In the Flesh: The Men

There’s a scene in Sandra Newman’s The Men in which an older white woman, realizing she’s alone in a Hispanic neighborhood, feels ashamed by her own racial paranoia and then doubly so for being comforted when a small group of young white girls appears. The book is full of such moments of guiltily defensive self-awareness, internal reactions to imagined stimuli spiraling out into paranoid fractals of supposition. The slim volume is so saturated with white guilt that it leaves precious little room for anything else, and while its sole black character of note — political revolutionary Evangelyne Moreau — is complex and deeply compelling, most of her presence on-page involves our point of view character, white middle-class housewife Jane Pearson — interrogating why she can’t really think of Evangelyne as a real person. There is, I think, some insight to be had in this kind of literary self-flagellation, an unblinking exposure of one’s ingrained prejudices at their most knee-jerk and repulsive, but Newman’s novel seems to regard it as a dramatic end unto itself, as though a white woman self-critically recounting her demographic’s broad experience of racist thoughts and impulses constituted substantive thought.

About the novel’s repellent premise — that the sudden disappearance of all people with a Y chromosome, referred to as “the men” throughout, engenders the near-overnight onset of utopia — the less said, the better. One need look no further than Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyrsten Sinema, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi to know that patriarchy as we understand it proceeds not from men but from those who participate in the grasping, violent games of oligarchal power which constitute governance in our culture. Forget your Elizabeth Bathorys and your Lizzie Bordens, your Typhoid Marys and your Dee Dee Blanchards; the thuddingly mundane and everyday complicity of women in the miserable project that is hegemony culture surrounds us, shapes our suffering, and permeates virtually every part of modern life. Newman’s novel posits a kind of dieter’s delusion, that just as within the “false” fat body resides a perfect thin one ready to spring forth and experience actual life, so too does a perfect world sleep inside our own, awaiting only the sudden sweeping away of brutish men — and trans women, an unfortunate by-blow as she hastens to reassure us again and again — to unfold into its full majesty.

If one is feeling charitable, one might read The Men as a white woman’s meditation on the fear of stepping out of the patriarchy’s brutal but familiar shadow and into the terrifying unknown of solidarity with the oppressed. Newman toys with ideas of men’s failure to live up to the roles they assign themselves, with the learned inability of women to say no to the men devouring and parasitizing their lives, and with Jane’s unwillingness to invest fully in her relationship with Evangelyne as a sort of proxy for her broader withdrawal from the possibility of a new world in which she is instrumental to the architecture of peace and plenty rather than a housewife hiding her own moral cowardice behind the unspeaking icon of her innocent boy child. Even the kindest interpretation, though, cannot skirt Newman’s baffling narrative choices and frequent resorts to defensive heteropessimism and carefully couched racist sentiments. Again and again Jane spitefully doubts Evangelyne’s accounts of police violence and racist abuse until eventually, without so much as a word, she consigns the other woman to death at the hands of a police mob in order to reclaim her former life. It’s not that Jane’s guilty racism necessarily reflects Newman’s, but that our entire experience of so much horror is through the lens of a white narrator obsessed with her own culpability or (in her mind) lack thereof in this architecture of racist violence. Evangelyne speaks, but only Jane feels, and in the end it’s only Jane who matters.

Similar to this dehumanizing approach to Black narratives, there is a deep and disturbingly thorough dehumanization of sufferers of bipolar disorder woven through The Men, from the parasitic narcissism of Peter Goldstein to the life-shattering suicide of Blanca’s nameless mother and, most bizarrely, the apparently real and actual sorcery of Poppy Beacham, Evangelyne’s ex-girlfriend, which catalyzes the disappearance around which the novel revolves. Can bipolar people’s illness cause them to hurt the people around them? Of course, but to make it the only story associated with bipolarity, an unrelenting litany of hateful, melodramatic ranting and raving, suicide threats, and other gross exercises of emotional manipulation, is to begin revealing the negative space of how one conceives of the disorder at an essential level. In essence it’s the same approach M. Night Shyamalan took to dissociative identity disorder in Split, an ugly mythologization of an often sensationalized mental illness which prioritizes the artist’s morbid curiosity over viewing those who live with bipolar as fully human and distinct individuals in their own right. There’s something distinctly Victorian and paternalist about it, a feel of well-heeled gawkers tittering nervously behind their hands at the sight of something unfamiliar and unpleasant.

As for the novel’s treatment of trans people, who appear only fleetingly, it is indeed ugly. A trans man is sexually assaulted by a mob of cis women who, upon seeing him in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, default as a group to ripping his pants off to see if he has a dick. A trans woman appears in a clip from the titular eldritch video series depicting the Y-chromosomed wandering a wasteland in company with a selection of blandly described creatures. She behaves as though briefly self-aware, occasioning, we are told, much angry debate over whether trans women behave differently from men in the show-within-the-book. Another trans man is mentioned in passing, identifiable as trans because nobody cares he’s around. It reads as ass-covering for a fundamentally transmisogynistic premise, a thin veil of “see, I thought of that” drawn over its essential arbitrary disregard. Tasked with erasing evil from the world, the nameless spirits which came at Poppy’s deranged call swept up all trans women right along with the men, and that’s just too bad. One finds oneself wishing for overt bigotry rather than this repellent soft-shoe routine. Reading a fantasy about the demonization and annihilation of the vulnerable and having to endure the author's ambivalent pangs of conscience is a special kind of draining tedium.

So, we see a stilted and absurd glimpse of a feminist utopia and then our protagonist ditches it without so much as a word to her lover, a woman who pleads with her in the heart of some sort of magical flux at the moment of transition to please, please imagine a life with her, to see her as enough. There is a note of reproach in the prose of this section, a sense that Evangelyne is asking too much of Jane by begging her to stay and help to build a better world, that the Black revolutionary is perhaps starting to get a little high on her own supply. How dare she ask a woman to abandon her child? It’s interesting that while Jane is aware of having used her unborn son as an excuse to flee from a relationship with Evangelyne years before, she makes no connection between this act and her decision to return to life as it was, catalyzed by seeing her innocent child killed and devoured on the titular show. The Men is an ambivalent narrative, frustratingly thin and riddled with veiled bigotry — some of which Jane wrings her hands about, some of which escapes her or — less charitably — escapes Newman. A door opens, a door shuts, a woman says she doesn’t know how she feels about that. That’s all the book is, in the end: the elaborate and self-aggrandizing fantasy of someone who harbors a suspicion that she could be part of something better, or that at least she could try, and opts instead to be guiltily comfortable.