New(ish) Books

Percival Everett's Dr. No and Richard Reeves' Of Boys and Men

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the book reviews for the week - one fiction, one non-fiction. These are a little different from standard book reviews. They dispense with plot summaries (and can be on the looser end of things about ‘spoilers’). The aim is to really enter into the author’s world and at the same time to write personally about the experience of reading the work.

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Best,

Sam

PERCIVAL EVERETT's Dr. No (2022)

Altogether wonderful. Everett is like the last stand of a loose, madcap way of writing fiction - a style that I’d associate with Robert Coover, John Barth, Don DeLillo in the Ratner’s Star phase. The idea is that the novel becomes a fantasy-scape, at a tangent to the ‘reality’ we live in, and governed entirely by the personality, and the whims, of the author. There’s a kitsch version of that floating around at the moment - I’m thinking of Nicole Krauss, Sheila Heti, Jason Mott - but the comparison with Everett makes it clear what it looks like when a writer truly has inner freedom, is impassioned, and is willing to let rip. 

There’s an idea I’m fond of that the true test of a work is how many imperfections it can contain and still be enthralling - and, by that standard, Dr. No tops the charts. The dubious authorial decisions are innumerable. There’s the decision to cast a maybe-talking one-legged dog as one of the main characters. There’s the very un-2022 comic mileage Everett gets from mocking a guy on the autism spectrum. There’s a certain inconsistency in Everett’s sense of humor (he’s often very funny but he has a tendency to fall for puns like the regrettable “I drove without a mishap, I wondered if that was the same as driving without a hap”). Then there are whole sections of the novel that don’t really pay off - the story of Wala getting his driver’s license; the whole subplot of Eigen Vector. And, oddly enough for a novel about supervillains and world destruction, there’s a shortfall of action. The majority of the novel, actually, is Wala turgyversing here and there, with a dizzying array of modes of transportation, engaging in only so-so funny banter about mathematics (puns about the word ‘nothing’ are repeated a lot), still sort of trying to keep to his course schedule at Brown. There’s a point where the entire cast of characters seems to get collectively concerned that not enough violence has happened - just one Villainy, Inc board member maybe plummeted into a shark pool - and there is, at times, the undernourished feeling of being in a Bond movie with only the gadgets and the puns.

Percival Everett - thoroughly enjoying himself

But Everett is - that most elusive of honorifics - a real writer, and for a real writer flaws like those can’t touch the underlying strength of the narrative. For the most part, he’s just having fun, savoring his wordplay, the zaniness of the world he’s created. If the bad puns are abundant, there is also a bone-dry humor that is at least as mordant as it is funny. There is the tongue-firmly-in-cheek method of narrating important plot points - “Road matters went a little better for me after I found the headlights and managed to switch them on.” There is the constant awareness the characters have of the way that events are supposed to unfold in an action-adventure story - “I looked out the window of my room and saw the cliché black sedan parked across the street.” And then there is the control Everett has when everything comes together and the reality of what’s going on turns out to be far darker than in any of the movie tropes that all of the characters assume are governing their world. “‘Is this the part where you fill us in on your diabolical plan?’” a secondary character asks hopefully of John Sill when he and his partner have been captured. “‘No.’ Sill nodded and both men were shot dead.”   

Everett is clearly enjoying himself unbelievably throughout Dr. No, but the overriding sense is that it is genuinely a very angry book - that Still is absolutely sincere about being after the elimination of America (starting with the most annoyingly mispronounced towns), that he means it, and that both Wala and Everett, though a bit more divided, are sympathetic to that project. I was a bit surprised that Sill disappears for so much of the middle sections of Dr. No - basically plays the gracious host to a variety of subplots; and remains in very many ways opaque - but Everett, master that he is, knows that he’s done enough by providing an involved back story for Sill in an early chapter. The point is that being a supervillain is the only appropriate, only actually moral response, to being black in America - especially if one’s back story is that one’s father was shot by the police as a result of having witnessed FBI involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Quincy, MA - which you will not think about in quite the same way again

Basically, it is Sill’s book - Wala is just narrating it. The real story is fairly straightforward. At an early age, Sill takes in the truth about America,. He embarks on a life-long path of revenge - “he really had no idea what was true, but he was smart, angry, and armed with a book full of prominent names.” He is pretty chill about his path towards revenge - takes plenty of time for gadgets, second homes, bons mots, has a good sense of humor about supervillainy (I knew that I was reading a special book when Sill responds to a cryptic warning e-mail of Wala’s by writing, “Dear Unsigned, Understood, go about your day, yadda yadda yadda,” and then follows up a few seconds later writing “Isn’t this fun?”) - but, really, never ever deviates from his plan. The linearity of the main character’s journey gives Everett some narrative airtime to fill in - and he does it mostly by mocking Wala’s Asperger’s Syndrome, by creating a couple of not-very-interesting subplots of Wala having misgivings about his role in Sill’s scheme; of Wala, the emotionless, developing feelings for Eigen. But, again, Everett knows what he’s doing and knows that these are just time-passing devices - the way that any action movie has a bunch of MacGuffins and false leads and half-hearted love-interest subplots. The real story is about nation-destruction on the supervillainish scale - from the perspective of the supervillains - and with Everett loving every second of it.

It must be said, by the way, that the mainstream reviewers have really outdone themselves here in forming pre-packaged opinions about a book without understanding it at all. It’s understood that Everett, as a venerable, prolific, clearly masterful black writer is due for a moment - that he is “if not exactly underrated, not as well known as he should be,” as a Washington Post profile puts it. The reviews are, therefore, appropriately laudatory - although nobody seemed quite to catch what the book was about. The Atlantic seems to think that Sill’s back story - which is, actually, the whole point of the book and is its narrative engine - is “little more than plot filler, trauma that needs to be there to set up the kinds of melodramatic one-liners that we expect from our movie villains.” Ron Charles’ Washington Post review, comparing Dr. No unfavorably with The Trees, expresses the “wish that Dr. No zeroed in on America’s racial environment with the same comic intensity,” which is, um, exactly what Everett is doing. Everybody seems to have fallen for the fairly obvious ploy of rewatching old Bond movies and thinking that that’s what the book is about - no matter that Everett, usually too-cool-for-school for these sorts of announcements, has given us the helpful hint that “It has nothing to do with anything Bond.” But Everett, not so surprisingly, is in a mental space where he can’t be touched by reviewers not getting him at all. The Washington Post profile is worth reading for a sense of how a veteran writer, who has been doing this for decades, who is as disciplined and inventive as anybody in the business, manages his inner equilibrium. “I don’t stress about anything. I mean it’s just books,” he said of his writing approach. “You can’t make a 1,200-pound animal calm by being excited.”

RICHARD REEVES’ Of Boys and Men (2022)

The way my non-fiction reading has shaken out over the past couple of weeks has been a nice juxtaposition of gendered tsuris - checking in to see what women are upset about with Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex (which is the disjunction between the exigencies of feminism and libido, the feeling that two social revolutions are pointing in divergent directions) and then seeing what the men are complaining about with Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men (which is the emergence of a new gender gap, men falling behind academically and losing track of their social responsibility, men falling disproportionately victim to ‘deaths of despair’). 

On the like intellectual center-right, Of Boys And Men is considered a big deal - and the reason, more than anything, is that it was written and published at all. As Reeves writes, “I have lost count of the number of people who advised against [writing the book].” The cultural presumption is that any discussion of the ‘crisis of men’ is right-wing talk - a sort of coded speech for returning to an old patriarchal system. Reeves, unfailingly centrist, with a stat to accompany every observation, a policy proposal alongside every argument, is an ideal mainstreamer for the whole discussion. He writes, “There is a deep well of private anxiety about boys and men that has yet to find a productive public outlet.” The thesis here, simple enough, is that, as Reeves tirelessly informs the reader, “It is possible to have two thoughts at once” - one can be a feminist, be concerned about the gender pay gap, the need for more women in STEM and more women CEOs and, at the same time (!), be concerned about boys failing at school and men losing their underlying sense of purpose. Most specifically, that means that it becomes possible to be p.c., liberal, and, at the same time, to worry about a host of sociological studies pointing towards a crisis among males, which, as Reeves correctly notes, we lack the ability to intelligently discuss.

And, in true think tank fashion, Reeves assumes that if the right data is publicly processed, then the right policies will duly follow. These, as per Reeves’ radical-yet-reasonable suggestions, are holding back boys for an extra year of pre-K before starting school, pushing males towards HEAL professionals (teaching, nursing, etc), adopting a set of policies encouraging conscientious fatherhood, above all six months of paid leave for fathers.

Reeves - here to tell the jokes and cite the studies

All reasonable enough, all somewhat unlikely to actually occur, but that’s no disqualification of Reeves’ arguments - this is think tank literature; the idea is to toss out ideas, some practicable, some thought-provoking, and just by having the conversation to shift the culture in the direction of meaningful change. So, all fair enough - and the hope is that, with somebody like Reeves as the flag bearer, the inchoate set of concerns about men starts to seem like just another policy point, fixed through money and intelligent social initiatives, as opposed to the counter-revolutionary grumbling of ‘the manosphere.’ 

As a reading experience, the Brookingsishness of Of Boys And Men - the way that it’s so clearly a position paper disguised as a commercial book - makes it a bit less than satisfying. Reeves doesn’t entirely earn one’s confidence as a narrator - for one thing, there’s the hint of Trojan Horseness about the enterprise, the sense that he is more upset about feminism than he’s letting on and that the mild liberal proposals he comes up with are more part of a counter strike on behalf of men’s interests; and, for another thing, he vacillates between a posture of humbly offering up sociological studies and then rendering sweeping verdicts. “This is wrong” is a favorite phrase of Reeves’, which can be startling when it’s applied to entire fields of discourse about, say, evolutionary biology or neuroscience. 

What matters most for me - since I’m not in the think tank world and like to think about questions as broadly and philosophically as possible rather than as issues of practical policy - is Reeves’ unwillingness to get at the real existential causes of men’s distress. He says repeatedly, and commendably, that the social sciences basically draw a blank as to why men are falling so far behind. He moves the focus from the data to psychology. And he puts a heavy finger on his hypothesis, that feminism has fundamentally reshaped the society - “we need to be grown up enough as a culture to recognize that big changes, even positive ones, have repercussions,” he writes - and that “the true cause of the male malaise is not labor force participation but cultural redundancy” but declines, demurely, to extrapolate beyond that. 

So, in the Brookingsian spirit of whiteboarding, let’s throw up a few of the more subtle, psychological elements in the male response to feminism that might have society-wide implications (these, all, are drawn from stray observations I’ve had in thinking about this phenomenon over the course of my life). 

- Male difficulty in accepting hierarchies and positions of subordination. This posture of rebelliousness drives a great deal of misbehavior among boys - it’s not just boys bouncing off walls or hormonally induced into high-risk behavior, as in Reeves’ account, it’s a sense that rebellion, the challenging of authority, the assertion of dominance, are a core part of male development and are increasingly discouraged in contemporary educational and workplace structures. What’s most confusing, for boys, is that competition and dominance are encouraged - but only in specific industries and specific situations. E.g. if you are a star athlete or if you are founding your own company, then competitive/dominant behaviors are encouraged, but if you are not, then you are expected, in school and in entry-level jobs, to be obedient and accept subordination. 

- Delusions of grandeur. One of the wisest lines I ever heard about men is that all men believe themselves to be the kings of their domain, the centers of their universe - however absurd that may be for any outside observer. In a society that increasingly emphasizes equality and civic responsibility, and that moves away from the fiefdom, master-apprentice model, that, at least in the level of crafts and shops, sustained so many men’s delusions of grandeur, there are ever-fewer real-world opportunities for men to feel that they are the heroes of their own lives and the tendency is to retreat into fantasia, first-person shooter games, etc, in which men feel like they’re the center of the action. 

- Male unwillingness to compete with women. Something that strikes me as being deemphasized in discourse about gender is a difficulty for men in engaging in competition with women in the marketplace while holding to some ideal of ‘gentlemanliness.’ Reeves quotes Gloria Steinem as saying “Women are always saying ‘we can do anything that men can do’ but men are not saying ‘we can anything that women can do.’” In Reeves’ account, that lack of male competition in women’s domains is seen as a failure of male imagination. But it’s possible to understand it as an unease that many men have in competing directly against women - a feeling that if you lose to a girl it’s embarrassing, that if you beat a girl it’s ungallant, and so it’s better to not play at all. That sensibility - half-misogynistic and half-chivalrous - may be more pervasive than people realize and helps to account for a certain diffidence that many male teenagers have towards their schoolwork, a feeling that school and grades are, at the moment, the game that the girls are playing. 

- Male unease in the white-collar workplace. There can be a certain confusion about priorities in the modern office space. There’s, on the one hand, team-building and, on the other, ruthless competition against one’s colleagues - and it can be very difficult to hold both ideas in one’s head at the same time. I have a sense - which is based just on my own office experience - that women are better at navigating those dueling priorities. Men seemed to have an advantage in an older dispensation in which office life was often conceived of by analogy to sports or war (and in which, as well, an overt misogyny was practiced as a barrier to female entry). In the modern dispensation, though, it’s often very difficult to figure out what’s at stake - whether you are working with your colleagues or against them; whether the emphasis on cooperation is real or rhetorical - and more men than one might realize simply give up on the whole thing.

The Sunday Times’ very silly illustration of the struggling modern male

Reeves’ remit is not to think deeply or critically about why exactly men seem to be caught so off-guard by feminism and by the new educational and workplace dynamics. He’s just telling the jokes and citing the studies. But he does important sociological work by claiming - and with copious evidence to back this up - that the sociologists have no idea what’s going on. “I have read these [cutting-edge] studies and spoken to many of the scholars,” Reeves writes. “The short summary of their conclusions is: ‘We don’t know.’” Reeves uses the space afforded to him to basically clear out his own field, to say that the answers are to be found more in individual psychology - or, really, in a very deep, existential need to matter. His usual narrative move is to cite, and analyze, a large number of studies, and then to conclude that they reveal very little. Reeves quotes Barrett Swanson writing in Harper’s Magazine, “Several of these men struggled with addiction and depression, or other conditions that could be named, but the more common complaint was something vaguer - a quiet desperation that, if I were forced to generalize, seemed to stem from a growing sense of purposelessness.” Reeves pays a great deal of attention to a series of pilot programs fostering education among young people - a free college program in Kalamazoo being a crown jewel of these initiatives - and finds that (although “it is barely getting any attention”) men are benefiting far less from these types of programs than women. Reeves considers various smart-sounding, sociological possibilities and concludes: “I think that the main issue is lower levels of engagement and motivation. These are not things that can easily be fixed externally.” 

To a surprising extent, the standard response to the poor social indicators among boys and men is that…..they had it coming. I have the feeling that just about any liberal New Yorker I presented these arguments to would respond, sooner or later, with something along the lines of saying that we have lived with patriarchy for so long, with misogyny, male violence towards women, with the systematic exclusion of women from schools and the workforce, that men deserve to take their lumps for some unspecified period of time. It’s not so easy to dismiss that line of thought - there is a certain harsh justice to it - but Reeves sweetly, timidly, makes the case for compassion. Present-day disadvantaged males are not responsible for the sins of their fathers, and narratives of retribution help no one - if males continue to fall behind at the rate that they are doing, they drag everyone down with them.