Contemporary Fiction and Men Who Talk Too Much

Once we’ve seen a stereotypical scene, it’s impossible to unsee it. And I can’t think of a scene more stereotypical in contemporary Anglophone literature than one where an older and wealthier man talks too much in the direction of a younger and poorer woman who pretends to listen while silently laughing at him. I don’t know when the first time was that a writer tried this scene, but it’s already fully formed in a well-known essay by Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me.” The plot is simple: The author goes with a friend to a party in the mansion of “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.”