Sarah Moss’s contribution to your debate (‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, 31 May) strikes at the heart of the matter: the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster.
As a researcher on men’s health behaviours, I see growing evidence that restrictive models of masculinity – stoicism, self-reliance, emotional detachment – are linked to poorer mental and physical health outcomes. Literature offers an antidote: access to emotional nuance, empathy and self-reflection. But boys are rarely encouraged to see reading in this way.
As a teenager, I rarely discussed books with male friends, even though I secretly read them. One long summer I immersed myself in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest. These novels (by male authors) opened up inner worlds I hadn’t been taught to name. That emotional expansion is a gift literature offers – one that boys in particular are too often denied.
If we want to steer young men away from isolation or online extremism, we need more men to speak publicly about the books that moved them – and to reach out, to each other and to their sons. Dear men, when was the last time you read something to another man?
Role models like Barack Obama and Bill Gates have shown the power of reading, but we need them to champion fiction too. And we must protect public and school libraries. The National Literacy Trust reports that children born into communities with the most serious literacy challenges have some of the lowest life expectancies in England. Those who enjoy reading are also happier with their lives. If men’s reading is in crisis, the solution won’t come from publishing alone. It must be cultural – and collective.
Vincent Straub
PhD candidate, University of Oxford
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