How to Be a Man

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

This struck me as a very good thing. Young men should read books; you may have noticed that there have, in the last year or so, been one or two essays on Substack agreeing with me on this point. Clearly, I decided, the logical next step was to check if he was reading my book — so, feigning a lost earphone, I leaned forward and chanced a peek at the cover. He was not reading my book. Instead, he was reading a book on business strategy by Robert Greene. “LAW 12,” read the line I surreptitiously glimpsed over his shoulder: “USE SELECTIVE HONESTY AND GENEROSITY TO DISARM YOUR VICTIM.”

In the long and delay-riddled train ride that followed, I began to descend into some kind of minor but very real mental crisis. I am a novelist; my entire professional existence is wagered on the idea that language is a decent analogue for consciousness, and that the more original, surprising, virtuosic a writer can be in language, the more faithfully he or she can render the mysteries of the inner life. But was that really true of this guy? It struck me that the better I got at this writing business, the further I would stray from the kind of mind that encounters The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and thinks to itself, “Wow, this is great. Does anyone have a pen so that I can start underlining?” I looked around the train: it was all young men dressed like him, reading things on their phones. Perhaps, I began to wonder, there really was a grain of truth in some of the recent hand-wringing about men and fiction. Whatever the language in which men my age are parsing their inner lives — workplace KPIs, political compass memes, online IQ scores — it