The average man can speak for himself

Darren had tried for the last several years to write a novel about an average dude. His protagonist was one of these guys who worked out, dreamed of getting rich, and didn't care about reading books. But...Darren had a hard time fully inhabiting this person, if he was being honest. He really wanted to write a story about some fitness bro who loved Joe Rogan, but then Darren would think...does a bro know they're a bro? How do they articulate their own self-image even to themselves?

Sometimes Darren wondered if he himself was a lit-bro. But even that label didn't seem to fit. He loved David Foster Wallace as much as the next guy, but there wasn't really a litbro community anymore. Like, if he just wanted to discuss DFW with people, he had to discuss him with women—because nowadays it was these Gen Z women who seemed really attracted to the guy. These women were very into the idea of the lit-bro. They idealized the lit-bro.

One of Darren's young female friends was a writer named Shelly, who adored lit-bros, and she told him, "No, there are so many different varieties of lit-bro, because they all exist in isolation, without talking to each other. They all began as the same guy in 2010 who liked David Foster Wallace, but after MeToo, they altered and changed. Many of them went on a journey inward and stopped talking to the rest, so now each one has their own particular obsession, their own little variation, that they've tended quietly, in the isolation of their soul."

"But I'm a flower," he said. "Surely I am a type as well! I loved DFW in 2010 too."

"Yes, but I don't know...you're different somehow. You're still...hmm, I'm not sure. You're somehow too direct. I'm not sure."

And it's true that the thing about the lit-bro was...they were cool. They had found a way to make literature cool, at least at some point.

Darren wasn't like that! He'd loved DFW in 2010 too, but he hadn't been cool. He'd been a nerd, been a try-hard, talking to everyone about this great new guy he'd read called DFW.

Of course, all the guys who'd ignored Darren in 2010 and thought they were better than him—they were gone now. Their careers had ended, and Darren was still around—he’d never sold book, but he was still publishing essays in high-profile journals and remained a relatively high-status person, at least in the eyes of people like Shelly,

Darren felt like, if he wanted to, he probably could become the kind of lit-bro that women like Shelly were attracted to.

He wasn't there yet, but if he worked on himself for years, like these guys had—learning how to throw up layer upon layer of pretense—then he was pretty confident he could fool the Shelly's of the world. And perhaps that's what being a gym-bro was like. These women wanted you to be something, so the gym-bro guy was like, okay, I will embody this type that's somewhat attractive to you.

But maybe that was completely inaccurate! Darren had no conception of the interiority of people who didn't read books—who weren't self-conscious—who didn't have some kind of intellectual aspirations. He could attempt to imagine such peoples' lives, but those lives often seemed so empty, vacuous. Surely the gym-bro's life couldn't be as bleak as it seemed.

It's not that he didn't want the best for the gym-bro or thought their lives didn't have dignity or whatever. It's just...he couldn't understand how they lived. What did they expect to happen? Did they really find fulfillment in working out and trying to make money and sleeping with women? Was that really enough? He would love to read a book that would explain to him how these guys could live. That's one reason Darren loved the movie Rocky, because it was about a meathead who seemed to have some soul, some aspiration.

But Rocky was exceptional. He was better than other people. And, yes, everyone conceptualized themselves as being exceptional. But was that actually true? Did this gym-bro person think he was better somehow than other people? Darren imagined the answer was yes, the gym bro did think they were exceptional, but Darren honestly had no idea.

The character in Darren’s novel was a college athlete. Why was he writing this? Darren hadn't played sports! He hadn't been in a frat! Darren had written for the college newspaper. At one point he used to wear bowties. Why would he have done such a thing? He had thought they looked cool. That's how clueless Darren had been at age twenty.

Where is the novel about a college sophomore who thinks wearing a bow-tie is somehow gonna improve his standing in the world? That's the novel that Darren wants to read! What was going through his mind? As a college sophomore, he'd gone online and purchased a bow-tie and watched a YouTube video on how to tie it. He couldn't imagine what he'd been thinking. Forget empathizing with the gym-bro, he had trouble empathizing with his own past self.

You know...in college, he'd been lonely. He hadn't gotten much attention from girls. He'd wanted people to notice him. Think he was special.

Maybe he could somehow use that experience to understand how the gym-bro felt adrift, sidelined by society? That was the hope, anyway.

It’s not that Darren didn't know about different types of guys. Darren’s own dad was in commercial real estate, and his mom was a housewife. They’d wanted good things for Darren, yes, but they’d aspired for Darren to lead an upper-middle-class lifestyle like themselves. They’d paid for him to go to a third-tier Catholic school, and they’d been happy when he got into a selective private college. They’d thought he would work in an office someday. Maybe join an executive training program. Something normal like that.

He’d never really liked or related to his own dad. His dad was basically a sales guy, bluff and hearty, with traditional values, while Darren was a nerd! Darren had liked anime and science fiction novels. Back when Darren was a kid, he’d conceived of the world as a conflict between nerds and jocks, and Darren had hoped that someday in the future the nerds would come out on top.

But then, in college, Darren was exposed to this third world, this preppy world—though it didn’t even call itself preppy—that rose above the nerd vs. jock dichotomy. And this was the world of higher aspiration, of literature and culture and helping people. And he’d aspired to be part of this world, even though, he now realized, nobody had ever thought he was truly good enough to excel within it. His parents had been right. Literature, books, culture—those weren’t for people like Darren.

Darren’s previous novel had been about a nerd. An earnest loser who attempted to reinvent himself continually in ways that were more and more comically out of touch with reality—getting first into liberal politics, then into socialism, then into transhumanism, and so on, but always doing it in the dorkiest possible way, without understanding these things were tiny, self-contained clubs where guys like him were written off as chumps.

The situation was played for laughs, yes, but his character also had a lot of heart. He never gave up, never stopped believing he would someday find his tribe, and eventually his hero found a home, in the arms of (what else) a pretty girl—a wallflower, who admired his verve, for whom he became a tour guide to the outside world.

Darren had thought there was room in literature for another Amory, another Holden, another Ignatius Reilly, another Oscar Wao. He had been told, in his MFA, that it didn't matter what you wrote, all that mattered was the quality of the writing. And he’d certainly published enough stories, won enough awards, that his writing seemed good enough.

But trying to sell this novel, about this nerdy guy, was like showing up in a bowtie to a college party. Nobody spit in your face, instead they just looked past you, looked over your shoulder, waited for somebody more interesting to come along. The only editor who came close was an assistant at Doubleday, but when this guy asked his bosses for permission to buy the book, they said no. Sales and marketing had concerns, Darren learned, though he never gathered what they were.

Darren realized the same rules applied to characters as applied to people. They had to be magnetic in some way, and nerds just weren’t magnetic.

Now there was finally some demand in the industry for books about men, and Darren was one of the few men with a good CV, but he knew, intuitively, that the men needed to be real men. They needed to be attractive, in some way, to women.

But it was just hard to get excited about writing these guys. Fuck these guys. Fuck the gym-bros and fuck the lit-bros too. These weren’t Darren’s people! He was a nerd. He was a loser. He wanted to write the kind of book that college-age Darren might’ve read: a book that could explain to Darren that you have dignity too. That your life has meaning. That all of these gym-bros are the real pathetic ones, investing their lives in meaningless trivia, and these preppies are pathetic too, trying to convince themselves that just because they know which clothes to wear, they’re somehow smarter than other people.

He knew the Darrens of the worlds would love his books! It was just so frustrating that his work needed to run the gauntlet of these preppy women and gay guys and aging hipsters who dominate the publishing houses. And that whenever he tried to write about earnest losers like himself, they said “I didn’t fall in love.” Like, fuck you. Maybe your love isn’t what I’m looking for!

These people, the winners, didn’t realize they were in the business of marketing books to people like him, the losers.

And to these losers, his experience was extremely relatable. It was by far the most common experience amongst people who read books. Most people he knew, whether they were literary or not, had possessed some aspirations in college. And eventually they had either given up on those aspirations, or they'd been crushed. It didn't matter whether the aspiration was public service, academia, medical research, etc—they'd discovered after a few years that this system didn't think they were good enough. And they'd failed. That, to Darren, was the archetypical experience of his generation.

But instead of publishing books about this reality, the people at publishing houses wanted Darren to peddle them some fantasy about his stoic, long-suffering dad. They wanted him to pretend like he had some inside line on how people like his dad thought, and to write some novel about, like, masculinity or some shit—a novel that would reassure these preppy editors that, yes, they had the ability to empathize with the average guy. But in reality, the average guy was Darren! And they very much did not have the ability to empathize with him, because their whole position in life was built on the idea that Darren wasn’t good enough.

And the thing is, Darren was still a nerd, still a loser, and he still thought that if he somehow explained this conundrum carefully enough and precisely enough, then he could get someone in the publishing industry to realize that the lives of people like Darren have dignity and honor. That it was worthwhile that Darren hasn’t succumbed to hatred and resentment. That he was a good man, and his goodness was hard-won. Maybe he wasn’t attractive to most women, but so what? He was married now, so it didn’t particularly matter—and surely life was about more than mere attractiveness. He had made a good career and a good life, and he’d done it during ten years when many men had become curdled and bitter. He’d felt that bitterness himself, but he hadn’t allowed it to destroy him, and he thought that story was worth telling.

But nobody was interested in it. He’d written the book of his heart, and then it was turned down. A few years afterword, he had done a rewrite, trying to punch up the character’s sex appeal, but his agent said the book was done—shopped out.

What could Darren do? He'd been rejected. His own interior life was not relatable. So he supposed it was worth at least attempting to write about something else, on the off chance that maybe it would sell.

---

Except…at some point, several years later, he will find himself explaining this situation to Shelly—explaining why he is stuck writing a novel about this average guy that he despises, and Darren will realize: I sound like a loser.

He wasn't born to be a loser. But he'd been treated like one for so long that he had internalized the sad, bitter, hangdog attitude that, in his fiction, he strove so mightily to avoid.

And after that conversation with Shelly, he will go back into his hard drive and find a copy of his first novel—the one rejected by thirty-four editors. And he will write a new cover letter and send it out again to agents, and within six months it will sell at auction.

And Darren by now will understand exactly how the industry tends to destroy men like him, so he will turn down the $500,000 deal from FSG, and he will accept $100,000 from Doubleday instead. And he will announce the sale online with a ready-made story about this novel that was rejected years ago, unfairly (he thought), and how he had turned down a big book deal because he wanted to work with the one editor who had, the first time around, actually seen something in the book. He will play on peoples’ expectations, arousing their hope and ire, so that by the time it comes out, everyone will be anxious to read it and formulate an opinion about whether this book was truly good, truly deserving, or whether he's just some pathetic white dude still nursing a grudge against the hot girls who rejected his book ten year ago.

And the men, his men, the nerds, will come out of nowhere and clasp it to their heart and tear apart every critic who tries to say the novel is sad or bitter or poorly-written.

And he will resist the twin temptations to say either that he was a genius or that he was unfairly suppressed by the woke mob. Instead, he will say the truth: I was good enough, and I knew it. For twenty years, I knew it, ever since I was that kid who got dressed in a snazzy bowtie for a college party and set out, full of hope, that this time would be different—that this time someone would talk to him, want to know about him, would want to be his friend, and that finally, after all of these years of waiting, he’d be ushered into this broad, wonderful life that he saw all around him, but which he’d never yet experienced. He had known, even then, that he deserved good things, and that he deserved them not just because all people deserved them—even though that was true—but because he specifically had power and insight and intelligence and kindness, and that those attributes might seem like empty platitudes—oh you're just another nerd, just another nice guy—when articulated out loud, but those same qualities, when put into practice and lived out, over the course of thirty or forty years, would create a man who could not fairly be described as “just an average dude”.