The Men

 

 I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: The Men

Author: Sandra Newman

Publisher: Granta

Release Date: 6.14.22

Publisher’s Summary 

From the author of The Heavens, a dazzling, mind-bending novel in which all men mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth

Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their five-year-old son Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world, disappearing from operating theaters mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and acts of love. Children, adults, even fetuses are gone in an instant. Leo and Benjamin are gone. No one knows why, how, or where. 

After the Disappearance, Jane forces herself to enter a world she barely recognizes, one where women must create new ways of living while coping with devastating grief. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, Jane focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, strange video footage called “The Men” is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?

From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of feminist utopias and impossible sacrifices that interrogates the dream of a perfect society and the conflict between individual desire and the good of the community.

My Review

The book I thought I was going to read and the book that I actually read are very VERY different. I was expecting a feminist dystopia somewhere along the lines of Christina Sweeney-Baird's The End of Men, with a world trying to reorganize in the wake of the disappearance of all men. Let's just say that the similarity between the two books ends there. The Men was a long ride through an unsettling world where I kept reading because I wanted to know where this fever dream was going. After finishing, I thought "hmmm, I need to chew on this one for a while" because while I liked some of the scenes, writing, metaphors, and ideas, there were also some BIG problems. It is impossible to address these without spoilers so here is a fair warning.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Big Problem #1 is how the author included trans people in this work. Originally I thought that including nonbinary, trans men/women, and people whose genetic makeup does not solely fall into the XY category in a story that focuses on a genetic Rapture was great, especially after reading criticisms about the exclusion of these marginalized groups in previous works of this style. The author even directly addressed this in the text

"We also debated whether it was ever acceptable to call those who were taken “men” (as 99 percent of people did) when that erased all the trans women, intersex people, and nonbinary folks who’d gone."

However, the inclusion is problematic and traumatic. This aspect of who was and who was not included in the story has led to a lot of blowback from readers, with numerous lengthy reviews posted to Goodreads and arguments on Twitter. I tried to read as many of these opinions as possible to gather other POVs. I'm simply going to say that as I was reading the novel, I thought the author was making major strides within the genre by acknowledging and including trans, non-binary, and intersexed people, but I now see how authors can do more. 

Giant Problem #2 was the "crazy ex-girlfriend" trope. Poppy has mental health needs that not only aren't being addressed, they're reduced to jokes (Evangeline, her brother, and cousin laughing while mimicking Poppy's screams and "Everyone in lesbian Seattle had a story about calling 911 on Poppy.") The author then sets Poppy up as some sort of visionary for opening the "Door" that started the disappearance and I started questioning the layers to the story. Were we inside Poppy's mind à la The Cell?

There were some other things that I just didn't understand.

The ending. The "it was all a dream" trope is one of the lamest story styles ever but is that what is happening here? If Jane stays in her dream Evangeline won't die? Or by choosing to stay at the campground she is choosing her life as a woman shunned by society but "safe" in the roles of wife and mother, rather than risking it all to live in a utopia with Evangeline?

Was the live stream show of "The Men" supposed to be a metaphor for living in the past by not letting go of those who've disappeared? Who was behind the account? How was it unable to be traced but only women who watched would see their loved ones. And then the watchers disappeared when the men returned. Is that to represent how a woman can disappear into the roles of girlfriend/wife/mother?

Toward the end of the story, readers are told that Blanca is a "mutant" which  

Blanca talked the most, about her father and the house they’d had in El Paso with a tall dog gate around the kitchen, where Blanca would lurk and wait for her father to come home with women late at night....One white lady flinched from the sight of Blanca, saying, “What’s that?”...It wasn’t his fault she was born a mutant.

So, Blanca's appearance is so startling that a woman calls her a "what" when the only other information we are given is that Blanca has had to have heart surgery at the beginning of the novel but that would have been after these scenes with her father and the women he brought home. This is just a single example of something being dropped into the story but never expanded on (there were so many that I can't recount them all here.)

I feel like this review is both too long and too short. There are just so many more things to discuss and dissect. Overall, I felt like there were too many loose ends and unexplained storylines. Also, the detailed inclusion of a brutal attack of a trans man, serial rape, allusions to incest, police raids, and gruesome murders just added up to too much trauma porn for my taste.