What About the Men? (Published 2022) (2024)

THE MEN, by Sandra Newman

WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS, by Kelly Barnhill

Are women, when you get right down to it, better than men?

Some think we are. They point to statistics: Men commit most violent crime and have started most wars. So, if women could physically overpower men or get rid of them altogether, would things be better? Two new novels investigate.

In Sandra Newman’s “The Men,” all cisgender men and transgender women suddenly vanish. When the protagonist Jane’s husband and son disappear from their camping vacation, she seeks out Evangelyne — her charismatic ex who now heads the country’s Commensalist Party (ComPA). “Evangelyne who I believed in above all people,” Jane thinks, “could find my son if anyone could.” Jane, a former dancer with a criminal record, is not alone in her quest — the story also follows other women longing for their men: a father, a best friend, a brother, two sons.

In their desperation, these women gravitate toward a mysterious online channel called “The Men,” which shows videos of the vanished “marching or standing in groups, mouths opening and closing in unison,” against an alien or demonic landscape. “The men were infinitely varied but their movements all the same,” a woman named Alma observes. She cannot pull herself from the screen: It even cures her alcoholism. The women hope that watching this channel will bring the missing back. But the rest of the world is moving along without them — inventing ways to fertilize eggs using female DNA, reunifying North and South Korea, reaching climate agreements, training women and transgender men to take on previously male-dominated jobs, like truck driving, or being the pope.

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. In one clip the men stand stock-still on a riverbank, staring fixedly at the far shore. “Among the frozen humans … horse-sized felines stalk restlessly. An elephantine behemoth switches its tail.” The image begins to rapidly darken and lighten: “We see the shadows of the men and animals turning, lengthening and shortening. At the end, the men are visibly thinner.” These sections are eerie, propulsive and horrifying. The worst thing imaginable happens to a young boy in footsie pajamas. A friend who happened to watch me as I read this section told me my face changed shape almost beyond recognition. It is a book whose disturbing imagination reaches through the page into our world.

Jane’s story too is deeply troubling. At 16, she was groomed by the older director of her ballet troupe, Alain, who taught her to seduce — to abuse — boys as young as 13 so he could watch them having sex. When it came to trial it was harder to prosecute Alain than Jane; after all, he hadn’t touched the victims. Jane is branded a criminal and left destroyed: “I will never be whole, I can never feel good.”