The idealised man-free existence is always fighting against the gravity of affection. Sandra Newman’s novel The Men takes that quandary and does something clever with it ... It’s a morally hard-edged and grippingly weird fiction ... Newman can write a beautiful sentence, the kind that unfolds itself into a small revelation ... This is a gripping, haunting novel that miraculously swerves both cheap misandry and the lazy pieties of contemporary rectitude to ask: what is to be done when politics smashes into the demands of love?
I just saved you the excruciating experience of reading Sandra Newman’s The Men, the most ill-conceived and badly executed novel of the year, if our God is a merciful one ... This is the kind of circular logic that drives The Men, and you think surely not, surely we’re not just going to spin endlessly around this one dumb idea until we puke from dizziness, but we are and we do ... A book that could be about how women would build a different world becomes a rumination on all the bad things men have done. Things happen, but we don’t see much of it ... 'The world would get better if only this one specific demographic could be eradicated from the face of the Earth' is an extremely weird thought to have, and it’s even weirder not only to write it down but to prattle on about it for a couple of hundred pages. I guess we’re just lucky Newman decided to use 'men' and not 'the Jews' or whatever ... She is not a thoughtful writer and she stumbles over stereotypes and clichés. Here, she doesn’t just trip over the stereotype of men bad/women good, she builds a house with it as her foundation. She only makes it worse by trying to wokeify the text, sprinkling in mentions of trans and nonbinary people in the clumsiest way possible as if she remembered in the final draft that trans people existed and had to be accounted for in her scheme of damnation.
It is in the exploration of these areas, the hinterland beyond the shock headline, that The Men really intrigues and disturbs. Indeed, once both characters and readers have absorbed the mass disappearances and their immediate effects – the collapse of industries and utilities chiefly run by men, and the ensuing plane crashes, power outages and lack of policing; the vast reduction in sexual violence and assault, and the “sweet clamour of voices in the air” when those voices belong only to women and girls – it is the less immediately obvious fallout that dominates ... it seems too literal to read the book as a simple equation in which the existence of men equals the death of hope for the future, even as one might also argue that the stark set-up makes such a conclusion tricky to avoid. The Men is a confusing novel, full of fraught ideas and jangling emotions, and a prose style that veers from affectlessness and distance to attempts to capture vulnerability ... At its strongest, however, it is an exploration of attachment, its lure and its peril, and the impossibility of its eradication from human affairs.
By 'men', Newman means 'all people with a Y chromosome'. This definition led — no surprise, perhaps — to some rough discussion on Twitter, long before the book was published. But the problems with this book don’t have much to do with this issue. Newman, it should be said, is an interesting writer ... The Men is something of a struggle ... The premise is not particularly original ... In Newman’s version, the disappearance becomes a kind of sub-plot to a personal psychodrama that is, if anything, even less convincing than the sci-fi element of the book ... These events do not unfold at all. Among the many flaws that bedevil this book is a twist at the end which undercuts everything that has come before. Is this the author’s get-out clause? She needs one, alas. The book fails on many levels but, above all, it does not dig into its central premise: readers are left without any sense of how society is actually affected by the disappearance of the men ... The book toys with politics of every stripe: the dynamics of sex and sexual abuse, the dynamics of race and racism. And yet the flatness of the characters means that Newman’s intention — which was, surely, to interrogate the complex issues raised in the novel — falls flat and, worse than that, feels exploitative ... This is a confused and confusing book, a tangled mess of threads that never knit up into a satisfying whole.
Some early readers have called The Men transphobic, because transgender women disappear along with the cisgender men. I see what they mean. The novel states that an unexplained force 'had removed every human with a Y chromosome, everyone who’d ever been potentially capable of producing sperm.' Given that this is an imaginary landscape that Newman could have organized any way she chose, she’s effectively made a strong statement about where transgender people 'belong': Transgender men remain on Earth with the cisgender women. Some readers will — very reasonably — want to avoid this book because of it ... But for those who do read it, there are other elements worthy of discussion. Evangelyne’s political philosophy of commensalism — a biological term for a relationship between species in which one benefits and the other is not harmed — is fascinating. The sections in the demonic landscape are tremendously unsettling, and perfectly conveyed ... These sections are eerie, propulsive and horrifying ... a book whose disturbing imagination reaches through the page into our world.
There is not much literary grist in competence. When your cast is so sedately obliging it is hard to make anything interesting happen ... the cultural discomfort the book aroused is one indication that this ageing thought experiment may have reached the edge of its utility ... lurking inside The Men (though you’ll have to dig deep) is a tale of white guilt, climate inaction and the gravitational pull of grief; of what – or who – we are willing to sacrifice to stay comfortable. But this pair read as novelties, anachronisms, time capsules.
[Newman] wants to pay homage to these literary foremothers, and in many ways she does. But it’s undeniable that today’s understanding of biological sex and gender is far different and more sophisticated than the assumptions under which Newman’s literary forebears were operating. She makes some difficult and controversial choices about where transgender people fit in this world she has created. Although perhaps she should be commended for not erasing them from her narrative entirely, the way that she addresses gender feels somewhat outdated and at odds with contemporary discourse ... That said, The Men is sure to get people talking, and not only for how Newman handles gender categories. This is also a novel, implicitly or explicitly, about plagues, climate and how power is reified by those in charge.
... for this reader, paradise is boring. (There’s a reason we relish Dante’s Inferno so much more than his Paradiso.) The defining feature of The Men, a snappy premise in search of a novel, is the utterly flat reality it imagines for its women. Building an entirely new world order of this sort ought to puff up dramas great and small. But pfffffft. Why does the air seem to go right out of them?The Men launches women into positions of uncontested power but entirely underestimates their complexity. It makes you long, against all your better instincts, for the men to come back ... There’s a big, ugly problem built into the foundation of The Men ... the novel isn’t transphobic as much as sadly ill-considered and unoriginal. Newman’s world isn’t binary, but her mechanism is, and no amount of shoehorned asides can shore up that rotting mooring. The history of feminist utopias in literature is long and fitful, with squabbles among renowned novelists and calls for a more expansive view of gender identity, but The Men lazily fumbles back toward simplicity ... Art is not required to be moral—and shouldn’t strive to be—but good art is never this careless in its conception. Utopias are ripe for wild imagining. Why not reckon with the reality of gender, especially when decades past have already seen this sort of utopian premise time and again? It appears the answer is that the gender-war narrative is too convenient to give up ... Here is where the tension dry-rots. Rather than pivot toward the women, to the rush of possibility for a world full of ambitious, complex, at-odds women; rather than push sci-fi heurism to a new dimension by investigating the thrilling, unbearable prospect of a world now populated by the grieving, formerly oppressed class; rather than defy the cruel banality of a binary gender apocalypse, Newman gives men the narrative. She even gives them the title.
Everything is firmly in the vein of matriarchal fantasy novels...but Newman tries to step up a gear by tackling other issues such as race, trans rights, sexuality, politics and even God’s existence ... Grappling with these subjects feels like the right move but the treatment can be blunt. They call for serious unpicking yet have the air of an afterthought ... Yet any quibbles should not distract from what is a propulsive read, provided you don’t overthink a plot that is overreliant on backstory. What is worth thinking about, however, is the type of society we all want to be living in, and that alone makes The Men worthy of your reading pile.
A smashing feminist utopia ... Newman provides powerful insights on the limits of sacrifice. As all the characters converge, the author introduces startling explanations ... This is a stunner.
This novel doesn’t seem to want to be science fiction. After setting the dystopian narrative in motion, the author pulls back to offer a detailed account of Jane’s life up to this point ... She falls under the control of a man who abuses her by compelling her to abuse other, younger kids. She escapes jail by testifying against her abuser. This is a horrifying story compellingly told, but it feels like it belongs in a different book ... By the last page, the connection between the realistic and speculative parts of the novel is clear, but the speculative elements feel woefully underdeveloped—which is too bad, because they’re inventive and chilling. Also worth noting: There will be readers who object to the gender essentialism upon which this novel relies and the way Newman handles the fate of people who aren’t cisgender when the 'men' disappear ... Occasionally brilliant but ultimately unsatisfying.