On the Problematic-Male Confessional

The problematic-male confessional has a long history that stretches as far back as the Book of Job, I guess, but it has largely fallen out of fashion in this country in the past twenty years or so. There’s no need to extensively theorize on why, or debate the relative moral credits of this decline, nor do I find it all that necessary to acknowledge that Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norwegian) and Michel Houellebecq (French) publish very frequently to great international acclaim. I am talking here about the U.S., where crude-dude books like David Gates’s “Jernigan” or Barry Hannah’s “Geronimo Rex” just do not occupy the same literary space that they did only a few decades ago.