The End of the "Sad White Man" Novel

One of the dominant literary forms of the 20th century was what people are now calling the Sad White Man Novel. Each of these novels gives us a middle class man who is successful enough – good job, marriage, children, house – but deeply dissatisfied with his mediocre lot in life and yearning to break free. One of the most famous examples was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (1955). Wilson gave us an advertising executive – i.e., somebody who has a cool, with-it career – who anguished over the limits of his boring life and fantasized about throwing it over and disappearing onto the open road.

In an interesting essay, John Self identifies the prototype as Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922). Babbitt describes himself as

the perfect office-going executive — a well-fed man in a correct brown soft hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a semi-suburban parkway. . .

but keeps asking questions like, "What was it all about? What did he want?"

Babbitt's question introduces us to one of the themes of this literature: not only are the central characters unhappy, they don't know what would make them happy. They don't know what they want, or even how to want. In Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961) the narrator's wife urges that they should move to France, where "for the first time in your life you’ll have time to find out what it is you want to do." (They never move, and never find out.) Quite a few psychologically-minded critics have made this absence of authentic desire into the central problem of the modern world. In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch argued that we have gotten so lost in the thickets of advertising and commerce, so saturated with come-ons, that we not only don't know what we want, we don't understand what an authentic desire would feel like. Edward Teach , as the anonymous blogger at The Last Psychiatrist called himself, wrote about "desiring desire." Porn, Teach thinks, is how we defend ourselves against the unbearable fact that we actually have no desire. 

To people who think this way, and write these books, we are lying to ourselves about what holds us down. Middle class men may say that they feel trapped by obligations: job, spouse, children, familial expectations, but what really traps them is that they don't desire anything enough to make a change.

Of course the one thing these men actually do in such books to shake up their worlds is have affairs, which you might think shows they have desires. Lasch and Teach would disagree, though, and say that pursuing affairs is just a way of concealing from yourself your own lack of desire.

So, anyway, these books are part of a big trend in 20th-century thought, all revolving around the complete inauthenticity of our lives. We have no authentic desires, only those we are told to have, and no authentic selves, just people filling roles in a system we abhor but can't seem to change.

Personally, I always hated these books. I had to read Babbitt for a course in 20th-century American history, and spent the whole time wanting to grab Babbitt and shake him. I tried to read one of John Updike's Rabbit novels once and threw it away after about fifty pages, thinking that if suburban life were really that bad, we'd all be dead by now. I suppose people read them to see other people who feel what you feel, so you understand that to be left empty by your career and marriage and children is something others also experience. Ok, fine, but once that is said, why go on? How did John Updike manage to write thirty novels?

Doesn't it seem strange that these books got so popular? Martin Amis noticed how odd this was in the long view. Tracing the changing identity of literary heroes, he wrote, "First gods, then demi-gods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers, then burghers and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me." 

Why not read about heroes? Of course plenty of people did; James Bond was more popular than John Updike. But John Updike won literary awards, and Ian Fleming never did. Somehow the literary culture got obsessed with the Sad White Man novel and made them out to be great works of literature with deep insights and so on. What did that say about our culture?

The point of John Self's essay is to say that this whole tradition is ending, and books like these can't get published any more. In the way of the contemporary world he makes this all about race and sex, and talks about how white male authors are having a hard time getting published. It is probably true that one reason these books are declining is that many Americans just don't want to hear right now about the struggles of the privileged. I, of course, think the White Man business is entirely the wrong framing; John Updike and Ian Fleming were both privileged white men, but their books are hardly in the same category.

I'm just wondering, now, what the praise heaped on those dismal books meant, and what it means that people no longer want to read them. I can imagine what certain kinds of people would say. E.g. the ones who would say we are now too economically insecure for such fantasies, or the ones who think the desperate struggle for justice or civilization is too all-consuming to allow time for them. But those novels were written during the Cold War, which a lot of people thought was pretty important.

Sometimes, maybe, art has a life of its own, and follows certain paths for reasons that have little to do with anything else. If so, I am glad art is moving on.