I know this isn't exactly the point of this piece, but as a former gym bro/athlete, the best explanation I can come up with is that they do have a deep interiority and drive, they just aren't aware of it or choose not to reflect on it. It's kind of always running in the background, imperceivable but powering everything. Like Rocky, they know they want to go the distance, they just wouldn't be able to articulate it in monologue form.
Buried deep on my hard drive there is a very bad pilot script about a walk on college football player. There’s also a decent feature script about high school football. I’ve always felt like there was a lack of honest stories around football, specifically high school and college. The emotional landscape of the game at that level is so unique. I don’t feel like it’s ever been properly portrayed, even in stuff like Friday Night Lights and Remember The Titans.
I hadn't thought of it this way but I'm gonna alley-oop: I went through a phase a few years ago where I binged, in the course of a couple months, maybe a dozen documentaries about endurance athletes--but especially body builders.
These were guys, sometimes 22--28 years old, who devoted their lives to their bodies...while enjoying virtually ZERO pleasures of the flesh. They lived like monks. Treated their body like a shrine--while at the same time injecting it with steroids and acknowledging with a shrug sometimes that, whatever, they'll deal with the cancer or the heart transplant or compression fractures when they get here (in their distant 50s).
They demonstrated such a fascinating kind of mindfulness. (ALSO--sorry to prattle--even though they spent their lives training for the day that they'd stand on a stage, before thousands, bronzed to the gills and flexing their near-naked bodies to taut how powerful and sculpted they were...almost every one of these dudes was softspoken, visibly bashful; they were in long-term monogamous relationships with women who didn't seem to fetishize that physique or exude any sort of personal vanity themselves; they were homebodies with close ties to their mother, unfailingly courteous...)
Amen. It really made me respect them and kinda conflicted about the gym bro meme (although my own brother is a personal trainer and very much like the meme).
When you see an athlete go monkish with dedication, especially if they're really young, does part of you want to encourage them to diversify their interests/commitments/pursuits? (To be fair, a lot of them get pretty entrepreneurial these days...)
I think high school athletes and younger should play multiple sports, specialization is really bad for kids. But I believe it’s good for college athletes to go all in. Either they eventually turn pro and make a ton of money (Or even make money in college due to NIL) or they build habits that pay off later in life. I wouldn’t have been nearly as disciplined with stand-up in the past, or with writing now, if it hadn’t been for my experiences playing football in college.
This was wonderful and as the kids say I felt seen. Thank you.
The late 2000s had a real Nerd Lit moment: Diaz, Chabon, Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”. Yet by 2013 the whole thing was over, driven not by the authors themselves but by external factors in the culture- basically ur nerd Mark Zuckerberg single handedly destroying the value of the printed word.
"Blame Zuck" is sort of the right take (when is it not?) but I think the bigger factor is that around the turn of the millennium, you started getting big-budget film adaptations of Tolkien, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, etc, and the culture around being a nerd shifted from bookish subcultural interiority to mainstream visual spectacle.* IMO the "nerd lit moment" is the overlap between the two generations: the last gasp of writers weaned on the former, and the arrival of big audiences wanting the latter.
*(This is made explicit in "Oscar Wao" towards the end of the book, iirc, in a paragraph where Yunior bemoans how all the guys who used to play D&D -- literary, DIY worldbuilding -- have moved on to Magic: the Gathering -- poker where the cards have ogres on them.)
Well shit, that's an interesting take. Of all the assessments I hear about "nerd" or "bro" lit sensibilities, I feel like I hear very decisive verdicts; I don't think I hear it talked about as the tension between broader cultural elements/phenomena, a struggle to reconcile...how would you put it? the gap between *how* they want to be appreciated (an intellectual/artist) vs the *scale* at which they want to be appreciated (entertainer)?
Because one of the details that kept hovering just over my reading of every sentence, down to the end of the story, is that Darren *loved anime and science fiction*...and yet he slaves over writing stuff that's almost antithetical to the stuff that made him love lit in the first place...
Yeah, IDK. I think it just depends on how narrowly you define "nerd." (Or rather, how narrowly culture at large defines nerd.) Like, as far as I can tell, there's no major difference in the level of geek content between "Kavalier and Clay" and Substack-alt-lit-favorite John Pistelli's "Major Arcana." But no one calls Pistelli a "nerd-lit" guy! Or, if that feels too niche, isn't "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" basically "Kavalier and Clay" but with video games instead of comics? Does anyone consider that to be a "nerd" novel?
I think we just had a broader idea of who or what counts as nerdy twenty years ago, whereas now if someone is on the internet talking about nerds they mean "white male ur-reactionaries with gutterbrow taste." Gone are the (Felicia) Days Of Geek Chic!
I noticed that too, but there's actually a similar thing in science fiction and fantasy these days. New authors in genre fiction are mostly female and/or queer...the straight guys have gone off to play video games. Interestingly, one of the breakout hits by a straight guy that made it into physical books was more or less inspired by a video game, it's in the 'litRPG' genre where characters are faced with being transported into a real-life RPG where they go up levels in power and monsters try to kill them. But if you're a 14 year old boy and you want to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or tread the jewelled thrones of the world under your sandalled feet now, you play a game, you don't read a book.
Also, according to my market research (I have an eleven year old boy), I think manga and anime have eaten sff's lunch. Every body in his grade is reading JJK and One Piece and Demon Slayer: I think these have displaced both comics and sff. This is reflected in a stroll through you're local Barnes and Noble. They went very in on manga.
That's what I've heard too! Recently the children's publishing world in America has invested very heavily in graphic fiction, and it seems to be doing okay sales wise, but maybe hadn't caught on with the boys!
I think that's right. Our girl reads a lot of graphic-novel-ized Babysitter's club and Raina Telgemeier, but our boy hasn't been into any American graphic novels.
I don't know how new a trend this is (I am 30 and distinctly remember all the guys I went to school with 20 years ago being big into, like, Naruto) but this is definitely a factor!
My recollection is that there were people who were into this stuff twenty years ago, but it was subcultural, and moreover, it made you a weeb. Nowadays, certain anime are almost monocultural. I think it was definitely a thing--plenty of people watched Dragon Ball or Pokemon or, as you say, Naruto--but I would bet the proportion watching those is higher now!
Yea, there is definitely something to that. The audience for nerd stuff fundamentally changes around 2005-2010 to a mass audience with all that entailed.
There’s a specific turn around 2010 where the popular image of the nerd went from Sam Wier in Freaks and Geeks to a Fedora wearing sex pest and that kind of killed nerd lit. But the number of sex pests in nerd culture has basically remained constant that whole time so what changed? What changed is Zuck came in and destroyed the market for newspapers and magazines. Suddenly ladies who dreamed of expense account lunches in the Time Life building were eating ramen at their desk at Buzzfeed and had axes to grind.
Yeah Silicon Valley in 2025 isn't run by nerds, and it's not particularly friendly to nerds. It's the playground of NlMBA types and sales guys. It's honestly a bit surprising to me when I meet someone in San Francisco who is a classic nerd and works in tech.
So obviously this is fiction... But I find myself struggling with the end especially. It's possible that a book that went out on submission years ago and didn't get published anywhere, not even a small press, might have a second life at a different cultural moment. But the assistant editor who liked it is still at the *same imprint*? Really? And Darren turns down $400k to work with this person, who didn't have the clout previously to buy his book at all and still doesn't have the clout to make a competitive offer? Really? And his agent lets him choose this without comment or pushback, understanding that this is a huge, permanent loss of income not only for Darren but for their own agency? Really??
As someone who used to work in lit agencies I find all of this this to be a nightmarishly bad idea. If Darren's worried about not earning out, any six-figure (or hell, five-figure) advance means taking that risk. With either $100k or $500k, this will likely be the most money he ever makes in one go from his fiction. Unless, as you posit, nerdy male readers "come out of nowhere" to buy it on publication -- but they truly would have to come out of nowhere, because these male readers of low-stakes comedic literary novels don't exist in the same culture where Darren has any of the problems you previously established. The issue here isn't just that his book needs to "run the gauntlet of these preppy women and gay guys and aging hipsters" to get published. It's that the Darrens of the world don't buy or read books, especially literary novels, and they haven't bought or read them for so long and so consistently that there isn't even a mechanism for advertising these products to them anymore.
Yes most people take the big payoff, and they get set up to fail. There are many Darren's who have gotten the 500k and their books haven't succeeded, and he knows that.
To succeed in publishing in 2025, you have to get people's attention, and you can only do that with a story. Darren generates this story.
I based the turning down 500k for a 100k offer on Nell Freudenberger, who did the same thing in the early 2000s for her first story collection.
Genuinely not trying to be combative here but... in the early 2000's DFW was still alive? This clearly is a story about our specific, contemporary moment in literary publishing but imo the resolution you give us doesn't match those conditions. And I wish it did, because I wish that it was probable that things could turn out this way now and Darren could have a fulfilling career! But I just don't believe it 🤷♀️
It's what he does though. Whether it succeeds or not--you don't really know. Maybe it doesn't succeed, and he's happy anyway that he took his fate in his own hands.
Ok, that's a bit snarky. But, if Darren spent some time as a teacher, or a line cook, or a mail man, or a landscaper, or an accountant, or a white collar middle manager, or a fisherman, or whatever, he might find he has something to write about, and in doing so, might incidentally say something interesting about masculinity or something else!
People with real jobs work them because they need money, no? Would any of those people do that work if they didn't need the money? And if Darren can make a living without doing those jobs, how is his life any less real?
Sure -- if given the choice, many people would taken Darren's career over "real jobs." But that's because being a writer (in this case, I'm talking about people for whom writing pays the bills) is qualitatively different than being a teacher or a surgeon or a construction worker, right? And it's not just different, it's more luxurious.
Sometimes I ask myself if I would take that deal, to be a full-time writer. Realistically, I wouldn't, because I value the financial stability that comes with my job and I don't expect I would get it writing. But of course, that's not really the question. The question is "would you take a life of being financially stable as a fiction writer" and the answer is "yeah, duh." It's like asking if I would retire early if money wasn't a concern. Obviously I would do that. Those people are among the most privileged in the world.
But there's a cost to that. I think it hampers art, particularly the art of a novelist (for various reasons, music and film and visual arts aren't as affected by this). If the Darrens of the world truly think that gym bros have no interiority, then I honestly lose some interest in what Darren has to say about anyone else. Darren thinks someone with different interests than him has no interiority? And he wants to write a novel, of all things? What a wild thought! And so we end up with a lot of writing about writing, which appeals to writers but not much else.
I think this is the issue that really runs underneath a lot of this "where is the literary white male" stuff, and it's why I don't really care about all that, despite being a straight, white male with literary aspirations. The best way to find something to write about is to get some life experiences that have nothing to do with the literary world. The best way to say something about masculinity is to come at it indirectly, by telling stories about men and the many varied ways they live. CHERRY was a very good novel that one might say is "about masculinity," though it's more accurate to say it's "about" joining the army and robbing banks.
The Darrens of the world don't live "less real lives," whatever that means. They still have friends and family and fall in love and face disappointments. But I do think their uniquely privileged lives leave them less able to do the one thing they really want to do -- to comment meaningfully on the way we live today.
Darren just wants to write about himself. A lot of people find himself to be repellent, as you do! He accurately perceived that fact, so he attempts to write about someone else…but…his heart isnt in it. Learning to write well about other people wouldn't change the fact that he would be unable to write about the story that's most meaningful to him. So he writes about himself anyway, and he finds a readership. That's what writing is, an act of will. You decide something is worth saying, and you thrust it upon the earth, even though the earth could care less.
Love this take. When you're writing a book, book research is nothing compared to lived research. That doesn't mean you should stick to writing about what you know; it means you should open yourself up to new experiences and life paths.
Everyone real is real. Darren may not be real, but evidently the sort of guy he's approximating is. (You wrote about him well enough people are chiming in to say they feel seen!)
I think the point may be writers used to do a lot of blue-collar odd jobs, expanding the range of people they could write about. Now everyone goes from an Ivy straight to an MFA, so there's sort of a restriction of range...?
Writers used to come from blue collar backgrounds. Even Dickens' family was poor. They lost their money. He had to work in the ink factory at age twelve because he had no money. Mark Twain, same thing, had to go to work at age 11 because his parents lost their money.
In those days writing was, to some extent, something you did for money. It was a path to an easier life.
Nowadays there are many poor people, but writing isn't really a path to an easier life. I cannot say why that's changed. Many professions have become more and more elite over time. You didn't used to need a college degree to become a police officer or even a teacher, for instance. People used to graduate high school and just go to work teaching.
In the 19th century, readers also came from all kinds of backgrounds. Many blue collar people read books and periodicals. I saw someone mention on Substack recently that Dickens had a significant illiterate readership--they would gather in circles and have someone read aloud Dickens work to them.
In the present day, I don't know what the answer is for getting more working class representation in books. Perhaps some kind of identity politics, where people from working class backgrounds demand representation. That will get a few books published, at least
There is an author who can write Darren's dad and Darren at the same time, and it's Richard Ford in "Independence Day," the most glorious modern novel about an aging real estate bro dad who used to be a writer. Frank Bascombe is cool because he's suffered devastating tragedy that made him lose all of his nerdy pretensions. It's a smart way for Ford to get out of the trap of being a sad literary man! Some parts of Frank's character make no sense (he's an engaged/enraged liberal in the late 80's) and seem like manifestations of Ford's own personality, but most of his insomniac drunken vibes are bro-y in an appealing way. There's probably a lot of Updike Rabbit novels in him, too. I do think Ford and Updike are more appealing than the nerds (Chabon, Diaz) are in general, but maybe that's because I've also transitioned out of worrying about being cool and into being a parent of small children.
Oh my god Richard Ford is so good! I loved Independence Day and the Sportswriter! He is an author who is simultaneously extremely highly rated and yet still underrated. I LOVED how Bascombe captured middle aged disappointment
I remember him sitting very contentedly alone at the Miami International Book Fair a few years ago, at a table to sign books, but nobody was coming up to him. I thought something was wrong, like he wasn't actually there to engage with people, so I gave space. Found out later that, no, Richard Ford was sitting at a table in a busy Miami literary festival to engage with literally anybody who came up to him, and hundreds of people were just marching back and forth, ignoring him.
I think I read Independence Day on Ross Barkan's recommendation without realizing it was a sequel to something, so I keep meaning to go back to The Sportswriter. I worry that I might be disappointed in it, but I have no idea why---I felt like I was in such good hands the whole time. I think I read it right around the time I was reading John Ganz's "When the Clock Broke" and I was just thinking, wow, there's so much more going on in the late 80's and early 90's than I thought there was! We think of that time as this wasteland of culture or the end of history or whatever, but of course that kind of wasteland can be a goldmine if you're a genius like Ford.
Oh the Sportswriter is better. In my opinion at least. But I also read it first. Both books are excellent though. I really keep meaning to read the later ones
OH NO, now (based on this recommendation) I need to go back and read The Sportwriter, which if my memory serves was the the "sloggiest" book I've ever read lol (also the only book I ever bought for my OG KOBO)!
The Darrens of the world have remarkably bad distance, comedic ability, and self awareness. You can't sell being a nerd without decent comedy or genre writing, I'm sorry. This also applies to women. Still waiting for a tell-all fujoshi memoir.
You know who writes fun nerd boy books? Neal Stephenson. A lot of sci fi stories have autofiction elements, or were just written for nerds entirely. The entire world of web novels. Anime, and manga. Visual novels.
Have you tried reading a Neal Stephenson book? He even an intro to a DFW book.
What I really like about his work is that his nerds aren't losers. (Or if they are, it' s still very loving.) He enjoys being a nerd. He doesn't apologize for being a nerd. Instead, the reader is going to read ten pages about orbital mechanics or coco puffs.
Neal gets away with this because he has Voice and Comedy and experience with IRL scientists. I feel somewhat enriched after reading him. He's also using genre fiction techniques.
Most shameless nerd writing is just that: shameless. But nerds also understand they need scientific gizmos, mysteries, waifus, magic systems, spaceships etc, to sell that kind of niche nerd story. Give the reader some dopamine in exchange for ten pages of, idk, hypothetical nerd fantasy divorce court that is really their own divorce proceedings with magic thrown on top.
tl;dr: Darren needs to give the reader dopamine if he wants to raw dog his feelings
Love this! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining industry line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes (mostly NYC and L.A.) for easy home cooking. Dm me if interested in a recommendation swap — we’re growing fast!
"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."
Its so hard to talk to people who don't have sympathy but think that they do.
You never say if Darren lifts, so I can’t tell if he’s the hero or not, please fix this
I know this isn't exactly the point of this piece, but as a former gym bro/athlete, the best explanation I can come up with is that they do have a deep interiority and drive, they just aren't aware of it or choose not to reflect on it. It's kind of always running in the background, imperceivable but powering everything. Like Rocky, they know they want to go the distance, they just wouldn't be able to articulate it in monologue form.
I forgot you were a college athlete! You should write about this
Buried deep on my hard drive there is a very bad pilot script about a walk on college football player. There’s also a decent feature script about high school football. I’ve always felt like there was a lack of honest stories around football, specifically high school and college. The emotional landscape of the game at that level is so unique. I don’t feel like it’s ever been properly portrayed, even in stuff like Friday Night Lights and Remember The Titans.
Agreed! I read one book by a football player once, and it was so fascinating. I had never read anything like it.
https://a.co/d/a7nwJyJ
I hadn't thought of it this way but I'm gonna alley-oop: I went through a phase a few years ago where I binged, in the course of a couple months, maybe a dozen documentaries about endurance athletes--but especially body builders.
These were guys, sometimes 22--28 years old, who devoted their lives to their bodies...while enjoying virtually ZERO pleasures of the flesh. They lived like monks. Treated their body like a shrine--while at the same time injecting it with steroids and acknowledging with a shrug sometimes that, whatever, they'll deal with the cancer or the heart transplant or compression fractures when they get here (in their distant 50s).
They demonstrated such a fascinating kind of mindfulness. (ALSO--sorry to prattle--even though they spent their lives training for the day that they'd stand on a stage, before thousands, bronzed to the gills and flexing their near-naked bodies to taut how powerful and sculpted they were...almost every one of these dudes was softspoken, visibly bashful; they were in long-term monogamous relationships with women who didn't seem to fetishize that physique or exude any sort of personal vanity themselves; they were homebodies with close ties to their mother, unfailingly courteous...)
Yeah it’s like all of their life force gets channeled into one specific thing. I don’t think I could do it, I need to diversify my energy or I crack.
Amen. It really made me respect them and kinda conflicted about the gym bro meme (although my own brother is a personal trainer and very much like the meme).
When you see an athlete go monkish with dedication, especially if they're really young, does part of you want to encourage them to diversify their interests/commitments/pursuits? (To be fair, a lot of them get pretty entrepreneurial these days...)
I think high school athletes and younger should play multiple sports, specialization is really bad for kids. But I believe it’s good for college athletes to go all in. Either they eventually turn pro and make a ton of money (Or even make money in college due to NIL) or they build habits that pay off later in life. I wouldn’t have been nearly as disciplined with stand-up in the past, or with writing now, if it hadn’t been for my experiences playing football in college.
This was wonderful and as the kids say I felt seen. Thank you.
The late 2000s had a real Nerd Lit moment: Diaz, Chabon, Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”. Yet by 2013 the whole thing was over, driven not by the authors themselves but by external factors in the culture- basically ur nerd Mark Zuckerberg single handedly destroying the value of the printed word.
"Blame Zuck" is sort of the right take (when is it not?) but I think the bigger factor is that around the turn of the millennium, you started getting big-budget film adaptations of Tolkien, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, etc, and the culture around being a nerd shifted from bookish subcultural interiority to mainstream visual spectacle.* IMO the "nerd lit moment" is the overlap between the two generations: the last gasp of writers weaned on the former, and the arrival of big audiences wanting the latter.
*(This is made explicit in "Oscar Wao" towards the end of the book, iirc, in a paragraph where Yunior bemoans how all the guys who used to play D&D -- literary, DIY worldbuilding -- have moved on to Magic: the Gathering -- poker where the cards have ogres on them.)
Well shit, that's an interesting take. Of all the assessments I hear about "nerd" or "bro" lit sensibilities, I feel like I hear very decisive verdicts; I don't think I hear it talked about as the tension between broader cultural elements/phenomena, a struggle to reconcile...how would you put it? the gap between *how* they want to be appreciated (an intellectual/artist) vs the *scale* at which they want to be appreciated (entertainer)?
Because one of the details that kept hovering just over my reading of every sentence, down to the end of the story, is that Darren *loved anime and science fiction*...and yet he slaves over writing stuff that's almost antithetical to the stuff that made him love lit in the first place...
Yeah, IDK. I think it just depends on how narrowly you define "nerd." (Or rather, how narrowly culture at large defines nerd.) Like, as far as I can tell, there's no major difference in the level of geek content between "Kavalier and Clay" and Substack-alt-lit-favorite John Pistelli's "Major Arcana." But no one calls Pistelli a "nerd-lit" guy! Or, if that feels too niche, isn't "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" basically "Kavalier and Clay" but with video games instead of comics? Does anyone consider that to be a "nerd" novel?
I think we just had a broader idea of who or what counts as nerdy twenty years ago, whereas now if someone is on the internet talking about nerds they mean "white male ur-reactionaries with gutterbrow taste." Gone are the (Felicia) Days Of Geek Chic!
I noticed that too, but there's actually a similar thing in science fiction and fantasy these days. New authors in genre fiction are mostly female and/or queer...the straight guys have gone off to play video games. Interestingly, one of the breakout hits by a straight guy that made it into physical books was more or less inspired by a video game, it's in the 'litRPG' genre where characters are faced with being transported into a real-life RPG where they go up levels in power and monsters try to kill them. But if you're a 14 year old boy and you want to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or tread the jewelled thrones of the world under your sandalled feet now, you play a game, you don't read a book.
Also, according to my market research (I have an eleven year old boy), I think manga and anime have eaten sff's lunch. Every body in his grade is reading JJK and One Piece and Demon Slayer: I think these have displaced both comics and sff. This is reflected in a stroll through you're local Barnes and Noble. They went very in on manga.
That's what I've heard too! Recently the children's publishing world in America has invested very heavily in graphic fiction, and it seems to be doing okay sales wise, but maybe hadn't caught on with the boys!
I think that's right. Our girl reads a lot of graphic-novel-ized Babysitter's club and Raina Telgemeier, but our boy hasn't been into any American graphic novels.
I don't know how new a trend this is (I am 30 and distinctly remember all the guys I went to school with 20 years ago being big into, like, Naruto) but this is definitely a factor!
My recollection is that there were people who were into this stuff twenty years ago, but it was subcultural, and moreover, it made you a weeb. Nowadays, certain anime are almost monocultural. I think it was definitely a thing--plenty of people watched Dragon Ball or Pokemon or, as you say, Naruto--but I would bet the proportion watching those is higher now!
Yea, there is definitely something to that. The audience for nerd stuff fundamentally changes around 2005-2010 to a mass audience with all that entailed.
There’s a specific turn around 2010 where the popular image of the nerd went from Sam Wier in Freaks and Geeks to a Fedora wearing sex pest and that kind of killed nerd lit. But the number of sex pests in nerd culture has basically remained constant that whole time so what changed? What changed is Zuck came in and destroyed the market for newspapers and magazines. Suddenly ladies who dreamed of expense account lunches in the Time Life building were eating ramen at their desk at Buzzfeed and had axes to grind.
I wouldn’t blame Zuck. I’d blame the Social Network, which turned SV into a Wall Street alternative and thus diluted nerd culture in its heartland.
Yeah Silicon Valley in 2025 isn't run by nerds, and it's not particularly friendly to nerds. It's the playground of NlMBA types and sales guys. It's honestly a bit surprising to me when I meet someone in San Francisco who is a classic nerd and works in tech.
Why are your titles always such bangers? The stories are parables and the titles are koans.
I love these. They are true parables.
DFW was a jock
So obviously this is fiction... But I find myself struggling with the end especially. It's possible that a book that went out on submission years ago and didn't get published anywhere, not even a small press, might have a second life at a different cultural moment. But the assistant editor who liked it is still at the *same imprint*? Really? And Darren turns down $400k to work with this person, who didn't have the clout previously to buy his book at all and still doesn't have the clout to make a competitive offer? Really? And his agent lets him choose this without comment or pushback, understanding that this is a huge, permanent loss of income not only for Darren but for their own agency? Really??
As someone who used to work in lit agencies I find all of this this to be a nightmarishly bad idea. If Darren's worried about not earning out, any six-figure (or hell, five-figure) advance means taking that risk. With either $100k or $500k, this will likely be the most money he ever makes in one go from his fiction. Unless, as you posit, nerdy male readers "come out of nowhere" to buy it on publication -- but they truly would have to come out of nowhere, because these male readers of low-stakes comedic literary novels don't exist in the same culture where Darren has any of the problems you previously established. The issue here isn't just that his book needs to "run the gauntlet of these preppy women and gay guys and aging hipsters" to get published. It's that the Darrens of the world don't buy or read books, especially literary novels, and they haven't bought or read them for so long and so consistently that there isn't even a mechanism for advertising these products to them anymore.
Yes most people take the big payoff, and they get set up to fail. There are many Darren's who have gotten the 500k and their books haven't succeeded, and he knows that.
To succeed in publishing in 2025, you have to get people's attention, and you can only do that with a story. Darren generates this story.
I based the turning down 500k for a 100k offer on Nell Freudenberger, who did the same thing in the early 2000s for her first story collection.
Genuinely not trying to be combative here but... in the early 2000's DFW was still alive? This clearly is a story about our specific, contemporary moment in literary publishing but imo the resolution you give us doesn't match those conditions. And I wish it did, because I wish that it was probable that things could turn out this way now and Darren could have a fulfilling career! But I just don't believe it 🤷♀️
It's what he does though. Whether it succeeds or not--you don't really know. Maybe it doesn't succeed, and he's happy anyway that he took his fate in his own hands.
Darren needs to get a real job.
Ok, that's a bit snarky. But, if Darren spent some time as a teacher, or a line cook, or a mail man, or a landscaper, or an accountant, or a white collar middle manager, or a fisherman, or whatever, he might find he has something to write about, and in doing so, might incidentally say something interesting about masculinity or something else!
People with real jobs work them because they need money, no? Would any of those people do that work if they didn't need the money? And if Darren can make a living without doing those jobs, how is his life any less real?
Sure -- if given the choice, many people would taken Darren's career over "real jobs." But that's because being a writer (in this case, I'm talking about people for whom writing pays the bills) is qualitatively different than being a teacher or a surgeon or a construction worker, right? And it's not just different, it's more luxurious.
Sometimes I ask myself if I would take that deal, to be a full-time writer. Realistically, I wouldn't, because I value the financial stability that comes with my job and I don't expect I would get it writing. But of course, that's not really the question. The question is "would you take a life of being financially stable as a fiction writer" and the answer is "yeah, duh." It's like asking if I would retire early if money wasn't a concern. Obviously I would do that. Those people are among the most privileged in the world.
But there's a cost to that. I think it hampers art, particularly the art of a novelist (for various reasons, music and film and visual arts aren't as affected by this). If the Darrens of the world truly think that gym bros have no interiority, then I honestly lose some interest in what Darren has to say about anyone else. Darren thinks someone with different interests than him has no interiority? And he wants to write a novel, of all things? What a wild thought! And so we end up with a lot of writing about writing, which appeals to writers but not much else.
I think this is the issue that really runs underneath a lot of this "where is the literary white male" stuff, and it's why I don't really care about all that, despite being a straight, white male with literary aspirations. The best way to find something to write about is to get some life experiences that have nothing to do with the literary world. The best way to say something about masculinity is to come at it indirectly, by telling stories about men and the many varied ways they live. CHERRY was a very good novel that one might say is "about masculinity," though it's more accurate to say it's "about" joining the army and robbing banks.
The Darrens of the world don't live "less real lives," whatever that means. They still have friends and family and fall in love and face disappointments. But I do think their uniquely privileged lives leave them less able to do the one thing they really want to do -- to comment meaningfully on the way we live today.
Darren just wants to write about himself. A lot of people find himself to be repellent, as you do! He accurately perceived that fact, so he attempts to write about someone else…but…his heart isnt in it. Learning to write well about other people wouldn't change the fact that he would be unable to write about the story that's most meaningful to him. So he writes about himself anyway, and he finds a readership. That's what writing is, an act of will. You decide something is worth saying, and you thrust it upon the earth, even though the earth could care less.
Love this take. When you're writing a book, book research is nothing compared to lived research. That doesn't mean you should stick to writing about what you know; it means you should open yourself up to new experiences and life paths.
Everyone real is real. Darren may not be real, but evidently the sort of guy he's approximating is. (You wrote about him well enough people are chiming in to say they feel seen!)
I think the point may be writers used to do a lot of blue-collar odd jobs, expanding the range of people they could write about. Now everyone goes from an Ivy straight to an MFA, so there's sort of a restriction of range...?
Writers used to come from blue collar backgrounds. Even Dickens' family was poor. They lost their money. He had to work in the ink factory at age twelve because he had no money. Mark Twain, same thing, had to go to work at age 11 because his parents lost their money.
In those days writing was, to some extent, something you did for money. It was a path to an easier life.
Nowadays there are many poor people, but writing isn't really a path to an easier life. I cannot say why that's changed. Many professions have become more and more elite over time. You didn't used to need a college degree to become a police officer or even a teacher, for instance. People used to graduate high school and just go to work teaching.
In the 19th century, readers also came from all kinds of backgrounds. Many blue collar people read books and periodicals. I saw someone mention on Substack recently that Dickens had a significant illiterate readership--they would gather in circles and have someone read aloud Dickens work to them.
In the present day, I don't know what the answer is for getting more working class representation in books. Perhaps some kind of identity politics, where people from working class backgrounds demand representation. That will get a few books published, at least
There is an author who can write Darren's dad and Darren at the same time, and it's Richard Ford in "Independence Day," the most glorious modern novel about an aging real estate bro dad who used to be a writer. Frank Bascombe is cool because he's suffered devastating tragedy that made him lose all of his nerdy pretensions. It's a smart way for Ford to get out of the trap of being a sad literary man! Some parts of Frank's character make no sense (he's an engaged/enraged liberal in the late 80's) and seem like manifestations of Ford's own personality, but most of his insomniac drunken vibes are bro-y in an appealing way. There's probably a lot of Updike Rabbit novels in him, too. I do think Ford and Updike are more appealing than the nerds (Chabon, Diaz) are in general, but maybe that's because I've also transitioned out of worrying about being cool and into being a parent of small children.
Oh my god Richard Ford is so good! I loved Independence Day and the Sportswriter! He is an author who is simultaneously extremely highly rated and yet still underrated. I LOVED how Bascombe captured middle aged disappointment
I remember him sitting very contentedly alone at the Miami International Book Fair a few years ago, at a table to sign books, but nobody was coming up to him. I thought something was wrong, like he wasn't actually there to engage with people, so I gave space. Found out later that, no, Richard Ford was sitting at a table in a busy Miami literary festival to engage with literally anybody who came up to him, and hundreds of people were just marching back and forth, ignoring him.
Guy seemed perfectly zen about it.
If he captured middle-aged disappointment that well in a novel, maybe he's zen about it in real life.
Very true
I think I read Independence Day on Ross Barkan's recommendation without realizing it was a sequel to something, so I keep meaning to go back to The Sportswriter. I worry that I might be disappointed in it, but I have no idea why---I felt like I was in such good hands the whole time. I think I read it right around the time I was reading John Ganz's "When the Clock Broke" and I was just thinking, wow, there's so much more going on in the late 80's and early 90's than I thought there was! We think of that time as this wasteland of culture or the end of history or whatever, but of course that kind of wasteland can be a goldmine if you're a genius like Ford.
Oh the Sportswriter is better. In my opinion at least. But I also read it first. Both books are excellent though. I really keep meaning to read the later ones
OH NO, now (based on this recommendation) I need to go back and read The Sportwriter, which if my memory serves was the the "sloggiest" book I've ever read lol (also the only book I ever bought for my OG KOBO)!
2nd read time!!!
The Darrens of the world have remarkably bad distance, comedic ability, and self awareness. You can't sell being a nerd without decent comedy or genre writing, I'm sorry. This also applies to women. Still waiting for a tell-all fujoshi memoir.
You know who writes fun nerd boy books? Neal Stephenson. A lot of sci fi stories have autofiction elements, or were just written for nerds entirely. The entire world of web novels. Anime, and manga. Visual novels.
Have you tried reading a Neal Stephenson book? He even an intro to a DFW book.
I’ve read many books by Neal! Am quite fond of his workl
What I really like about his work is that his nerds aren't losers. (Or if they are, it' s still very loving.) He enjoys being a nerd. He doesn't apologize for being a nerd. Instead, the reader is going to read ten pages about orbital mechanics or coco puffs.
Neal gets away with this because he has Voice and Comedy and experience with IRL scientists. I feel somewhat enriched after reading him. He's also using genre fiction techniques.
Most shameless nerd writing is just that: shameless. But nerds also understand they need scientific gizmos, mysteries, waifus, magic systems, spaceships etc, to sell that kind of niche nerd story. Give the reader some dopamine in exchange for ten pages of, idk, hypothetical nerd fantasy divorce court that is really their own divorce proceedings with magic thrown on top.
tl;dr: Darren needs to give the reader dopamine if he wants to raw dog his feelings
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Really enjoyed reading this, especially:
"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."
Its so hard to talk to people who don't have sympathy but think that they do.
I’d like to read that novel.