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.
I’m joking. Sort of.
Every publishing pundit, literary critic and pseudonymous Twitter profile suddenly has a take. Where is the “sad boy literature?” Has Ben Lerner finally cracked White Male Rage? These essays range from thoughtful and well-articulated to thinly veiled excuses to whine about wokeness to just plain stupid. In a now-notorious 2022 interview with the alt-lit journal Hobart, the writer Alex Perez (styling himself the “Iowa pariah”) criticized how the world of literary fiction—from publishing houses to graduate programs all the way down to writers themselves—pays lip service to the idea of diversity but has only traded its political conservatism for a moral one. In Perez’s mind, the industry’s fealty to identity politics leaves no place for stories of “hood deviance and squalor,” the kind that he writes. According to him, some of this is because of race—“If [the industry] really wanted to uplift minority voices,” he explains, “they’d diversify their hiring practices and hire black female editors, Hispanic dudes, old Asian ladies, and other actual ‘marginalized’ people”—but increasingly, the more divisive fault line is that of gender. In Perez’s conception, if the “woke white ladies” that make up “80% of editorships/agent gigs” get their way, titans like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson will be phased out in favor of “token” male novelists who feel sufficiently guilty about their place in the world. Novels that deal with explicitly “male” concerns have no place.
While arguments like these tend to get trapped in the orbit of “wokeness discourse” (coastal elites, affirmative action, etc.), the phenomenon they’re responding to is nevertheless real. Since the 2010s, it’s become obvious that the publishing industry has moved away from the (male) stories of teenaged angst, hard drinking and infidelity that once made up a sizeable chunk of literary fiction’s yearly output. As the critic Christian Lorentzen bemoaned in Bookforum, careerism has become the dominant mode in American literary fiction. Yet while Lorentzen saw the then-recently deceased Philip Roth—a prodigy in his twenties who still raked in positive press fifty years later—as the quintessential careerist, today’s novelists seek self-preservation not by courting controversy but by avoiding it at all costs. The Rothian model of literary celebrity (feuds with critics, well-publicized affairs) simply wouldn’t work today, especially for male writers. At best, it’s played out. At worst, it would invite whispered accusations of the “p” word that’s oh-so-damning to artists working today: privilege. Unless they want to rebrand themselves as iconoclastic culture warriors à la Perez, today’s male and female writers realize they’re best off keeping their heads down, their fiction neutered, and the powder keg of masculinity safely out of sight.
●
Andrew Lipstein may have missed that memo.
While the rest of us argued about autofiction, self-help, and how no one even reads books anymore anyway, Lipstein (who, from what I could find on Google, is a straight, white, millennial dude) has quietly spent the first half of the 2020s writing what might be the definitive body of work on straight, white, millennial dudehood. His debut, 2022’s Last Resort, is a literary thriller about a twentysomething who turns his college frenemy’s sexual escapades into a bestselling novel. Throughout, the narrator is neurotic, ambitious and casually cruel to just about everyone (including 2.5 female love interests) standing between him and the money-slash-literary clout he feels he deserves. Lipstein’s second novel, The Vegan, takes a similar approach to New York’s other industry: finance. That novel’s narrator—a startup CEO on the cusp of a big fin-tech breakthrough—pulls a prank that puts a dinner-party guest (this time, his wife’s college frenemy) into a coma and gets away with it. He spends the bulk of the book enduring a sort of psychotically induced veganism as a way to repent for the guilt he feels for the violence he’s inflicted on the universe. Like the narrator of Last Resort, the narrator is shortsighted, ego-driven and, yes, casually cruel to his wife. (And don’t worry—by the novel’s end, he’s given up the veganism and gone back to work.)
If these descriptions have you groaning, expecting the same New York millennial novel you’ve read a hundred times before, I don’t blame you. But though they hit some familiar beats, Lipstein’s novels are unique in their execution, combining an old-school, plot-driven sensibility with unabashedly zeitgeisty ideas. And unlike most literary debuts these days, they’re each about something more than general millennial ennui—annoying people in publishing in Last Resort, annoying people in finance in The Vegan. (Lipstein might be the only writer of his generation to have high literary aims while confessing to a fascination with stocks). In his hands, these books, which could’ve come off as serviceable romps, are elevated into not-so-subtle indictments of today’s generation of young people, who feel entitled to the world.
Lipstein’s latest novel, Something Rotten, drags the “battle of the sexes” energy that underscored his early work front and center. Reuben and Cecilie are thirtysomething New York media people—she’s a business reporter at the Times, he’s an on-air personality at NPR—who, though unmarried, have a six-month-old named Arne. From the novel’s first pages, a mutual resentment simmers barely under the surface of new-parent stress. This dysfunction, both privately agree, stems from the quasi-sex scandal that cost Reuben his job. Lipstein smartly plays this like a joke—thinking he left a Zoom meeting, Reuben and Cecilie get frisky while working from home. But word gets around, coworkers are appropriately outraged, and NPR “lets” Reuben resign. Stuck as a stay-at-home dad while ambitious Cecilie delays her maternity leave to work on a big scoop, Reuben grows resentful of what he regards as his cancellation. (“The word had long become meaningless,” he muses early in the novel, “a relic from another time, like yuppie, hipster, millennial”). Everyone else, however, just finds the situation awkward; they are eager to move on.
Cecilie’s solution to their domestic woes is to spend her delayed leave abroad in Copenhagen, where she grew up, and where both her family and tight-knit circle of friends from journalism school still live and work. She wastes no time in dropping Arne off with his Danish grandmother and, baby-free for the first time in months, dragging Reuben into her old social circle with the hope that doing so might spark something career-wise.
The men in this friend group are lorded over by Mikkel, another one of the J-school cohort with a telling nickname: psykopaten. Mikkel is hyper-sarcastic, a heavy drinker and a fantastic journalist. Early in the novel, he breaks the biggest political scoop of the year in Denmark: two anonymous women accusing an influential right-wing politician of pedophilia and statutory rape. In the alternating chapters narrated by Cecilie, Mikkel functions as the novels’ antagonist, pulling strings in a subplot where he tries to convince another of the old friends (who is also Cecilie’s ex) to forgo medical treatment for a rare, possibly fatal brain disease. But for Reuben, the social and professional sway Mikkel has over his peers is infectious.
On Reuben’s first night with the Danish men, Mikkel leads the group in some light mockery of his “resignation” from NPR. But they quickly cool off, moving on to what else the night has in store (drinking). As he dwells on this treatment, Reuben feels a wave of something like gratitude wash over him. “[The other men had] brought it up. They’d made fun of him. And then they’d moved on. Had any of his friends back home been so direct? In their attempts to show him sympathy—texting him How are you feeling, man … they had only inflated the issue, made it taboo.”
What follows is Reuben’s not-so-gradual descent into Mikkel’s cult of no-nonsense Danish masculinity. That first night of heavy drinking, one of the men cheats on his wife, and the rest of them joke about it. Later, Reuben records Mikkel’s drunken ramblings about masculinity, Danish and American sensibilities, and how the internalized shame that Reuben feels is the root of all his problems. As Reuben confides to Mikkel in one recording, with an air of gravity like he’s reached some actual epiphany: “I do feel like a man … It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have to apologize for it.”
Ostensibly, he’s using these recordings to develop an experimental podcast, a deep dive into American versus European ideas about manhood. But really, Reuben is drunk on the us-against-the-world machismo that Mikkel is preaching, letting increasingly fringe ideas steadily bleed into his own. One morning, nursing a hangover, Reuben realizes that for the first time since losing his job, he “felt, in that moment, like a man. If he was instinctually embarrassed by this notion … that embarrassment soon became its own insight. Why was he embarrassed? It no longer seemed like one thing, embarrassment, but two: a part of him was embarrassed, another part the recipient of that embarrassment.” In one recorded conversation with Mikkel, Reuben hears himself regurgitate the sort of talking points that wouldn’t be out of place in a tradwife TikTok: “Danish men just seem more natural,” he says, “gender here feels more natural. It’s like you’re closer to the truth of it.”
Once Reuben has fully bought in, things escalate. He and Mikkel get their heads shaved like skinheads after a recording session. The next morning, after a night of drinking, Reuben wakes up with a tattoo that he half-remembers Mikkel talking him into: “Something Rotten,” in Danish, set in a funky gothic font. “From Macbeth,” he tells Cecilie, when she notices. It’s Hamlet, she corrects him, but even worse, that’s not actually what it says—the tattoo is Danish nonsense, translating to nothing. “He’s fucking with you,” she later explains. Reuben is furious, confronting Mikkel, but the mind games continue: Mikkel proceeds to confide in Reuben that his big scoop about the right-wing pedophile was made up—the anonymous sources he spoke to didn’t exist, he just wanted to take down a politician. Later, he gives Reuben the contact information for the latter’s estranged father, whom Reuben has never met, saying it wasn’t difficult to find.
At this point Reuben has realized that Mikkel is toying with him. But he is still intoxicated by what feels like freedom: in Denmark, for the first time in his life, he is embracing his “masculinity.” He is fascinated by how “this contradiction—[that] Mikkel was a dickhead, but he was doing good—was interesting at first, a curiosity, [but] slowly became uncomfortable, intimidating, an idea that the more he thought about it, seemed to have the power to singlehandedly undermine his standing notion of virtue, could show that notion as something contrived.” By then, it’s too late. Reuben’s self-worth is already tied up in the narrative Mikkel is spinning. Even if unapologetic masculinity’s promise to fix every problem in his life is ultimately empty, Reuben saw firsthand how good it felt to believe those things. Mikkel’s version of masculinity might have amounted to little more than a power fantasy. But even though Reuben could see through the fantasy, he kept coming back for more.
●
While Reuben is getting red-pilled by Mikkel, Cecilie gets a twisty, culture-clashy subplot of her own: she spends days convincing her not-quite-terminally ill ex-boyfriend Jonas that his life is worth living, an effort that culminates in an oddly chaste make-out session. In contrast with Reuban’s masculinity journey, this infidelity plot feels like a drag on the narrative. But the contrast itself throws the novel’s most interesting theme into dramatic relief. What we come to realize is that Reuben’s newfound sense of his masculinity has not just changed his and Cecilie’s relationship—it has, perhaps, changed it for the better.
This is the juicy part of Something Rotten. While half of the book depicts Reuben’s indoctrination into fascist-flavored Danish masculinity, the woman to whom he’s unhappily unmarried resents him for the same pathetic tendencies he resents in himself. The first glimpses of this come back in Brooklyn, when Cecilie returns from her last day at work before maternity leave and is forced to come to terms with the shell of a person Reuben has become. Seeing him harried, trying to pack up their tiny apartment ahead of the trip abroad, with visible bags under his eyes, Juuling just to stay awake, she is struck by just “how much parenting could be a zero-sum game.” That her and Reuben’s situation was gender-flipped—him wasting away trying to maintain domestic order while she worked her powerful job—was beside the point. Cecilie wonders if it’s really “a step forward to depict dads failing at tasks normally reserved for women.” No, she decides, this wasn’t progress. If anything, it was proof of how toxic, regardless of gender, the nuclear family could be. She and Reuben “hadn’t become more equal; if anything, their circumstances had only reinforced the privileges of being male and the burdens of being female. Reuben had become a victim as only a man could, refusing himself everything until his dignity had been returned, intact.”
This is followed by a page-long description of how, since she’s given birth to Arne (or maybe, more specifically, since Reuben has suffered the indignity of becoming a stay-at-home dad), Cecilie no longer finds Reuben attractive.
Being in Denmark, away from their tiny apartment and the ever-present distraction of her job, makes Cecilie realize how little she likes the self-righteous, vindictive man Reuben is becoming. Over the span of the novel—watching Reuben come home first with a skinhead cut, then with a nonsensical fascist-coded tattoo, then in the throes of a panic attack over some “secret” Mikkel entrusted him with—Cecilie thinks he’s acting like a child. But at the same time, she sees a fire inside Reuben that’s been missing at least since his “cancellation” back at NPR, and maybe even longer. She understands that the snake oil Mikkel is selling might be dangerous, but it’s worth something, too.
Cecilie’s presence in the novel—not just as a love interest or a side character, as the female characters were in Lipstein’s first two novels, but as the subject of half the chapters—balances Something Rotten out. Being privy to Cecilie’s interiority allows us to see how she, playing the role of the quietly unhappy heterosexual domestic partner, isn’t just complacent but is active in the toxic gender ideology taking over Reuben’s sense of self. That is to say, Cecilie’s reaction to Reuben’s radicalization is, compellingly, twofold: she thinks he’s being ridiculous, grasping at straws, getting toyed with by Mikkel. But also—and not particularly deeply under the surface—she understands why Reuben is attracted to these ideas, why he wants to shed his old self. After all, she didn’t particularly like that version of him, either.
This two-sided dysfunction provides a welcome contrast with depictions of gender and masculinity in the bulk of contemporary novels, particularly those in the increasingly heteropessimistic “sad girl” canon. In the worst of these—Sarah Manguso’s Liars or Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, for example—what’s supposed to be character-driven literary fiction reads like Mad Libs of heterosexual angst. Their unnamed female narrators passively haunt the few domestic spaces they have ownership of, feeling paralyzed by the not-quite-cruelty of their not-quite-absent partners.
Something Rotten is different in that it gives its domestic dysfunction drama a name and a face, letting readers encounter the mess on both sides. If Lipstein’s early fiction grappled with masculinity, it did so obliquely, showing its entanglement with ambition and ego in a specific social context. Something Rotten hits many of these same themes, but for the first time, masculinity is explicitly at the forefront. Yet importantly, its prominence is neither apologized for (as in the “sad girl” novels) nor celebrated for its messiness (as advocated for by culture warriors like Alex Perez). Instead, Something Rotten exemplifies a third way that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.
Lipstein isn’t the first youngish male novelist to resist the discourse. Books as distinct as Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection hinge on the fact that it’s become borderline transgressive to center a messy male voice in a novel while avoiding the trap of celebrating misogyny. So, too, does Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi. But Lipstein’s novels operate more as traditional commercial fiction—with beginnings, middles, endings and a prose style that doesn’t beg for think pieces. This allows him to stage the drama of masculinity directly on the level of narrative, rather than indirectly in the meta-drama of authorial voice. Rather than “wrestling with” or “worrying over” gender roles, they depict masculinity as it exists beyond the culture war’s talking points, in a way that the more highbrow, autofictional novels like Fuccboi and The Topeka School can’t. In a moment that’s so polarized, Lipstein’s choice to operate in straightforward realism feels almost radical. He writes neutrally about contemporary manhood, letting the good and the bad coexist on the page. But unlike underwritten “sad girl” wannabes on one hand or Perez-lite culture warriors on the other, Lipstein doesn’t get bogged down by the moralistic framework that’s become prevalent in how we think about fiction.
So if the pundits are right and Trump’s reelection really did signal a cultural realignment, let’s hope the future of men in literary fiction looks less like the culture warriors and more like Andrew Lipstein. Less like Reuben and more like, well… Lipstein hasn’t written a male character like that yet. But that’s part of the fun. The best satires hold a mirror right up to the ugliest parts of society: luring readers in with laughs, then daring them to think. That ugliness isn’t in and of itself a reason to celebrate. But that doesn’t mean we should look away, either.
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.
I’m joking. Sort of.
Every publishing pundit, literary critic and pseudonymous Twitter profile suddenly has a take. Where is the “sad boy literature?” Has Ben Lerner finally cracked White Male Rage? These essays range from thoughtful and well-articulated to thinly veiled excuses to whine about wokeness to just plain stupid. In a now-notorious 2022 interview with the alt-lit journal Hobart, the writer Alex Perez (styling himself the “Iowa pariah”) criticized how the world of literary fiction—from publishing houses to graduate programs all the way down to writers themselves—pays lip service to the idea of diversity but has only traded its political conservatism for a moral one. In Perez’s mind, the industry’s fealty to identity politics leaves no place for stories of “hood deviance and squalor,” the kind that he writes. According to him, some of this is because of race—“If [the industry] really wanted to uplift minority voices,” he explains, “they’d diversify their hiring practices and hire black female editors, Hispanic dudes, old Asian ladies, and other actual ‘marginalized’ people”—but increasingly, the more divisive fault line is that of gender. In Perez’s conception, if the “woke white ladies” that make up “80% of editorships/agent gigs” get their way, titans like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson will be phased out in favor of “token” male novelists who feel sufficiently guilty about their place in the world. Novels that deal with explicitly “male” concerns have no place.
While arguments like these tend to get trapped in the orbit of “wokeness discourse” (coastal elites, affirmative action, etc.), the phenomenon they’re responding to is nevertheless real. Since the 2010s, it’s become obvious that the publishing industry has moved away from the (male) stories of teenaged angst, hard drinking and infidelity that once made up a sizeable chunk of literary fiction’s yearly output. As the critic Christian Lorentzen bemoaned in Bookforum, careerism has become the dominant mode in American literary fiction. Yet while Lorentzen saw the then-recently deceased Philip Roth—a prodigy in his twenties who still raked in positive press fifty years later—as the quintessential careerist, today’s novelists seek self-preservation not by courting controversy but by avoiding it at all costs. The Rothian model of literary celebrity (feuds with critics, well-publicized affairs) simply wouldn’t work today, especially for male writers. At best, it’s played out. At worst, it would invite whispered accusations of the “p” word that’s oh-so-damning to artists working today: privilege. Unless they want to rebrand themselves as iconoclastic culture warriors à la Perez, today’s male and female writers realize they’re best off keeping their heads down, their fiction neutered, and the powder keg of masculinity safely out of sight.
●
Andrew Lipstein may have missed that memo.
While the rest of us argued about autofiction, self-help, and how no one even reads books anymore anyway, Lipstein (who, from what I could find on Google, is a straight, white, millennial dude) has quietly spent the first half of the 2020s writing what might be the definitive body of work on straight, white, millennial dudehood. His debut, 2022’s Last Resort, is a literary thriller about a twentysomething who turns his college frenemy’s sexual escapades into a bestselling novel. Throughout, the narrator is neurotic, ambitious and casually cruel to just about everyone (including 2.5 female love interests) standing between him and the money-slash-literary clout he feels he deserves. Lipstein’s second novel, The Vegan, takes a similar approach to New York’s other industry: finance. That novel’s narrator—a startup CEO on the cusp of a big fin-tech breakthrough—pulls a prank that puts a dinner-party guest (this time, his wife’s college frenemy) into a coma and gets away with it. He spends the bulk of the book enduring a sort of psychotically induced veganism as a way to repent for the guilt he feels for the violence he’s inflicted on the universe. Like the narrator of Last Resort, the narrator is shortsighted, ego-driven and, yes, casually cruel to his wife. (And don’t worry—by the novel’s end, he’s given up the veganism and gone back to work.)
If these descriptions have you groaning, expecting the same New York millennial novel you’ve read a hundred times before, I don’t blame you. But though they hit some familiar beats, Lipstein’s novels are unique in their execution, combining an old-school, plot-driven sensibility with unabashedly zeitgeisty ideas. And unlike most literary debuts these days, they’re each about something more than general millennial ennui—annoying people in publishing in Last Resort, annoying people in finance in The Vegan. (Lipstein might be the only writer of his generation to have high literary aims while confessing to a fascination with stocks). In his hands, these books, which could’ve come off as serviceable romps, are elevated into not-so-subtle indictments of today’s generation of young people, who feel entitled to the world.
Lipstein’s latest novel, Something Rotten, drags the “battle of the sexes” energy that underscored his early work front and center. Reuben and Cecilie are thirtysomething New York media people—she’s a business reporter at the Times, he’s an on-air personality at NPR—who, though unmarried, have a six-month-old named Arne. From the novel’s first pages, a mutual resentment simmers barely under the surface of new-parent stress. This dysfunction, both privately agree, stems from the quasi-sex scandal that cost Reuben his job. Lipstein smartly plays this like a joke—thinking he left a Zoom meeting, Reuben and Cecilie get frisky while working from home. But word gets around, coworkers are appropriately outraged, and NPR “lets” Reuben resign. Stuck as a stay-at-home dad while ambitious Cecilie delays her maternity leave to work on a big scoop, Reuben grows resentful of what he regards as his cancellation. (“The word had long become meaningless,” he muses early in the novel, “a relic from another time, like yuppie, hipster, millennial”). Everyone else, however, just finds the situation awkward; they are eager to move on.
Cecilie’s solution to their domestic woes is to spend her delayed leave abroad in Copenhagen, where she grew up, and where both her family and tight-knit circle of friends from journalism school still live and work. She wastes no time in dropping Arne off with his Danish grandmother and, baby-free for the first time in months, dragging Reuben into her old social circle with the hope that doing so might spark something career-wise.
The men in this friend group are lorded over by Mikkel, another one of the J-school cohort with a telling nickname: psykopaten. Mikkel is hyper-sarcastic, a heavy drinker and a fantastic journalist. Early in the novel, he breaks the biggest political scoop of the year in Denmark: two anonymous women accusing an influential right-wing politician of pedophilia and statutory rape. In the alternating chapters narrated by Cecilie, Mikkel functions as the novels’ antagonist, pulling strings in a subplot where he tries to convince another of the old friends (who is also Cecilie’s ex) to forgo medical treatment for a rare, possibly fatal brain disease. But for Reuben, the social and professional sway Mikkel has over his peers is infectious.
On Reuben’s first night with the Danish men, Mikkel leads the group in some light mockery of his “resignation” from NPR. But they quickly cool off, moving on to what else the night has in store (drinking). As he dwells on this treatment, Reuben feels a wave of something like gratitude wash over him. “[The other men had] brought it up. They’d made fun of him. And then they’d moved on. Had any of his friends back home been so direct? In their attempts to show him sympathy—texting him How are you feeling, man … they had only inflated the issue, made it taboo.”
What follows is Reuben’s not-so-gradual descent into Mikkel’s cult of no-nonsense Danish masculinity. That first night of heavy drinking, one of the men cheats on his wife, and the rest of them joke about it. Later, Reuben records Mikkel’s drunken ramblings about masculinity, Danish and American sensibilities, and how the internalized shame that Reuben feels is the root of all his problems. As Reuben confides to Mikkel in one recording, with an air of gravity like he’s reached some actual epiphany: “I do feel like a man … It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have to apologize for it.”
Ostensibly, he’s using these recordings to develop an experimental podcast, a deep dive into American versus European ideas about manhood. But really, Reuben is drunk on the us-against-the-world machismo that Mikkel is preaching, letting increasingly fringe ideas steadily bleed into his own. One morning, nursing a hangover, Reuben realizes that for the first time since losing his job, he “felt, in that moment, like a man. If he was instinctually embarrassed by this notion … that embarrassment soon became its own insight. Why was he embarrassed? It no longer seemed like one thing, embarrassment, but two: a part of him was embarrassed, another part the recipient of that embarrassment.” In one recorded conversation with Mikkel, Reuben hears himself regurgitate the sort of talking points that wouldn’t be out of place in a tradwife TikTok: “Danish men just seem more natural,” he says, “gender here feels more natural. It’s like you’re closer to the truth of it.”
Once Reuben has fully bought in, things escalate. He and Mikkel get their heads shaved like skinheads after a recording session. The next morning, after a night of drinking, Reuben wakes up with a tattoo that he half-remembers Mikkel talking him into: “Something Rotten,” in Danish, set in a funky gothic font. “From Macbeth,” he tells Cecilie, when she notices. It’s Hamlet, she corrects him, but even worse, that’s not actually what it says—the tattoo is Danish nonsense, translating to nothing. “He’s fucking with you,” she later explains. Reuben is furious, confronting Mikkel, but the mind games continue: Mikkel proceeds to confide in Reuben that his big scoop about the right-wing pedophile was made up—the anonymous sources he spoke to didn’t exist, he just wanted to take down a politician. Later, he gives Reuben the contact information for the latter’s estranged father, whom Reuben has never met, saying it wasn’t difficult to find.
At this point Reuben has realized that Mikkel is toying with him. But he is still intoxicated by what feels like freedom: in Denmark, for the first time in his life, he is embracing his “masculinity.” He is fascinated by how “this contradiction—[that] Mikkel was a dickhead, but he was doing good—was interesting at first, a curiosity, [but] slowly became uncomfortable, intimidating, an idea that the more he thought about it, seemed to have the power to singlehandedly undermine his standing notion of virtue, could show that notion as something contrived.” By then, it’s too late. Reuben’s self-worth is already tied up in the narrative Mikkel is spinning. Even if unapologetic masculinity’s promise to fix every problem in his life is ultimately empty, Reuben saw firsthand how good it felt to believe those things. Mikkel’s version of masculinity might have amounted to little more than a power fantasy. But even though Reuben could see through the fantasy, he kept coming back for more.
●
While Reuben is getting red-pilled by Mikkel, Cecilie gets a twisty, culture-clashy subplot of her own: she spends days convincing her not-quite-terminally ill ex-boyfriend Jonas that his life is worth living, an effort that culminates in an oddly chaste make-out session. In contrast with Reuban’s masculinity journey, this infidelity plot feels like a drag on the narrative. But the contrast itself throws the novel’s most interesting theme into dramatic relief. What we come to realize is that Reuben’s newfound sense of his masculinity has not just changed his and Cecilie’s relationship—it has, perhaps, changed it for the better.
This is the juicy part of Something Rotten. While half of the book depicts Reuben’s indoctrination into fascist-flavored Danish masculinity, the woman to whom he’s unhappily unmarried resents him for the same pathetic tendencies he resents in himself. The first glimpses of this come back in Brooklyn, when Cecilie returns from her last day at work before maternity leave and is forced to come to terms with the shell of a person Reuben has become. Seeing him harried, trying to pack up their tiny apartment ahead of the trip abroad, with visible bags under his eyes, Juuling just to stay awake, she is struck by just “how much parenting could be a zero-sum game.” That her and Reuben’s situation was gender-flipped—him wasting away trying to maintain domestic order while she worked her powerful job—was beside the point. Cecilie wonders if it’s really “a step forward to depict dads failing at tasks normally reserved for women.” No, she decides, this wasn’t progress. If anything, it was proof of how toxic, regardless of gender, the nuclear family could be. She and Reuben “hadn’t become more equal; if anything, their circumstances had only reinforced the privileges of being male and the burdens of being female. Reuben had become a victim as only a man could, refusing himself everything until his dignity had been returned, intact.”
This is followed by a page-long description of how, since she’s given birth to Arne (or maybe, more specifically, since Reuben has suffered the indignity of becoming a stay-at-home dad), Cecilie no longer finds Reuben attractive.
Being in Denmark, away from their tiny apartment and the ever-present distraction of her job, makes Cecilie realize how little she likes the self-righteous, vindictive man Reuben is becoming. Over the span of the novel—watching Reuben come home first with a skinhead cut, then with a nonsensical fascist-coded tattoo, then in the throes of a panic attack over some “secret” Mikkel entrusted him with—Cecilie thinks he’s acting like a child. But at the same time, she sees a fire inside Reuben that’s been missing at least since his “cancellation” back at NPR, and maybe even longer. She understands that the snake oil Mikkel is selling might be dangerous, but it’s worth something, too.
Cecilie’s presence in the novel—not just as a love interest or a side character, as the female characters were in Lipstein’s first two novels, but as the subject of half the chapters—balances Something Rotten out. Being privy to Cecilie’s interiority allows us to see how she, playing the role of the quietly unhappy heterosexual domestic partner, isn’t just complacent but is active in the toxic gender ideology taking over Reuben’s sense of self. That is to say, Cecilie’s reaction to Reuben’s radicalization is, compellingly, twofold: she thinks he’s being ridiculous, grasping at straws, getting toyed with by Mikkel. But also—and not particularly deeply under the surface—she understands why Reuben is attracted to these ideas, why he wants to shed his old self. After all, she didn’t particularly like that version of him, either.
This two-sided dysfunction provides a welcome contrast with depictions of gender and masculinity in the bulk of contemporary novels, particularly those in the increasingly heteropessimistic “sad girl” canon. In the worst of these—Sarah Manguso’s Liars or Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, for example—what’s supposed to be character-driven literary fiction reads like Mad Libs of heterosexual angst. Their unnamed female narrators passively haunt the few domestic spaces they have ownership of, feeling paralyzed by the not-quite-cruelty of their not-quite-absent partners.
Something Rotten is different in that it gives its domestic dysfunction drama a name and a face, letting readers encounter the mess on both sides. If Lipstein’s early fiction grappled with masculinity, it did so obliquely, showing its entanglement with ambition and ego in a specific social context. Something Rotten hits many of these same themes, but for the first time, masculinity is explicitly at the forefront. Yet importantly, its prominence is neither apologized for (as in the “sad girl” novels) nor celebrated for its messiness (as advocated for by culture warriors like Alex Perez). Instead, Something Rotten exemplifies a third way that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.
Lipstein isn’t the first youngish male novelist to resist the discourse. Books as distinct as Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection hinge on the fact that it’s become borderline transgressive to center a messy male voice in a novel while avoiding the trap of celebrating misogyny. So, too, does Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi. But Lipstein’s novels operate more as traditional commercial fiction—with beginnings, middles, endings and a prose style that doesn’t beg for think pieces. This allows him to stage the drama of masculinity directly on the level of narrative, rather than indirectly in the meta-drama of authorial voice. Rather than “wrestling with” or “worrying over” gender roles, they depict masculinity as it exists beyond the culture war’s talking points, in a way that the more highbrow, autofictional novels like Fuccboi and The Topeka School can’t. In a moment that’s so polarized, Lipstein’s choice to operate in straightforward realism feels almost radical. He writes neutrally about contemporary manhood, letting the good and the bad coexist on the page. But unlike underwritten “sad girl” wannabes on one hand or Perez-lite culture warriors on the other, Lipstein doesn’t get bogged down by the moralistic framework that’s become prevalent in how we think about fiction.
So if the pundits are right and Trump’s reelection really did signal a cultural realignment, let’s hope the future of men in literary fiction looks less like the culture warriors and more like Andrew Lipstein. Less like Reuben and more like, well… Lipstein hasn’t written a male character like that yet. But that’s part of the fun. The best satires hold a mirror right up to the ugliest parts of society: luring readers in with laughs, then daring them to think. That ugliness isn’t in and of itself a reason to celebrate. But that doesn’t mean we should look away, either.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.