>And it is not clear exactly what might fix the problem, if there is one. “Writers (including male writers) should just write, try to put out the best work they can, and let the chips fall where they may,” said Andrew Boryga, a novelist who has weighed in on the debate on his Substack and the “Time to Say Goodbye” podcast, in an email. “The market’s always shifting.”
The ‘Great Male Narcissists’
>If you read only the beginning of Savage’s polemic, you might come away believing that his primary antagonists are industry gatekeepers: agents, editors, publishers, awards juries, booksellers. But he reserves the majority of his opprobrium for young straight white male novelists themselves.
>“Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists,” Savage wrote, “but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.”
>The contrast hardly needed to be stated: The American novel was in recent eras defined by straight white male novelists’ ambitious, grandiose and not infrequently successful attempts to do exactly that.
>Well into the 1990s, it was rare for the National Book Award for fiction not to go to a white man. Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and another for nonfiction; Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1969, America’s top-selling fiction book, according to Publishers Weekly, was not a genre potboiler, but a novel about a young man from Newark named Alexander Portnoy. (The Jewishness of many of these novelists did give them a more angled perspective on some questions of identity.)
>A new generation of novelist responded with a more apologetic brand of manhood. In a New York Observer essay published in 1997, David Foster Wallace deflated the “Great Male Narcissists,” or “G.M.N.s” (he cited Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth), with their “radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.” Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and others seemed to write with more explicit self-awareness about the fact that they were writing as straight white men.
>Yet into the ’90s and 2000s it was still widely accepted, by both the novelists themselves and the industry and critical apparatus, that exploring the lives of hyperbolically male characters — a deeply troubled tennis prodigy, say — was the valid way to explore the American psyche.
>“These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition,” Choire Sicha wrote in a 2008 essay about a yet newer generation of novelist headlined, “Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?”

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The Death and Life of the Straight White Man’s Novel