8 1GT Tuesday July 28 2020 | the times

arts

A

once-familiar figure

has gone missing

from the landscape

of British fiction.

Young, almost

certainly Oxbridge-

educated and

probably posh, he

used to haunt prize lists and scowl

combatively from the covers of Sunday

supplements. There was a time when

you couldn’t move for successful

young male novelists. They are much

scarcer now. If the young male

novelist is not quite extinct, he

certainly no longer enjoys the cultural

ubiquity he once did.

The past few years’ bestselling

literary debuts have all been the

work of women: Sally Rooney’s

Conversations with Friends, Naoise

Dolan’s Exciting Times, Kiley Reid’s

Such a Fun Age, Imogen Hermes

Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs

Hancock and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s

My Sister the Serial Killer. Only two of

The Observer’s ten best debut novelists

of 2020 were men. In 2019 there was

one man and in 2018 there were two.

Older male novelists can still

command the bestseller charts and

prize lists: Salman Rushdie, Julian

Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Martin Amis

and Alan Hollinghurst have no trouble

shifting copies of their books. Yet no

younger male literary lions have risen

to take them on.

Male domination of UK fiction’s

biggest prize, the Booker, was once

so total that the Women’s Prize for

Fiction was founded in protest at the

all-male shortlist of 1991. This year’s

Booker longlist of 13 novels, which was

announced today, features four men,

one of whom is British (another,

Douglas Stuart, is an expatriate Scot

living in America). The prospect of an

all-female shortlist this year seems

eminently plausible.

Most of today’s bestselling male

literary novelists started their careers

in the 1980s and are now in their

fifties, sixties or seventies. Ground

zero of modern literary phallocracy

was Granta’s 1983 list of the best young

British novelists, which was dominated

by men and helped to launch or boost

the careers of Amis, Barnes, Rushdie,

Julian Barnes,

Salman Rushdie,

Kazuo Ishiguro and

Martin Amis

William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian

McEwan, Graham Swift, Adam Mars-

Jones and AN Wilson. Of the women

on the list only Rose Tremain and Pat

Barker remain in the public eye.

As the critic DJ Taylor explains,

male novelists dominated in the 1980s

because men dominated publishing

then. “The cultural patrons dispensing

the money were blokes. The whole

best of British thing was run by

Granta. [The Granta editor] Bill

Buford liked male writers and the

people chucking the money about

were men like Tom Maschler

at Cape, Robert McCrum at Faber

and so on.”

The thin layer of men at the top of

the publishing industry disguised the

fact that the vast majority of fiction is

read by women. Eighty per cent of

novels are bought by women. A

literary critic friend of mine points out

the irony that even in the 1980s and

1990s the careers of the “great male

narcissists” such as Saul Bellow and

Philip Roth were sustained to a large

degree by their female readers. Now

that women have fought their way to

many of the top jobs in the publishing

industry, the advantage enjoyed by

male novelists has melted away.

John Ash, a smart young literary

agent, says that publishers are keenly

Where are the

new male hotshot

novelists? Not on

the Booker lists

As the longlist for the literary prize comes

out, James Marriott reports on why men

seem to have been written out of the story

CHRISTOPHER LANE FOR THE TIMES; RICHARD SAKER/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE; ALAMY; COLIN MCPHERSON/GETTY IMAGES; CHRISTA HOLKA