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The Torontoist Review of Books: The Bird Factory by David Layton
Ah lad lit, publishers trying to cash in on the success of “chick lit” writers like Helen Fielding, Candace Bushnell and Sophie Kinsella tried to create a the genre over the last couple of years. Thankfully it died a quick (and hopefully painful) death.
Reasons for lad lit’s sudden demise are many. Market numbers point out that men make up a very small number of novel readers (about 20% in the US). Laura Miller, writing in the New York Times also points out that the novels the publishers hold up to be paragons of the genre are terrible.
“Lad lit authors may be truthful about young men’s preoccupations, but the recipe for great escapist reading does not include ample servings of stuff people would rather not know. The promoters of lad lit confuse the way women exhaustively analyze a boyfriend’s smallest words and gestures with genuine curiosity about men’s inner lives.”
There are exceptions of course, Nick Hornby is probably the best example of lad lit, and he did so by creating characters masculine enough that men identify with them but not so crass to resemble the customers at a second-rate, strip club down the road from some highway off-ramp.
I’m happy to include Luke Gray, the protagonist of David Layton’s The Bird Factory, on that short list of male characters that men wouldn’t be ashamed of identifying with and that the women aren’t completely repulsed by.
Gray is a man who seeks balance and order in his life. He finds it in his wife Julia, a crisis consultant, and the polar opposite of all the emotional turmoil of his childhood. This order begins to unravel when the couple are unable to conceive and the pressures of fertility treatments begin to wreak havoc on their lives.
Layton convincingly weaves together the psychic traumas of Luke Gray’s childhood with his current frustrations. His father, a documentary maker past his artistic prime, serially cheated on his mother and drove her away.
I didn’t fall in love with Luke Gray, and many won’t either. But you undoubtedly will empathize with him as his life spirals out of control. And perhaps this is another approach that publishers can take with literature for men. Not all of us are interested in reading about the bedroom conquests of men, some of us just want to read a good novel, with believable characters. And if the work somehow touches on that strange, confusing thing that is contemporary masculinity so much the better. Don’t you think we deserve that much?