Lately, it seems like literary fiction has been unable to escape the scourge of "sad girl literature." Though the genre has deep roots, it garnered widespread popularity during the pandemic, when it came to encapsulate the malaise of millennial and Gen Z existence: unfulfilled desires, life under late-stage capitalism, the threat of climate change, and so on. So prolific is the genre that it now seems to have flattened the branding of contemporary women's fiction into something of a monolith.
This isn't to say that these novels are without merit—far from it!—but the way they've been marketed speaks of an industry stunted by the popularity of its own creation. Where are all the sad young men in literature, then? The male equivalent of My Year of Rest and Relaxation's droll narrator? The modern-day Holden Caulfields? As far as the Internet is largely concerned, there aren't any. Or at least very few of them receive the same hype as books by and about women.
Perhaps it's because there's a certain stigma surrounding male vulnerability, but in contemporary fiction, the subject is wildly overlooked. This discrepancy isn't just a matter of representation, though: It's reflective of wider attitudes toward masculinity. If social norms dictate that men should embody strength and stoicism, there's little space left for those who don't.
Ultimately, fiction plays a crucial role in shaping our self-image and reality; it's why the relative absence of young men in recent fiction profound.
