WORKING CLASS LITERARY MALE
or, what we talk about when we talk about the savage working poors
I was talking with my wife about various aspects of being alive right now and inundated with the insane thoughts spewed about by the goblinized community of freaks that make up posters on social media. It’s all quite alienating. All aggressive and weird and antagonistic.
My contention, often, is that most people are normal but that the algorithmic life has destroyed much of our shared humanity and our empathy for one another. Even so, most of these deranged gremlins make up the tiniest sliver of humanity and even were you to meet them in person, they would probably act quite normal.
And then there’s always the issue that you may be arguing with a twelve year old. Often when I see someone posting in a confidently ignorant manner, I just assume they’re a child and don’t give it a second thought.
This may be unfair to teenagers and preteens, but it will save you quite a lot of time by filtering out mass stupidity and silly delusions.
Anyway, I was thinking about this sort of thing when I came across the DISCOURSE and people writing about WORKING CLASS MALE LITERATURE, and I guess I may as well just point to what everyone pointed me towards, which is
and this post he made on his newsletter:Though if you’re expecting a takedown or something like that, maybe look elsewhere. It’s not even really a critique of this specifically, but more a way to look at this discussion happening all over the world wide web. Though I will say this: anyone so desperate for the approval and acceptance of his peers probably isn’t worth listening to; and, young men, do not take advice about what it means to be a man from someone with such a narrow view.
Though for the curious, I did actually write about some previous controversy stoked up by Alex Perez, though I used it more to poke at the indie literary scene more broadly.
infighting in the kiddie pool
Going to do something sort of dumb and talk about a recent controversy that most of you likely didn’t hear about and likely won’t hear about anywhere else besides this post. It concerns a small independent literary magazine called Hobart.
But all of this brings me to something new: a positive view.
who is this for?
In the discussions of a working class male, there’s a sort of Noble Savage quality to the discourse, which often makes me feel like none of the people speaking on their behalf have ever spent time with anyone who’s not addicted to their smartphone.
I will poke a bit more fun at Perez’ essay, though, but only about his inclusion of Roberto Bolano, who is not American but who Perez says is very American. I honestly don’t know how someone could read Bolano and think this, especially since the essay also critiques the literary man for wanting to read really long books in translation, since Bolano’s reputation largely relies on his two very large novels that most of the world encountered in translation.
Ah, one more thing: It all starts with Hemingway is very, very funny, since he was a rich kid who was also overly obsessed with ideas about his own manhood.
Anyway, the discourse around working class literature and literary men, in general, seems to revolve around style. There’s a sense that more masculine a writer is, the more tied to literary minimalism he is, which is why, as Perez says, it all begins with Hemingway (though Knut Hamsun would likely want his name thrown in the ring—but there I go mentioning a European, and a Scandinavian no less!—since Hemingway is, in many ways, aping Hamsun). And then there’s Denis Johnson—who I like a lot!—who was also a rich kid.
And this isn’t all to say that rich kids can’t be great writers and artists—they often are. But that our ideas of working class are quite spongy and self serving and often, I think, rely on never interacting with actual working people.
And then there’s the curious case of Raymond Carver, whose best known stories are best known for a style that he didn’t write them in! Rather, Gordon Lish rewrote and butchered Carver’s prose into the exacting and precise prose that’s now become so renowned and influential.
If anything, Carver is an example of how often the working class are used, abused, and stolen from. Even his art was stolen and manipulated and sold.
So much of this discussion is so grievance based that it’s hard to take seriously, especially since there’s no curiosity about the people being spoken for. A polemic must have an enemy, I suppose, and so there’s these assertions that you’re not ALLOWED to talk about Carver or Johnson, two of the most celebrated authors of the last fifty years. They’re too AMERICAN, these writers scream, as if we’re still trapped in 2005, bombs raining down on Baghdad, George W Bush ducking those projectile shoes.
But I think this is honestly quite demeaning to working class people. First that they’re such suckers as to believe that they must find some school of literature to speak for them, to speak to them. As if they cannot speak for themselves or cannot understand all these ten dollar words the college folk use when they talk and write. And then there’s the idea that comes from the overly educated that you can’t understand what some might call High Literature without receiving special instruction.
I’d say I’m living proof that that isn’t true! I’ve written enough about James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy here to likely convince people that I’m the kind of idiot who reads big dumb books that smart people like, but I didn’t get a literature degree or have any kind of formal training in how to read a difficult text.
Perhaps I’m old fashioned in that I simply picked up the books and began reading them like any other novel, rather than making them a work of study. And perhaps some would say I read them wrong or must have missed the point or any other kind of notion, but I’ll just say, as I keep saying in my ongoing series on Stephen King, that I think Joyce gave birth to the 20th Century and his afterbirth keeps frothing forth into this 21st Century.
But here’s the thing about complexity, about difficult literature: it’s for everyone. And much of it was written by the working class, the desperate poor. James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy, for example, are known and lauded for their styles, for their inventiveness, for their linguistic and narrative ingenuity.
Both of them came from those working poor and lived the lives of the desperately poor. Looks at Hubert Selby Jr and William Faulkner, two of the more daring prose stylists of the 20th Century, and you’ll find their working class roots and how poverty shaped them and their world. We can talk about Steinbeck and Bradbury and George RR Martin and Jose Saramego (but, alas, again, European). Male writers whose working class backgrounds informed everything about their work.
There are many working class male writers writing right now!
and are two of the best right here on substack, but there’s also Brian Allen Carr and Bud Smith and just dozens of others. Someone might even call me working class, though I think, technically, I’d have to disagree. I think it’s more accurate to say I’m among the Moneyed Poor (though my father comes from the abjectly poor, if that means anything).None of them preen about how the Literary World doesn’t understand them because this kind of conversation is really one for the email and professorial classes. And maybe that’s what these people are all angling for: a gig where they can teach a class called Postwar Working Class Fiction or Masculinity in Post-postmodern America or some such thing, where they can lecture to the indebted bourgeoisie about what the savage poor need and what they think and what their spokesmen have to say about them all.
working class fiction
You know what working class men are really reading?
I hate to break it to you, but it’s not Raymond Carver. Maybe it should be! Maybe it would be, if we were having this discussion in 1985 or 1995. But it is, sadly, unavoidably, 2025, and working class men are mostly reading books like Cradle by Will Wight and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. They’re reading Bernard Cornwell and Stephen King. They’re still reading George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie.
And maybe above all else, they’re reading Brandon fucking Sanderson.
And maybe that bums you out or lets the wind out of your sails, but let us ask why, because that’s far more interesting than bemoaning the what. Why are young men drawn to LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, to the worldcraftiness of Brandon Sanderson?
And the simple answer is, actually, because of the positive case for masculinity (among numerous other factors, for the working class man is not so fixated on the things that the educated may think) at the center of these. The works of Wight, Dinniman, and Sanderson present quite effortlessly what it means to be a man. What a man is.
And they do this by showing what a man does.
You won’t find polemics and screeds about what men ought to be or ought to do. And, yes, they show men who are flawed. Men who are despicable. But even these flawed examples of men create a spectrum of what it is to be a man, to live a masculine life. And it’s obviously not all being emotionally hard and physically strong.
They’re creating a framework. Maybe not even on purpose. Honestly, it’s probably not on purpose. Which is why it’s effective and why these stories resonate so much with young men and boys.
And, sure, I’d prefer young men read someone besides Sanderson, for example. There is a longing within me for more freaks to like the things that I love and that shaped me, but the youth have spoken and they keep speaking and the name that dribbles off their lips is Brandon Sanderson.
An interesting question would have something to do with the rise in genre fiction and how it came to dominate even the high reaches of academia, but the working class have always had an affinity for sword and sorcery, for lasers and spaceships, for superheroes and baseball cards.
What we see in Lord of the Rings (a series I love) and The Wheel of Time (a series I hate) is a full and well realized framework for masculinity. Tolkien and Jordan were both soldiers in war and what we see in their depictions of strength and masculinity is that it’s so much more than physicality. Rather, it’s this bonedeep strength of will.
But perhaps most importantly, it’s the ability to forgive. Not only those who have wronged you, but the ability to forgive yourself.
Because remember: Frodo doesn’t throw the ring into Mount Doom.
He fails. His story is one of failure. At the very last moment, at the final, crucial moment, his will gives out and he fails.
He fails.
And yet, he is our hero. He is the hero, both within the constructed world and within the text and out here, in the real life world we real lifely live in.
a positive view
And rather than write thousands of words about each of these series in turn and what they say about masculinity and manhood, I’ll save those for a later date and wrap this essay up. But this will be something I’ll keep returning to.
I’ve been thinking about masculinity, perhaps for the first time, these last few years. Maybe because I have a few sons now. Maybe because there’s so clearly a genuine crisis among young men and a dearth of outreach for them.
I haven’t really known how to approach the topic, to be honest. My goal has been to present a positive view.
Rather than describe narrowly what a man ought to be or should be, and so on, I suppose I hoped to present a framework. A working theory on choice and action. All topics that feel a bit too big to simply dive into without at least taking a few breaths.
But this conversation about literature and masculinity opens up a path for me. And so I’ll likely do what I have always done: write reviews that are a mix of personal essay, autobiography, and political dialogue.
Until next time.
A tangential observation: successful (and unsuccessful) brown and black writers, regardless of their economic background, are often portrayed as "working class" even though a healthy percentage of them have followed the same elite college route as successful (and unsuccessful) white writers. A few of the more successful brown and black writers are alumni of elite high schools (the kind of places whose students become U.S. Presidents). I think there's an unexpressed idea that racism makes you economically poor no matter how poor you are or aren't. I'm certainly not doubting the traumatic effects of racism (I carry the most racist encounters in my life like permanent luggage) but there's a massive difference between working class poverty and Harvard, even inside the BIPOC world, but that difference is a rather forbidden topic.
Man, this is great. I like Perez’s piece (I think he’s deeply funny and ironic in a way that doesn’t always register for some; for instance, I immediately took his Bolaño comment as a joke). Love that you point out that working class men ARE reading, and they’re reading genre, and that there’s a good reason for that. Yours is the kind of High Horse Sense take I look for on Substack.