall in love with it. All I know is it’s a great book, by one of the great American writers of the last century, so let’s just say I fell in love with it the way I fell in love with my wife four years later: I couldn’t think of a thing I would change.
Because so few men read fiction these days, I rarely talk about East of Eden with other guys. I don’t want them thinking I had some cheap conversion over—shudder—a novel, especially the one that brought back Oprah’s Book Club. But I thought of it last fall while watching novelist Russell Smith and publisher Kim McArthur on Imprint, TVOntario’s book show. As the panel discussion ended, McArthur seemed indifferent to the fact that men don’t read fiction. An appalled Smith argued passionately—perhaps even angrily—against such nonchalance.
His books include the novels How Insensitive and Noise, and a book of short stories called Young Men. Nothing wimpy about his writing, but still most of his readers are women. Publishers accept that women buy about 80 percent of fiction sold in Canada, he tells me, “but I’ve talked to booksellers who say, ‘That’s nonsense; it’s 90 percent.’” It’s no coincidence that most people who work in publishing—including the editors—are women. Desperate for sales, they pursue the biggest market: suburban book clubs. “That tells men that fiction has nothing to do with them and is just for their mom’s book club,” says Smith, who notes that publishers reinforce the problem by putting out so many books about “family, memory and loss” and giving them titles and covers that could only appeal to women.
Even the books that might appeal to men aren’t marketed to them. Miriam Toews’s Governor General’s Award-winning A Complicated Kindness is about a 16-year-old female protagonist, but it’s funny and includes enough sex, drugs and rebellious teenage angst that the men I know who’ve read it, loved it. But those men had to get past the less-than-manly title and a cover that features pink and orange trim. “A lot of guys think, and I do blame the publishing industry for this,” says Smith, “that if they read fiction it’s going to be like having that long conversation with your girlfriend that she always wants to have about the relationship and where it’s going.”
But the problem really starts before guys start worrying about girlfriends. In January, Roy MacGregor wrote about ending his popular Screech Owl series after 20 books. He began writing the hugely popular mysteries starring more than a dozen 12-year-old kids on a hockey team when his publisher wanted “to do something for what teachers and librarians call ‘the reluctant reader,’” he wrote in his Globe and Mail column. “In layman’s terms, boys who hate books.”
As boys become men, they learn to avoid saying they hate books—as I discovered when I wrote magazine profiles of successful men. I’d always ask what they read and they’d invariably say, “Biographies.” But how many biographies can anyone read? The truth is men are simply reading fewer and fewer books and when they do read one, it’s not likely to be a novel. It’s bad enough among men my age, but it’s worse among those who have yet to hit middle age. “You go to cocktail parties of bright young guys—lawyers, businessmen, history grad students, whatever—and they will smile as they say they don’t read fiction,” says Smith. “It’s almost as if they’re rolling their eyes, as if it’s a ridiculous idea. One guy—a very intelligent financial analyst—said to me, ‘I don’t read fiction because I’m interested in ideas.’”
Still in bemused disbelief as he tells me that story, Smith says, “If you read [Don DeLillo’s] Underworld, you’re going to come across more ideas than you will in a year of reading The Economist. There’s a whole view of the 20th century there: the Cold War, race relations, America.…” That’s been my experience, too. With the exception of one credit in art history, I devoted my last two years at McGill to literature courses so I could meet all the requirements for graduation after my switch from engineering. I guess that means I don’t really have a liberal arts degree because I managed to graduate without sitting through even one history class. But over the years, I’ve done my own self-directed studies in history by reading fiction. I learned about the Spanish Civil War from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; I got a good sense of what life was like during the Depression by picking up Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and I slaked my curiosity about Joey Smallwood with Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
Now I’m not suggesting that reading fiction has turned me into a genius, but I can usually carry on an intelligent conversation at a dinner party—at least in the early part of the evening. Unfortunately, dinner-party discussions about novels are few and far between. The months following the release of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in 2001 were a treat because it was one of those rare books that just about every literate person—including men—read at the same time. So five of the eight people around the dining-room table might be able to talk about it and because some readers believe it’s a brilliant book while others have the temerity to suggest it may have a few flaws (the talking turd scene, for example), a spirited debate was sure to follow. I hadn’t enjoyed such group sparring about a book in mixed company since Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City 20 years ago.
Arguing about the merits of a book is obviously more fun than talking about kids, real estate or most of the other topics that too often pass for conversation. But it’s more than that. Fiction, Smith contends, offers something that even the best non-fiction writing can’t because it puts the emotional and the sexual against a political, historical, ideological background. “Fiction is more visceral; it fires different neurons,” he says. “You’re lost in a story so you absorb it differently, you’re a bit closer to dreaming. And that’s good because you experience other realities more intensely that way.” Unfortunately, this is, as Smith says, “really hard to explain to those smart guys at cocktail parties who say, ‘I don’t need art, I can just read The Economist and I’ll know everything.’”
There’s not much point in suggesting that a novel might change their lives—the way East of Eden did for me—because they don’t think their lives need changing. And maybe they don’t. But someone ought to tell them that a really good book can make March a more bearable month in just about any city.
