Hard not to agree with Jacqueline Maley the PC man-hater, although I can think of 20 Australian male novelists off the top of my head. Even so, by and large, the feminisation of lit is complete. Like the final stage of entropy. As for the Charmaine Clift nostalgia exercise, most of her novels were so-so but her opinion pieces for the Sydney Morning Herald were skyrockets. Clift killed herself because Johnston wrote about her root-rat activities and was going to publish them in a book. Are there no gentlemen left? The Chinese couldn’t have launched a more destructive missile than Po-Mo at western culture. The future of literature? Cookbooks.

For decades after her death from suicide in 1969, Australian writer Charmian Clift’s work was eclipsed by her husband’s. Clift was married to writer George Johnston, whose classic Australian novel My Brother Jack was published in 1964 to great acclaim.

But for the past few years, a Clift renaissance has been under way, kicked off by the publication in 2020 of A Theatre for Dreamers by British author Polly Samson.

The novel is a sensual depiction of the 1960s bohemian idyll on the Greek island of Hydra, where Clift and Johnston were part of a set of proto-hippies that included Leonard Cohen.

Fascination with this colony of artists and the charismatic, brilliant woman who stood at the centre of it – cooking and entertaining and birthing children and writing through it all – has burgeoned in recent years, fuelled by the reprinting and translation of Clift’s novels.

As reported in the Australian Financial Review this week, every day, three or four people from all over the world wander up the labyrinthine cobblestone streets of Hydra looking for Clift’s house.

Legendary Australian publisher Jane Palfreyman says this is as it should be.

“Charmian is our very own Frida Kahlo,” she says. “In the same way that Frida has totally eclipsed Diego Rivera … Charmian is riding high, whereas George Johnston is found gathering dust on the back shelves of second-hand bookstores.”

A similar kind of justice has been accorded to Elizabeth Jane Howard, the English novelist married to Kingsley Amis at the height of his fame (and legendary alcoholism).

Howard was a brilliant novelist but was overlooked in her lifetime, dismissed as a “women’s writer”. Now, her books, particularly the marvellous Cazalet Chronicles– a saga of upper-class English life which spans the two world wars – are being reprinted at speed to keep up with a younger generation of readers just discovering her.

Meanwhile, Kingsley Amis’ work, and to a lesser extent, that of his son, Martin (whose own writing was encouraged by his stepmother), has been relegated to the genre of Straight White Man’s Novel. And sadly for the Amises, the Bellows, the Roths and the Mailers, not to mention all contemporary wannabe inheritors of the tradition, this once-vaunted body of work is sputtering to its death.

This controversial claim has long been muttered among straight white man writers finding it difficult to sign publishing deals for their literary novels. But it flew out into the open in an essay published in March in the American literary journal Compact.

In it, American writer Jacob Savage, once a screenwriter, now a ticket-scalper, charted the downfall of “The Vanishing White Male Writer”.

Savage conducted a forensic audit of literary prize and “notable novel” shortlists over the past decade or so and found them wanting in straight male whiteness. His conclusion is dramatic: “Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down”.

Savage goes on to argue his case, which is compelling because there is little doubt that in the United States and beyond, including in Australia, the contemporary literary fiction market is increasingly dominated by women and people of colour.

This is not for reasons of charity or self-sabotaging affirmative action on the part of publishers. It’s because literary fiction by women and people of colour is what readers of fiction (the majority of whom are women) want to buy right now.

Savage’s critique is not a cry of self-pity (well, maybe it is a little bit); it is an attempt to explain this phenomenon of increasing female literary dominance and its co-phenomenon, the demise of fiction-reading among men.

The piece startled a lot of commentators and led to some derision, which only served to prove the potency of Savage’s point. Savage also argued that white male novelists were not producing innovative or fresh work because they were self-censoring according to the laws of Millennial political correctness.

“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” he wrote.

Jesus, we need to start a charity for these poor young men, these linguistic fuck-ups, as their works are spiked by female gatekeepers because, ‘they are no longer capable of describing the world around them’. Call ‘A Current Affair’.

The New York Times examined his claims in its own think-piece, entitled “The Death and Life of the Straight White Man’s Novel”, in which it posed the question of whether we should care if the perspective of the straight white man is hopelessly demode, like Picasso.

We probably should, at least insofar as it conveys interesting shifts in culture. The alienation of the straight white male – particularly the economically displaced working-class men who powered Donald Trump’s voter base – has self-fulfilling political power.

Now, the advent of 21st-century postmodern identity politics has profoundly splintered the arts in a million fascinating directions. If reading a novel is a window into another world, then a window into the world of a historically marginalised perspective represents a particularly interesting vista.

Female buyers power the fiction market. As noted in a 2024 NYT article (by a male creative writing university teacher), “over the past two decades, literary fiction has become largely a female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women”.

In her 2019 book, Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of our Lives, Helen Taylor cited research that women account for 80 per cent of the fiction-buying market in the UK, US and Canada. They also constitute most of the patrons of libraries, literary festivals and book clubs.

She quotes novelist Ian McEwan as saying “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead”.