What women want

From fictional men, anyway

I recently read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, by Wendy Lesser. Lesser is an accomplished editor, author and critic. She founded The Threepenny Review; she wrote a biography of architect Louis Kahn; she holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She is also a devotee of crime fiction emanating from modern Scandinavia—your Denmarks, your Swedens. Actually, ‘devotee’ is an understatement. Lesser is something of an amateur expert, and perhaps even an addict. Sometimes she’ll inhale three or four Scandinavian mysteries per week, ever-seeking her latest fix of bloody murder and existential despair.

In Scandinavian Noir, Lesser pursues her obsession to its real-life home, visiting Sweden, Norway and Denmark to see the real-life places where her favorite stories are set. It’s fun, engaging, and informative, even if, by the time she reaches the end of her journey, she never quite accounts for why she’s so obsessed with the genre. Which is the thing with obsession, after all. For an obsessive personality, the object of the obsession is, almost, secondary. What matters is that your wheel-turning brain has something to spin about endlessly.

Perhaps the most insightful look into why Lesser, and so many other readers like her, are obsessed with the genre has to do with how it functions as a mirror in a way other stories don’t.

Surely such an environment, one would think, produces people who are seriously unlike us. And yet that turns out not to be the case. On the contrary, the Scandinavian thriller often speaks directly to readers from the United States in a way that the books set closer to our own clime do not. When we read mysteries that take place in Japan or even in England, we are likely to come up against a relatively enclosed and distinctly self-involved culture. But when we look at the Scandinavians, we often find our own faces reflected back at us.

Lisbeth Salander, c’est moi.

Yet I came away from Scandinavian Noir with a different insight into Lesser’s obsession, one that has less to do with nationality and more with gender. At the same time I read the book, I was following a conversation, or series of conversations, on the apparently diminished role of the straight male in contemporary literary fiction. We’re living through a moment where many of the biggest names in literary fiction are women: Sheila Heti, Eleanor Catton, and especially Sally Rooney, who moves units at a rate that recalls the heyday of the 1970s. Some praise the phenomenon; others bemoan it, such as, say, Alex Perez, who caused quite the kerfuffle when he pointed out that those who work in publishing are largely upper-middle-class white women. (Which is true, by the way, in terms of pure numbers. Many of those same white women point out that fact!) Perez blames that combination of gender and class imbalance for what he sees as the ongoing difficulty of certain kinds of writers—straight males of various ethnicities, generally from the working classes—have in finding a place in the current literary sphere. All those women, wanting only to read about themselves.

Which is where Scandinavian Noir comes in. The book, among other things, outright disproves such a characterization. Lesser is a well-educated, upper-middle-class white woman. Exactly the sort of cohort that, according to Perez, has no interest, and even outright hostility, to males from from working-class backgrounds such as himself. Yet Lesser loves her straight males. Many of the authors whose books she devours are males of the straightest, whitest variety: Jo Nesbo, Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell. And many of the protagonists of those novels are similarly white and straight, sometimes veering into territory that verges on the toxic. Say, Harry Hole, the detective from Nesbo’s ongoing series. A depressive alcoholic of the sort that Scandinavia produces by the truckload, Hole is forever moping about, nipping on whiskey while he solves the murder of the latest nubile young woman.

What accounts for this divergence? Is it simply a matter of genre, of crime fiction providing a sense of resolution that more literary fare avoids in the pursuit of aesthetic distinction? Is this an aesthetic instance of that political phenomenon where voters say one thing online yet vote differently in the booth?

I think there’s something else going on. Lesser, and readers like her, and Perez, and writers like him, are questing after the same thing. They both want, and miss, male competence.

The thing about Harry Hole, and Mikael Blomqvist, and Martin Beck, and hundreds of other Scandinavian detectives is that they are all competent at their jobs. They do the work. They knock on doors. They pull up the files from storage. Despite the mess they make of their personal lives—or perhaps, because of it—they remain devoted to their jobs, competent at their tasks, committed to the only source of purpose they have in their lives.

Now I am, obviously, a straight male writing this, and so my insight may verge into the speculative. But I think women find competence to be one of the most compelling, perhaps the most compelling, traits that a man have. If a man displays competence in at least one area of his life, then that is one area a woman doesn’t have to take care of herself. A novel where a competent man does his job is wish fulfillment of the most longed-for sort.

And competence is also what those like Perez long for, in one way or another. To be a male hailing from the working class today is to be aware that the jobs that once constituted male working-class competence are harder and harder to come by, what with the offshoring of the manufacturing sector. It’s not their fault. And yet that lack of competence, of the opportunity to display competence, can be read as a personal failing. It’s a vicious circle.

So perhaps there’s a solution: all the straight men who can’t find jobs should become private investigators, and all the straight male writers who can’t sell their literary debuts should turn to crime fiction. Get competence where you can find it.