“It-girl” Novelists’ Masculine Revisions

When The Guest took the Hamptons by storm, many considered Emma Cline to have crafted the book of the summer. “People scour the pages to catch a glimpse of a version of their neighbors, their wealth, and maybe themselves,” Curbed reported. Yet online brands and disinterested literati reduced Cline’s harrowing tale of a sex worker trying to stay on the straight and narrow while battling a pill addiction to hot girl literature. It’s not clear if this is fair to Cline, whose stories regularly appear in The New Yorker and has been named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. 

It is perhaps in order to avoid this middlebrow classification as a beach read that Cline’s new novel Switzy centers around an older man rather than a younger, more dissociative woman. It’s not a first for her; many of Cline’s short stories—including several in her collection Daddy—dissect the lives of desperate patriarchs clinging to their virility with something like a compassionate scalpel. In 2020, she wrote a short story from the perspective of Harvey Weinstein. In her 2021 story “The Iceman,” Cline details WimHof, the infamous fitness guru who promoted cold plunges and gooning. Masculinity, she suggests, is about discipline. Switzy’s David is a man losing control of his faculties. His memory, his physicality, his career, and his desires are all fading fast as he embarks on a trip to Switzerland to end his life, as he notes, with dignity. Now in his twilight years, David is reflecting on the Matryoshka doll of his past while on the plane. Instead of the plights of sex workers and girlhood cults she became most known for writing, Cline riffs on the well-worn trope of the contemplative old man, somewhere between the characters of Sebald and Roth, gentle and comic, cruel and searching. 

Cline isn’t the only one shifting gears. It would seem that popular women novelists are writing about poorly behaved men and their worlds more and more. Moshfegh confounded critics with Lapvona, her grim take on masculine empire. Rooney also turned towards men—and chess—with her most recent novel Intermezzo. Like a pop star struggling to enter the domain of adult-contemporary songwriting, these novels are critiqued for their perceived struggle to progress into more “mature” territory. “The media can't agree on whether her work is chick lit or literary genius,” one article asked. “If you look closely, many conversations about the literary caliber of Rooney’s books are actually coded discussions about how specific the books are to women.” Men are rarely criticized for similar growing pains. 

For women novelists, the “it-girl” label is both a cudgel and sometimes a career necessity. “Do you think everybody feels oppressed by the need to be attractive?” Ottessa Moshfegh and Kristen McKenna mused in a 2016 conversation for Harper’s. Being a beautiful party girl can certainly help sales, but it can also be a gilded cage. Books by beautiful women on the back flap tend to get more play. Being traditionally attractive (and even blonde) helps with selling a persona and brand. While writing isn’t a visual medium, marketing is. Profiles of women authors love to describe their subjects as gaunt or being both smart and gorgeous, as if this is a contradiction. In order to get to the stage of being able to write a more avant-garde novel, one must first make their bones selling a few books. The market determines who can write what and for how long. It’s easier to get permission to write a book from a new perspective or in a new form if you already have a few bona fide hits as Moshfegh, Cline, and Rooney do. Escaping such discourse is nearly impossible. Maybe dramatizing the trouble of men is seen by society as more serious. 

Moshgegh, for her part, has a wry sense of humor about these pressures. She told The Guardian in 2016 that Eileen came about because: 

She didn’t want to “keep her head down” and “wait 30 years to be discovered… so I thought I’m going to do something bold. Because there are all these morons making millions of dollars, so why not me? I’m smart and talented and motivated and disciplined and… talented: did I say that already?”, she laughs. “I said: fuck it. Which was also: fuck them. I was pretty hostile. I thought: I’ll show you how easy this is.” So Moshfegh, in her own words, “went out and bought a book called The 90-Day Novel, by Alan Watt.”

This is the kind of disdain for the divide between commercial pressure and artistic integrity that the publication of these novels demonstrate. Trying to write literary fiction with broad appeal is an uphill battle. Such calculation cannot, of course, be stripped away from the context of gender. The continual fretting over the disappearance of male novelists only serves to assert that women’s place in literature is unearned. It is not as though men find themselves bereft of awards. Moreover, their work rarely seems to be dirtied with the dire label: “middlebrow.” 

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“Middlebrow” gets a bad reputation. So does the contemporary novel, which by many accounts has struggled to grow up. “It is maturity above all things that the American writer fears,” the literary critic Leslie Fielder presciently wrote in 1960. Gender isn’t the only outside force constricting the creation of good books. Economics and other social pressures are shaping how authors write—for better and worse. In the face of AI, increasing screentime, and decreasing literacy rates, the novel must compete with the overwhelming power of visual media. Perhaps it’s strange, then, that the novel has not become increasingly ornate and Nabokovian, but instead polished and muted. We read crystalline prose that never ruptures the reader’s eye while employing vast amounts of white space. Plot is delivered at a jaunty clip, moving onward with little interiority, disembodied regardless of its content: a first person narrator recounting some great trauma will be described with the same dismissiveness as her earlier recitation of a grocery list. Such writers admire Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, and Raymond Carver. Their novels discuss “slanted” light and focus on domestic quibbles, they are sometimes (though not always) written in the first person, and turn even the most epic fights into tightly drawn character studies. “Vibes” win out over plot and time is “viscous.” Metaphors and adjectives are excised in favor of precision. Of course, this describes just as much “literary” fiction as it does “commercial” fiction. Middlebrow is anything that shoots for high culture but ends up straddling the conventions of the commercial world. The pressures to write something literary but accessible, MFA-inflected but “artistic,” mirror the same challenges women face when scolded to write more serious literature. Writers like Cline and Moshfegh meet at this junction. 

It is no wonder a series of “middlebrow,” MFA-holding novelists are turning to the avant-garde for their next act. Commercial literary fiction is at a crossroads, sputtering out creatively as it gets squeezed by pieces of genre fiction that often fare better on BookTok. In 2022, Missouri Williams (The Dolaroid, The Vivisectors) wrote about the state of contemporary fiction for The Drift: “Things feel less didactic, more obscure. You’re the one who has to find a meaning in all this. Form is back.” Such enigmas are a rarity as publishers become more risk averse. The opposite of the MFA, middlebrow novel may be the systems novel or novels of Hysterical Realism—think David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Helen DeWitt, Tony Tulathimutte—stuffed, chunky books that sprawl, making use of pastiche, puns, and multiple narrators. Underworld. Infinite Jest. Language is abundant, prose is sometimes even purple or mauve. But this late-twentieth-century brand of literature doesn’t describe the vast amount of novels being published in the mainstream. Form may be back for some, but it’s often packaged as unobtrusively as possible. 

Most modern novels prefer the first-person present tense, reading like moral thrillers. Literary critic Naomi Kanakiarecently attempted to diagnose a nascent subgenre of contemporary fiction she christens the Diversity Novel. Such a book includes a “protagonist who faced racism or bigotry,” “a lyrical voice that seemed overtly literary,” and “sparse dialogue.” To Kanakia, this is an offshoot of the “sad girl novel.” This kind of novel can be collected by those on Goodreads looking for extra social justice credit. Such readers treat diversity like a game of Bingo. Read a novel by a queer woman, read a novel by a Black gay man, read a novel by a survivor of incest. Infographics abound. Everything from Raven Leilani’s Luster to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous to Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness is flattened under the same kind of vampiric reading experience. Like Pokemon, they’re collected and stored away. How can authors fight back? 

If the contemporary novel is the diversity issues novel, or a melodrama of manners, novels like Switzy and Lapvona attempt to navigate away from such identity-based readings. Perhaps if the protagonists are male, less emphasis will be put on the author’s innate femininity.These taxonomies are like a hamster wheel every new novel fights to get off. Existing within or without these contexts does not in and of itself redeem a work of art. Debates over whether contemporary fiction is fundamentally good or bad remain evergreen, while authors struggle to tap into a new vein of literature less concerned with these cyclical discourses. The panic over declining literacy rates, the book review, and media coverage at large continues. With such pressure put on readers, it’s no wonder that, as Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” Both writers and critics must contend with the apocalyptic mood of the moment. As institutions crumble, from the Books section of The Washington Post to NEA’s support of little magazines, many erudite journalists are quick to defend the credibility of their livelihood even if they are no longer the vanguards of taste. They’re right to both eulogize the end of critical criticism and recognize the professional critic as an important part of the artistic ecosystem. Of course, that’s our job. It’s right we’d be naturally defensive that these institutions matter. 

The taxonomic anxiety over contemporary fiction has been discussed and mourned by everyone from Dan Sinykin in Big Fiction and Christian Lorentzen in Granta to endless Substackers with extra time on their hands. The headlines go something like this: Always, the novel is failing. We must rescue the novel. I don’t read contemporary fiction. The sloppification of novels. The profile-ification of novels. Perhaps even more corrosively: Only men write good novels. Women have hijacked the novel.

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Moshfegh, however, has always been a provocateur. She eschews what we might understand as “easy” or “domestic” fiction. Her work frequently takes on the perspective of despicable men, sailors, and vain women on the brink of nervous breakdown. That is, the kind of “unlikable” narrators so many readers on Goodreads seem afraid of. All too often, readers expect their characters to be moral avatars, cheerleaders of propriety. In her breakout hit, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her protagonist is obsessed with waxing and removing her body hair, nervous, even, about the pubic hair that “puffed out of [her] panties.” She enjoys gobbling sleeping pills and mercilessly poking fun at her only friend. In a New Yorker profile, Moshfegh pushed back on a pervasive kind of parochial discourse about likable narrators: “They wanted me to somehow explain to them how I had the audacity to write a disgusting female character.” Yet at the same time, in interviews Moshfegh has stated that she believes in a fundamental gender divide. She says that “men are more logic-centered,” that “biology gives men and women a fundamentally different consciousness” and that the vagina is “primordial.” As she once put it: “We have adapted to a superficial environment, but I don’t know if the vagina has.” Moshfegh’s fiction teeters between dramatizing societal disdain for women and enforcing it. In her 2025 short story, “The Comedian,” she writes of one character, “Much like a woman, he was always grasping for some perfect version of himself, always seemingly exasperated that this perfection was just out of reach.” 

“Masculinity is hot right now,” Moshfegh writes in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. No surprise then that Lapvona, her most recent novel, is primarily about men. It takes on the male world of domination and violence, themes ripe for a woman trying to rebrand and buck expectations. In the titular fictional country, a young boy named Marek ends up becoming a part of the royal family, transcending his humble roots and outgrowing his crude father Jude. Marek is later taught about power by his adoptive father, a cruel dictator named Villem. The only foil to these boyhood bonds is the witchy midwife Ina. As Andrea Long Chu has noted, Lapvona is a novel obsessed with the grotesque. Bodies are sites of destructive envy and disgust. There’s a grim naivety to Moshfegh’s depiction of her protagonist as he transverses the dangerous medieval Machiavellian world of Lapvona: 

Marek knew his father’s body was beautiful. But he didn’t revere it. He simply respected Jude’s physique as a part of nature, the way he found a vulture beautiful, or a cow. He knew that he didn’t resemble his father. You couldn’t compare a plover to a chicken. They were different kinds of animals. No one who saw the two together would ever guess they were of blood relation.

For men, beauty means something quite different. Lapvona is a city full of vomit and anger, a bucking against the confines of polite society. There’s a thinly veiled rage to the way Moshfegh dramatizes gender roles in the novel. The way men talk about women seems to reflect the way she’s talked about womanhood in interviews. “Girls are supposed to be nice,” one character groans after a woman is rude to him. Elsewhere, a character tells us that “A mother’s sorrow was tiresome, but a whore’s heartache? It would be a good show.” The roles for women in such a world are limited. 

For Marek’s father Jude, women are objects, something to “unload” into, a way to connect to the “groan of creation.” Crying during sex is for good girls. “That’s my good little girl. You are mine now. The white that dripped from his greasy penis smelled like a summer rain, iron in it, tangy.” Cum can certainly be a component of effective body horror and Moshfegh isn’t exactly playing it for laughs. How much fecal matter and body fluids are allowed in a work of literary fiction before it becomes kitsch? Even if writing men is an exercise in creative freedom, that doesn’t mean our authors can’t troll us. 

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Cline writes about a different kind of woman. The Guest is a novel about the kind of woman who downs vodka sodas, the drink of the “female martyr,” as Cline puts it. Cline’s novel stands in awe of the “thin girls in camisoles who ate yogurt standing up.” But, according to the protagonist Alex, women lose their charm, becoming “girls in drag as girls” who must learn how to seduce men while convincing both themselves and their tricks that they are good. “Men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman.” The problem, as The Guest’s protagonist Alex discovers, is that men are often even moodier than women are. They “insisted on her coming first, as if this was proof of their fundamental goodness.” 

In Switzy, Cline turns her gaze towards masculinity through David, a feckless man who is reckoning with his misdeeds and triumphs, the banality of his relatively nice life at its end. Cline brings great empathy to her male characters, even when they clearly love using the word faggot. David worries about “his droopy tits” and plays solitaire, “his miniature hit of oblivion” while preparing for euthanasia—death as a “business exchange.” He dreads aging and taking on the smell of old people, something he says that only imported persimmon soap can get rid of. He struggles to go to the bathroom: “Aim, poor. Dot dot dash—he was basically pissing in Morse code.” This onomatopoeia persists throughout Cline’s novel, a careful dance of language devolving as David gets closer and closer to the end. The jostling blocks of memory keep getting removed until the Jenga tower falls. In the last few pages of the novel, plenty of sections in the book are replaced by “Something Something.” David hallucinates that multiple old lovers and business partners are death incarnate. There is a Lockwood-like absurdity to this language game, as even David’s desire becomes “fainter.” He doesn’t understand the world he’s living in, instead looking everywhere for “the last gasp of the old world.” 

For a man of David’s generation, the new order has fundamentally shifted “how it should be between men and women”—now women “knew too much.” This seems an oblique reference to the post-#MeToo world, a fierce phantom that men are petrified by. To such wealthy bon vivants as David, these rules are invisible, only manifesting as punishments for what they understand as slight quirks. This anxiety of both warranted and seemingly unwarranted backlash recurs throughout Cline’s fiction. In The Guest, she writes that, “So many men had been scared she was recording them, setting them up in some way. It had never occurred to her—it already felt enough like a setup.” 

As a man of a certain ilk, David’s ideas about gender weigh heavy on the novel. He marvels at his grandson: “The boy’s room was a grown-up’s idea of a boy’s room. But he supposed that’s what all children’s rooms were. Their parents’ wishes on display. Pink hearts for girls, blue moons for boys.” For David, this kind of gendered order makes sense. It’s a form of arithmetic based on years of social conditioning. What doesn’t make sense is how his assistant Cody is able to live openly as a gay man and drink white wine in public, something he finds “prissy.” Having a boyfriend now, he realizes, is “an unremarkable option for one’s life. Remarkably so.” This collapse of the status quo flummoxes David. 

Like The Guest, Switzy takes place as a series of encounters while its hero embarks on a quest. As David prepares to end his life, he visits his daughter, flirts with a woman at a bar, and tries to make amends with Tom, an old friend he betrayed in boarding school. This is a series of reprises, returns. “Reprise, which usually meant: Again, but worse,” Cline writes.  

It is Tom who turns out to be the linchpin of the novel. He does not want to relive David’s formative sins. The two used to sleep together until things soured and David participated in cruelly bullying Tom. His old lover took time off from school and eventually dropped out. While the two kept tabs on each other for a while, they never entirely reconciled. This queerness used by Cline as a kind of tragic backstory serves as an interesting fulcrum. It is not entirely dissimilar to the trauma plot, using closeted gayness to evoke some inner depth of character. We later find out that David’s daughter too has a female lover, but sexuality alone doesn’t really contain the exacting power of Cline’s prose or “the animal information of his private terror.” At the end of his life, men barely make the list of things David will miss. What he really misses is feeling connected to the world around him. “Intimate, that was the word. For what passed between them. Why had some people found it and others failed?” 

Mortality is a grim subject, but Cline writes beautifully and with wit about the body’s decay. “Again with butthole concerns,” she jests. “Did people often end it all because they didn’t want to schlep?” The relationship between luxury, food, comfort, and death is an obsession for her as characters try to catch a glimpse of “what used to be fairly common: grace.” But their money insulates them not just from discomfort, but the very intimacy they’re looking for. They leave the details to “women’s capable wake” to eat “Yoo Zoo” in peace. This leaves them at the end with water sloshing around “companionably,” looking to a new generation of gay men for hope and finding a sense of loss instead, with “no bridegroom to carry him across the threshold.” 

Women’s capability and queerness are the two biggest mysteries of David’s life. They are unknowable to him, even if they are the subject of Cline’s investigation of masculinity in its sunset years. Through David, Cline is able to examine femininity and gender from the outside looking in. Perhaps, she lightly suggests, part of the reason that manliness has such a hard time surviving the twenty-first century is because it is so inflexible, struggling to adapt to queerness and feminism. 

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These dramatizations of men don’t avoid the debates about women novelists or “commercial” fiction, but they do reflect the productive tension of their construction. They dissect the pressures of authorship in a world where many believe literature is headed towards a cliff. By inhabiting the world of men, Cline and Moshfegh are able to examine the pressures of womanhood from the opposing side. They are relief sculptures, portraits of lack. Bucking the pressures and labels put on contemporary fiction is a Herculean task that doesn’t guarantee aesthetic depth or freedom to, perhaps only freedom from. 

As a work of art, Switzy may succeed as an act of empathic imagination while Lapvona reads as a work of paranoia. Cline’s newest novel may be her sharpest yet, a shockingly tender take on mortality and memory loss. The ability to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, the choppy waters of creation and the market doesn’t always bode well. Certainly there’s a glut of rote fiction that follows the typical MFA rules about prose and writing what one knows. But there are novelists at least attempting to carve their own path despite the stress to churn out the same book with slightly different characters over and over again. Soon enough, the novelist will have to reinvent themselves again.