An Interview With The Notorious Jacob Savage

On the Vanishing White Male Writer - Straight from the Horse's Mouth

Dear Republic,

You may well be tired of the ‘vanishing write male writer’ discourse, but, to be honest, I find it very interesting. About a month ago, Jacob Savage started a ruckus with his viral piece for Compact Magazine, and in this, the first Republic of Letters interview, ROL chats with Savage about what went into the piece and the takeaways from it.

-The Editor

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE NOTORIOUS JACOB SAVAGE

Who are you? I haven't come across your byline before but you really set the internet on fi-yah with your Compact piece.

I'm a suburban dad in the LA suburbs. I scalp concert tickets, mostly. I came out here to write screenplays.

What prompted you to write the piece? The sense with it is that you said what everybody was thinking.

I'd been working on a much larger piece about white male millennial failure, and then I read Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, which I loved. And I had the thought — this was pre-election, before the vibe shift — that really, a white guy could never have written it (partly because most don't have the talent… but more interestingly, because they don't have the guts). I had conversations with some of my more literary friends, and no one could think of a book by a white male millennial that took place in the present that dealt expansively with the world we live in. And I wanted to explore the reasons behind that beyond a simple representation / discrimination rubric.

The Dean Kissick piece in Harper’s also colored my thinking. In an environment in which all new art or literature is based on tribalized identities (“if an artwork's affective power derives from the artist's biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant,” as he put it), then white men, whose biographies are suspect by default, are left with nothing to say.

(This phenomenon is by no means limited to the literary world. There wasn't a single straight white male artist in the entire 2024 Whitney Biennial, etc.)

What do you make of the reaction you've gotten from it?

I was gratified, obviously, by how viral it went. I think I succeeded in writing what a lot of people were thinking. And I was thrilled to make it into the NYT Cooking section.

And — I knew this going in, but it still always comes as a bit of surprise — everyone takes what they will from a piece. Conservatives lapped up all the evidence of discrimination and tended to ignore the self-censorship angle, but weirdly so did many people on the left.

The cope was strong. It was strange to watch a certain type of Good Literary White Guy desperately insist that Everything is Actually Fine, which itself was a sort of live-action reenactment of my thesis. “White guys only listen to podcasts / white guys are too busy playing video games” (do non-white men also not like these things? not to mention — if you go back to the NEA study everyone likes to cite — the premise that “only” younger women read fiction is nonsense).

I guess this is going to appear on literary Substack, so I might as well draw some blood. A lot of supposedly post-woke people here didn't challenge my thesis, or my conclusions, almost no one objected to my readings of any of the white guys I wrote about, no one came forward to say, “actually ____ is a genius who perfectly describes contemporary society,” or “actually the incredible imagination of ____ renders contemporary critique irrelevant.”

But they did seem offended I bothered to notice.

“What a base and miserable complaint!” wrote

Henry Oliver

about my daring to mention the fact that the New Yorker hasn't published a work of literary fiction by a white American man born after 1984. Oliver and his ilk (

Andrew Boryga

,

Naomi Kanakia

) want to position themselves as above it all — all while echoing my fundamental argument, which is that most of these white male millennial novels just aren't very good (and ignoring the underlying sociological reasons for that).

Oliver goes on to helpfully suggest that younger white men, if indeed they face institutionalized discrimination, should self-publish. Who cares about the New Yorker? A Naomi Kanakia in every kitchen, a John Pistelli in every garage!

This is just wild. Can you imagine giving that advice to any other group of people?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it? And while we're here: if Tony Tulathimutte, whose writing both Henry Oliver and I both adore, hadn't been able to publish Private Citizens with William Morrow in 2016 — what would have happened? If he'd found himself ever-so-slightly further offsides the Maginot line of identity and a mainstream publisher hadn't picked up his début, do you really think we'd all have read Rejection in 2024?

My argument isn't that brilliant white male novels are going unpublished because of “woke” publishing, but that the horizon of creativity has been diminished. My hunch is that there were a bunch of average to good to better-than-good débuts that might have come out between 2015-2023, but which didn't, largely for identitarian reasons, and many would-be authors moved on. They got married, they had kids (and no, I'm not talking about myself — to everyone's surprise, I am neither a novelist nor an aspiring novelist). So instead of spending five years working on a brilliant sophomore effort, the second coming of Updike or DeLillo or even Ben Lerner probably works in marketing at Meta and changes diapers in his spare time.

And I get it, most novelists, of any gender and any background, barely scrape by. But you know why it “matters” if you publish in the New Yorker? Not because of the ossified subscribership of Boomers and dentists — but because if you get $10K for a story it means you can keep writing, and maybe it helps get you a publishing contract, which also means you can keep writing. And obviously vanishingly few people will ever get a story into the New Yorker — but if there's no path other than to write as an avocation, many people will simply give up before they start (

Chris Jesu Lee

just wrote a very good piece related to the collapse of prestige).

Sure, no one's “stopping” you from writing your novel. You can self-publish, spend years tirelessly working to build an audience. But the point of culture isn't to upload a novel to your 137 Substack followers. Either there's some common culture, some mechanism of common distribution and consumption, or we are truly lost.

Here's my theory of what's happened. I'm curious how this lines up with yours. I feel like there are about four things that are stacked up on top of each other. The first is the general introduction of a corporatized feminism into Western life. This may have happened more explicitly in publishing than anywhere else. Gradually, the old boy networks at the storied publishing houses atrophied out. The old dinosaurs stayed on as long as they could and never got around to choosing younger male successors. A new generation of women emerged in prominent positions in publishing. They had a great deal of camaraderie with one another and axes to grind against the older 'patriarchal' establishment. (

Mary Gaitskill

’s This Is Pleasure covers many of these dynamics brilliantly.) Then Woke hit in the culture and all of those tendencies accelerated. It became a kind of merit badge to not publish white men and to publish women and people of color. Then the third point — and this is important — is that the publishing industry felt, I think, that that had worked out pretty well, that they hadn't really made a lot of money from Garth Risk Hallberg but that, especially with the heavily female readership, they were getting good sales from the new way of doing things. I notice this on Substack, by the way, that women — especially young women sharing a bit about their sex lives — just get much higher engagement than anybody else. And then, fourth, men sort of gave up. To generalize about this, a lot of men feel like they have to be the 'center of the world,' or to be the 'best ever,' to want to do anything, and if they weren't wanted in publishing — and literature, in general, became very female-coded — then they drifted off to something else. That would be my breakdown of how it all played out. Curious what yours is?

That basically lines up with my thinking. I’d push back a little on the prurient ladies of Substack sub-thesis, though. What you're describing also existed for men — think about every despicable 2000’s-era Vice article you ever read — but at a certain point the social cost of publishing that stuff outweighed the benefits. I have no idea what went on inside the publishing houses, but my sense is that the path of least resistance, as in other industries, was to mandate more diversity on a junior level to ensure the higher levels didn't have to change all that much.

Everything I've said above is kind of socioeconomically determined. But maybe the more interesting way to think about all of this is in terms of literary expression. You have this interesting line, “Younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them.” Can you say more of what you mean by that? One of the ways I've thought about this — definitely I've struggled with it in my writing — is that it's very difficult to know what to ‘say’ about being male at this moment in time. It hasn't appealed to me to write about victimhood or inceldom. There just don't seem to be obvious narratives to latch onto, whereas I think there are a lot of very interesting narratives for women — figuring out how to navigate traditionally male workplaces, figuring out how open to be about sexuality, all the dilemmas about ‘having it all,’ etc.

Andrew Boryga should probably be writing another novel instead of publicly congratulating himself for the one he's already written (“brave,” “kind of bold” — his words, describing himself) but in his attempt to dunk on me he did have one thought that was spot-on: “I fear that too many writers are trying to forecast the industry's reaction before they've even stepped up to the plate.”

In this respect he's completely right. So much millennial art — and this isn't confined to white men, or to literary fiction — isn't written for an actual audience. Even in the act of creation, millennials seem to play to an imagined gatekeeper: a Vulture reviewer, some clueless Boomer grandee (every scene in every Damien Chazelle movie feels like this). And it's poison for everyone.

I'm not sure anyone needs to “say” anything — that framing sort of defeats the purpose of art, right? I think, fundamentally, what I want is more ambient honesty and risk-taking. I want fiction writers of all backgrounds to stop being afraid of their own shadows. I want to see white men go for it, the way I see

Ottessa Moshfegh

or Tony Tulathimutte going for it. I mean, how can you hope to depict complex human relationships if you can't even accurately describe getting on the phone with your own agent?

On the other hand — I do feel like a valid criticism of the Compact piece is, what am I actually looking for? Do I just want a dozen millennial Jonathan Franzens to bloom? And the answer is: not... really?

Take the academic roman à clef — it's a little weird there hasn't been a novel about a white guy not getting a tenure-track position; there should probably be one or two books about that. But it's not a tragedy that there aren't. I would also be interested in narratives about fatherhood and shifting gender expectations, but I don’t need them. I don't need any more incel books, either. What's missing isn’t a specifically white male fiction so much as pure literary ambition. What I want, more than anything, is some gesture among millennial novelists towards the universal and the eternal.

Any thoughts on the three Republic of Letters pieces on these questions?

I enjoyed them, though I found the video game cope a bit much. They were fairly representative of the gamut the reactions have run. Good work!

I've been thinking about why your piece really hit me — and hit a lot of people. And here's what I'd say, that it makes me look back very differently on professional frustrations over the last 15-20 years. Because if I didn't get a piece accepted somewhere, or a response to a query on a novel, I assumed always that it was my problem, that my writing just wasn't that good, and then I had an extra degree of self-loathing on this for being a white male and feeling that ‘even with all my advantages’ I still wasn't succeeding. With your framing — and the data you bring to bear on this — I find myself thinking about all this pretty differently: that nobody of my demographic was getting published all that time, that there was this major seismic shift that was happening, that I was caught up in but wasn't seeing for what it was. And for me that's an astonishingly different way of thinking about my own life. How would you assess the kind of psychological implications from the conclusions you draw in your piece?

I've been grappling with this myself. It cuts deep. It's hard to think about just how historically contingent your life is. I could have been born in some 19th century shtetl to a life of grinding poverty — but of course I wasn't, I was born upper-middle-class in the 1980's, with the expectations and mores of my social class.

Now if you're a Gen-Z white guy who just graduated college — given the political trajectory we appear to be on — the cultural headwinds we faced are mostly gone, and you’ll probably be fine (assuming there's any work left to do). But white male millennials graduated with one expectation of how the world operated, only to have the rules switched up just as we were beginning our professional careers (especially within liberal fields: academia, culture — anything that wasn't finance or tech). If you'd told me, back in the early 2010's when I moved to Los Angeles, that being a straight white Jewish man would actually be a liability at the lower levels of the movie industry, I would have said you were crazy. But that's exactly what happened.

Like many others, I kept thinking I would be the exception. It took a long time to see there really weren't too many exceptions — that on a very basic level, the traditional cultural means of ascent closed off around 2014. Partly this was because of secular trends (I don't envy people in Hollywood who’ve “made it”) — but they were shut for white men. And the smartest white guys of our generation probably saw the writing on the wall and went into tech or finance (or podcasting or HVAC repair), and the more resourceful and more committed went at it alone, and only the suckers were left to court the gatekeepers in the arts or journalism or academia. You and me Sam (and many people we know), we were definitely the suckers.

Now even whispering this will whip the Bluesky crowd into a lather — I can already hear dozens of keyboards clanging in unison about the world's tiniest violin. Sure. Whatever. That relatively privileged white men within liberal milieus got kinda screwed over the past decade isn't necessarily a national tragedy (though in many cases it was plainly illegal), but it certainly is a personal tragedy of varying dimensions. And part of moving on, both politically and emotionally, is being able to discuss this honestly and openly without having to contort yourself.

(I don't need a novel about this. But I wouldn't not read one, either).

And for your viewing pleasure, here are three German men playing tiny instruments

I think about my father-in-law, who matriculated at Penn in the 1950’s, when there were still Jewish quotas at other Ivies. He knew certain colleges were much harder for Jews to gain admission to, that certain industries were effectively off-limits — and went on to lead a happy, successful life. My father-in-law understood where he stood in relation to society and planned accordingly. The vertigo our cohort has experienced is largely because we did not.

Jacob Savage is a ticket scalper and very occasional writer who lives in Los Angeles.