At this point the problem, if it really is a problem, is more or less agreed upon: that sometime in the past ten years, it became unfashionable (or worse) to write about men. That is to say, the twentieth-century archetype of the meat-eating, whiskey-guzzling, four-ex-wife-having man of letters is done. There’s a new unspoken understanding among literary young men: instead of aping DeLillo or McCarthy or Pynchon, they’d be better off following the lead of Amor Towles and Anthony Doerr—laying low till middle age, then specializing in the sort of inoffensive historical fiction that gets turned into prestige miniseries and movies released on Christmas Day.
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