The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The novel behind 2022’s most ludicrous trans row
A sci-fi tale which empties the world of all Y chromosomes – men and trans women alike – caused outrage before anyone had read it
THE MEN by Sandra Newman 272pp, Granta, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £12.53
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When Philip Wylie wrote his 1951 novel The Disappearance, in which the entire female species vanishes on a Tuesday afternoon, the dystopian vision of a world containing only one gender probably felt to him a beautifully simple idea. It’s not quite so simple anymore: in daring to imagine a future suddenly empty of anyone with a Y chromosome, Sandra Newman’s new speculative novel, The Men, has already led to a Twitter spat, and it’s not even published yet.
After trans activists attacked the novel’s gender essentialist premise – which sees Y-chromosomed trans women spirited away with the men – the American essayist Lauren Hough tweeted her support for the book, leading to her removal from the Lambda Awards, which had shortlisted her lesbian memoir. This typically convoluted example of America’s increasingly mad culture wars is grist to the mill for those horrified by the virus of ideological conformity infecting the US literary scene. But the really weird thing is that The Men actually bends over backwards to signal its awareness of the many identity issues Twitter likes to get so het up over. It’s also a lesser novel for it.
It begins with Jane Pearson awaking in a tent to find her husband and five-year-old son missing. Before long, it’s apparent all men and trans women on Earth have vanished without trace, leaving government departments at a standstill and planes falling out of skies. But this is no nightmare set-up: women, it turns out, are just as good as the chaps at piloting aeroplanes and organising bin collections. What’s more, they don’t tend to wee in the subway which, as one character is relieved to discover, no longer smells of urine.
As the women make pizza together and work out how to fertilise embryos without need of male sperm, Newman deftly establishes minor plot threads: Alma, an alcoholic loner who learns to stand on her own two feet after the disappearance of her beloved brother; Ruth, who reestablishes contact with her semi-estranged daughter. Meanwhile, video clips start appearing online, showing the disappeared men in strange locations next to amphibious creatures, and which become increasingly violent and appalling as fathers start massacring their own children.
Yet Newman, whose previous novel, The Heavens, also toyed with fantasy worlds, isn’t much interested in fleshing out her set-up, with its rich interest in the relationships between gender and power. Instead she swerves into Jane’s backstory as a promising teenage dancer now on the sex offenders’ list for having had sex with younger male dancers at the urging of her abusive male teacher. Some years later, Jane met and fell in love with Evangelyne, a black woman who spent time in prison after shooting two policemen during an armed raid and who then produced what has become an influential political text. Newman spends so much time on their retrospective histories, the reader starts to wonder if they are reading at least three separate novels for the price of one.
In places, though, The Men reads as if it has been sensitivity assessed into the ground. Its minor characters may feel like fully imagined fictional characters but, alas, Evangelyne never does. Instead her story is presented as a paradigmatic one of white racism and police oppression.
Haunted by an exploitative past friendship with a white girl, Evangelyne realised “the White girl was everywhere, eternal, and could never be escaped”. Jane, for her part, rarely misses an opportunity to signal her awareness of white privilege, pointing out not just her discomfort when Evangelyne describes their friendship as “pure”, but how aware this makes her compared to other “unsuspecting” white people who wouldn’t see “anything odd in the association of whiteness and purity”. At one point, a woman is simply identified as “Republican neighbour” – no further characterisation needed.
All this adds to the muddle of a novel overloaded by concept and political ideation. What’s more, the rug-under-foot ending indicates even Newman isn’t confident of how to pull all these strands together.
As for those trans activists? At one point Jane and
Evangelyne debate whether it was acceptable to call those who have vanished “men”, when “that erased all the trans women, intersex people and non-binary folks who’d gone”. One can only wonder if they’ve actually read it.
In fact, The Men reads as though it has been sensitivity assessed into the ground