The Booker Discovers Men

Or: a prize for novels about male crisis.

The Booker shortlist came out on Tuesday, and it makes for interesting reading, as four of the six books are by men. Douglas Stuart's 'John of John' is about a father and son with dollops of shame in the Outer Hebrides. Marlon James's 'The Disappearers'. M. John Harrison's 'The End of Everything', which the Telegraph reviewed as a "stunningly weird vision of the collapse of England". And Luke Kennard's 'Black Bag', which is about a failing actor who's paid to wear a leather bag over his head.

Well, we've all been there.

The critical response's been pretty uniform about what the shortlist is all about. As Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Times identified, it's a list about "masculine authority in crisis," with male characters "struggling to inhabit the roles, structures and stories that are supposed to contain them."

Fair enough.

But then one of the judges, Jarvis Cocker (yes, that one, and I'm sure I'm as surprised as you are), explained that "the male-written books weren't as good as the ones written by women" and that "when we first started reading, most of the books we were putting through were by women. It took a while to get a book written by a man that seemed good." Interestingly, the ones they apparently decided were 'okay' to put through were the ones in which "men are having to rethink their role."

I don't know about you, but it's good to know that men can be on an award shortlist, provided their male characters are falling apart and learning to be better.

Now, I need to be careful, because I haven't read all six and for all I know each and every one of them's an absolute masterpiece. This week's irritation isn't with the novels themselves, it's with what this whole process says about where we are now.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent most of his career on exactly this sort of thing, and he's useful here. "Taste classifies," he said, "and it classifies the classifier." Essentially, a judge announcing that men's books are generally worse is very much telling us which sort of judge he is. Of everything a person can consume, Bourdieu went on, "there are none more classifying than legitimate works of art," which is, I think, a polite way of saying that a Booker shortlist is a sorting hat, and the sorting goes both ways. And he had a line for what happens once the sorting starts, because the people doing it "retain only the things capable of interesting them," which means "things that fit their categories and mental grid."

I think the grid for men this year was novels about men in crisis. So that's what the shortlist became.

Then again, this is not new. Bourdieu was writing about it back in 2001, when he noted that "male privilege is also a trap, and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances." Which is masculine authority in crisis, a quarter of a century before the critics got round to it.

You see, there's a belief in literary culture that the way to bring men back to the novel is to give them countless novels about what's wrong with being a man. Peter Ferry, who writes about masculinity in fiction, believes that these narratives "present opportunities for men to engage in self-reflexive analyses of the everyday performance of their masculine identities." Read about a man who can't inhabit his role properly and you'll come to understand your own. Apparently.

But that doesn't hold up, does it? Here's a man on r/science earlier this year, in the top comment on a thread about what men will and won't read: "Gender of the protagonist doesn't matter. However... the plot absolutely does. Is this book about a hero's journey, or about some world conspiracy, or has lots of action, or lots of strategizing and politics? Sign me up. Is this a book exploring interpersonal relationships, has drama, or focuses on a love triangle? Zzzzzzzzzz..."

Because the books men are actually buying are very much NOT ones where their perceived faults are slapped into their faces. They're actually the ones where a man has lost something and is fighting his way back into control. Booth and Zhang, who studied the Chinese web novels that a lot of this grew out of, describe the successful hero as a man "who manipulates the hyper-competitive society around him to create a counter-society made up of close friends."

This, on first glance, seems to be the same premise as the Booker, but with an opposite second act. But the literary novel gives the struggling man a long, careful study of his own failure and inability to fulfil his role whereas the bestselling novel gives him a ladder. And, guess what? It turns out that when men are offered both on a menu, they take the ladder rather than the hectoring! Weirdly, nobody on a prize panel has yet thought to ask why.

Sarah Lynne Bowman, writing about the attraction of role-playing games, pointed out that "the constraints of everyday society offer limited roles for people to inhabit," and the men reading at the bestselling end of the shelf have noticed the same thing. If you're stuck in a mundane life, the possibility of being a warrior with magical powers becomes pretty damned attactive. But, sadly, the Booker won't be reading anything on Kindle Unlimited, which is where a very large share of male fiction reading now happens.

This is the oldest snobbery in the building, incidentally. Greg Kelly, reviewing a history of the modernists, described their deliberately difficult style as "a kind of yacht club whose members had inscrutable books instead of expensive boats."

The membership of the elite club has changed, but apparently the rules haven't.

Do I think the Booker should shortlist 'Dungeon Crawler Carl'? No. There's different prizes, doing different jobs, and I'd be as suspicious of a Booker that tried as I am of a Booker that sneers. However, Bourdieu had a name for that too. He called it 'the popular aesthetic', and its defining feature is that it "refuses the refusal of 'facile' involvement and 'vulgar' enjoyment."

Basically, when a bloke says a book is boring, he might just be right.


Sources

The shortlist, the judges' comments and the Telegraph review are drawn from 'Struggling men take centre stage in 2026 Booker shortlist', The Week, 24 September 2026, and the Associated Press report 'British novels dominate idiosyncratic Booker shortlist', 22 September 2026. Johanna Thomas-Corr's reading of the list is from The Times and Lucy Thynne's from The Telegraph, both as quoted in The Week.

The Bourdieu quotations come from three books. 'Taste classifies', 'none more classifying' and the popular aesthetic are from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. xxviii–xxix and 8. The 'mental grid' line is from On Television, translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 47. 'Male privilege is also a trap' is from Masculine Domination, translated by Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 50.

The books-as-mirror argument is Peter Ferry, 'Writing Men: Recognising the Sociological Value of Counter-Hegemonic Masculinities in American Fiction', Masculinities and Social Change, 2.2 (2013), 146–66.

The r/science comment is from the thread 'A longstanding belief in the publishing world suggests that men avoid reading fiction that centers on the lives of women', 1 February 2026.

On the web-novel hero: Nathanael T. Booth and Yifan Zhang, 'Ironizing the Martial Protagonist: Jin Yong and the Web Novelists', Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12.204 (2025), 1–13.

On limited roles: Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), p. 7.

On the economic filter: Ivan Del Valle, 'The End of Editorial Scarcity: AI-Collaborative Authorship and the Structural Disruption of Traditional Publishing', SSRN working paper (2026).

The yacht club is Greg Kelly, 'Intellectuals of the World Unite', a review of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses, in Queen's Quarterly, 101.3 (1994), 589–95.