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, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Adam Mars-Jones and AN Wilson. Of the few 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. Nowadays 80 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 aware of who is buying novels. “When sales and marketing teams in publishing houses look at a young literary fiction debut they have certain comparisons to go to, for example Sally Rooney, or Naoise Dolan’s debut, Exciting Times, which has done very well recently. If you get it right you hit this readership of young women who pick up books in a way that young men don’t. If you make something the fiction debut of the summer you can shift so many copies. There’s just not that confidence there with young men.”

That’s not to say that young men aren’t writing books. Ash points out that “young, bright, brilliant male writers are choosing to write nonfiction”. That’s significant because almost all the growth in publishing (and it is still a growing industry) comes from nonfiction. Meanwhile, sales of literary fiction have been falling for years. In an article in The Atlantic the writer Juliet Lapidos suggested that “women are succeeding because men are no longer competing. They’re abandoning the field as its commercial prospects plummet.”

The thing that makes most people want to become novelists is reading lots of novels. If few young men are reading fiction, that suggests few young men are also nourishing ambitions to write it. Perhaps the young male novelists are simply not there. I put this theory to the agent and co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Clare Alexander. She disagrees. “I think it’s not that they’re not there, it’s that we can’t see them. There’s not an appetite from publishers and it’s hard to get men noticed. Unless they’re contenders for the Booker or a major prize, they don’t have much of a platform. It’s just very, very hard.”

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I asked everyone I interviewed for this piece to name as many important male novelists under 40 as they could. All of them struggle. Taylor, who has a reputation as a walking literary encyclopaedia, suggests Ross Raisin (who turns out to be 41) and Stuart Evers (who is 44). “Oh no! I thought he was just some kid,” Taylor cries. “Well in that case I’m stumped.”

The resourceful Alexander puts her brain to work and spends the evening firing me emails with suggestions. Eventually we cobble together a list that includes Joe Dunthorne, Derek Owusu, Guy Gunaratne, Max Porter, Paul Mendez, Ned Beauman, Luke Kennard and Matthew Sperling. Of those men probably only Porter (the author of the bestselling Grief is the Thing with Feathers) qualifies as a household name among the literate public.
Alexander says that the publishing industry has undergone two key “inflection points” in terms of the diversity of the fiction that is published. The first was in the 1990s, when publishers woke up to the commercial potential of literary fiction by women. The second is happening now as publishers and agents strive to introduce more racial diversity to their lists. Each of these inflection points, Alexander explains, “brings new writers to the fore and eclipses others. It’s not that other writers don’t exist, it’s that the industry pursues a particular thing and it eclipses everything else.”

One publisher I speak to tells me that modern publishing is shaped by a preoccupation with identity politics. It’s “really, really hard” to publish literary fiction by young white men because “the culture doesn’t really want to hear from them”. That preoccupation pervades wider literary culture too: landing newspaper interviews with young white male novelists can be almost as impossible as finding them places on prize lists. There hasn’t been a young (if you count young as under 40) white British man on the Booker shortlist since 2011.

The novelist Luke Brown (the author of My Biggest Lie and Theft), who grew up in the deprived Lancashire town of Fleetwood, says there’s a perception that “the white male is a discredited category”. Yet he points out that some middle-class metropolitan publishers are apt to forget that to be a white man is not necessarily to be privileged. “I do bristle at the current use of straight white male as an insult because I come from a place where nearly half the town are white men and they don’t really expect much from life,” Brown says. “The idea that their voices should take a back seat is offensive to me because they’ve never really had a front seat.”

He makes the interesting point that young male novelists may be struggling to position themselves in the cultural zeitgeist. Twentieth-century male fiction, especially in America, was dominated by lurid, uninhibited writing about sex. Writers such as Roth and John Updike prided themselves on pushing into the grimiest corners of male desire. A lot of that writing now appears unpalatable and even offensive to modern readers.

Nowadays, Brown says, women seem able to write more freely about sex than men. He points to Rooney’s novel Normal People and Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story Cat Person. Male novelists need to find a way of escaping the long phallic shadows cast by Updike, Roth and their like and discover how to write about sex in the 21st century. “If men dodge this because they’re scared to what extent they’re allowed to own the unpalatable aspects of their sexuality, they’ll only have themselves to blame in that no one wants to publish or read them,” Brown says.

Brown believes that male novelists such as himself have “a responsibility to argue our case and to argue that literary culture cannot be complete without us, really. We’re half of the population. Nobody’s calling for the 1980s to come back, but people should be interested in the male novelist because men are still everywhere and it might be of interest to understand what they’re thinking.”

That said, everyone I speak to is quick to point out that publishers remain interested above all in good writing. “Nobody’s turning down masterpieces,” Brown says. And Alexander, thinking like an agent, spots a challenge. Our conversation, she says, “makes me think I’ve got to go and find the best men nobody’s ever heard of”. Brilliant young male novelists (if you do in fact exist), she’s coming for you.