Summary The Agency of Men in The Atmospherians and How to Kidnap the Rich blog.pshares.org
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Two novels explore the global issue of misogyny and its impact on men's empowerment.
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Key Points
- Misogyny and male agency are consistent and transcendent across cultures.
- Fiction debuts "The Atmospherians" and "How to Kidnap the Rich" explore the idea of problem men being isolated and forced to confront their flaws.
- The novels challenge the notion of male passiveness and present men as owners of their mistakes.
- The actions of man hordes in the novels reflect the dilution of male agency in the real world.
- "How to Kidnap the Rich" explores the machismo culture in Delhi and the consequences of questionable actions.
- Both novels use cults or spiritual retreats as devices to address the problem of men seeking direction.
- The concept of agency is explored, with power dynamics and reactions being important factors.
- The novels provide astute observations of contemporary America and predict real-world events.
Summaries
22 word summary
Misogyny and its manifestations are global and disempower men. Two novels, "The Atmospherians" and "How to Kidnap the Rich," examine male agency.
71 word summary
Misogyny and the actions that stem from it, such as catcalling, rape, and murder, are consistent across cultures and erases male agency. In India, this is seen in the concept of Eve teasing, where women are seen as existing
Two fiction debuts, "The Atmospherians" by Alex McElroy and "How to Kidnap the Rich" by Rahul Raina, explore the agency of men in different ways. In "The Atmospherians," a white man named
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The Agency of Men
in The Atmospherians and How to Kidnap the Rich
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The Agency of Men in
The Atmospherians
and
How to Kidnap the Rich
The Agency of Men in
The Atmospherians
and
How to Kidnap the Rich
Author:
April Yee
Aug
17
2023
Posted in
Critical Essays
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Some traditions dont need translationthey are ever-present and transcend boundaries. Take misogyny, and what happens when men notice that they are no longer powerful. The actions they takecatcalls, rape, murderare consistent, and described through passive language that erases male agency. In India, for example, Eve teasing references a religion in which women exist to serve men, and dangerous consequences for women are a side effect of male play. Its parallel in the U.S., toxic masculinity
is an oil spill in which men are hapless, tar-soaked birds. When people use it, they tend to diagnose the problem of masculine aggression and entitlement as a cultural or spiritual illnesssomething that has infected todays men and leads them to reproachable acts,
writes
Michael Salter, a professor of criminology. The pabulum of both terms creates the illusion that men are victims of a system masterminded by someone, anyone but them.
Against this passiveness labor two fiction debuts set on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They take a
what if
to its most extreme conclusion: What if problem men were isolated in a forest with only machetes, bran cereal, and mirrors in which to view their flaws? What if the filthiest menboth in riches and in hygienewere taken hostage and forced to evaluate their life choices? In the world of fiction, as opposed to the real world and its assumed male passiveness, men must make choices; they are not victims, but the owners of their mistakes.
Alex McElroys
The Atmospherians,
published last month, starts with a white man deciding to save the world from others like him. Dyson, a failed actor, launches a cult whose purpose is to reform men, or at least relieve the rest of the world of the burden of interacting with them. Because if any group ever deserved forced isolation, ever needed their world view shaped by trusted leadersfor the greater goodits men, Dyson says. White men, especially. He elegantly lays out a system of classification in pursuit of this goal, much like the ones white men have applied for centuries to the rest of the world, and categorizes a dozen species of dysfunction: Stubborn Man, Righteous Man, Accommodating Man, Military Man, Workaholic Man, Sports Man, Negligent Dad, Yoga Man, College Man, Addict Man, Professor Man, Cheater Man.
The reason the world needs rescuing from these men is both exaggerated and familiar; across the U.S., men are spontaneously banding together to change a womans tire or weed a womans gardenwithout the consent of the tire or garden owners. These man hordes are unthinking and unstoppable, and though they only exist in the novels reality, they feel authentic to a world in which male agency is diluted to make the continuation of mens dominance more palatable. McElroys portrayal of contemporary America is so astute that the novel, completed before the March shootings in Atlanta in which a white man killed six women of Asian descent, seems to predict the actual event:
Last week, a man horde in Bernice, Louisiana, heaved thirty-four bricks through the front window of Fine Finish Nail Salon. Seven customers were treated for injuries. The owner of Fine Finish Nail Salon, Susan Cho, an Asian American resident of Bernice, has joined local activists in calling on the Bernice police to charge the assailants with hate crimes. But police are reluctant to charge the menall of whom were whitewithout evidence of premeditation.
The video cut to a cop at a podium: These are good men. Men from our community. Men weve grown up with. They would never act like this under normal conditions. Something infiltrated their brains.
In the novel, the police are reluctant to blame members of the man horde because they can see themselves in those men. In Atlanta, it was the same: a police spokesman initially averred that the murders were not racially motivated and told reporters the shooter was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him. A bad day arrives like bad weather, beyond the gun owners control.
The problem with men making choices is that the easiest option is not to change, but to escape. Escape beckons in the form of cults, self-harm, and suicide, illusory balms for the wounds of relationships. To heal those wounds, the cults men stage psychodrama, a therapy method in which people act out roles (parent, child, partner) in an individuals trauma. No story is ever a story alone, reflects a second cult leader who secretly watches, noting that her pleasure arises not from watching the enactments but instead from witnessing the reactions of the audience. Stories are never realized through their telling but through the reactions they elicit. The same can be said of humans themselves, who seek from birth to confirm their selfhood through others reactions. In this context, the actions of the man hordes become comprehensible: men who have failed to successfully interact with their own families desperately seek a response from any stranger, even if that response is terror. They are ghosts haunting the functional world.
Rahul Rainas
How to Kidnap the Rich,
out in the United States last week after its initial publication in the United Kingdom earlier this month, is concerned with what white men leave behind. In Delhi, its a machismo that infects men of every social class, from a television producer to a chaiwallah. Some prowl clubs with women on their arms as accessories; others utter crude jokes about sleeping with underlings. As in
The Atmospherians,
the process of correction starts with the questionable actions of one manspecifically, the kidnapping referenced in the books title. Violence makes possible repentance. The victimsa dumb, rich teenager and a poor but clever twenty-something narrator who earns a living by taking the teenagers examsface the consequences of each of their many mistakes. This agency extends to the narration itself, in the voice of the genius test takereach is aware of how it will be digested in the global marketplace. The test taker will not allow his story to be manipulated into passiveness; he is in control. Take a description of his childhood neighborhood:
My father and I lived in a one-room concrete shell, down an alley, then down another, and another, from the place the Western tour guides said was the real India, the one with piles of spices, women in mango-colored saris, men who smelled of hair oil and incense and dragged cows behind them, stately and fat; the one where the whites got out of their AC jeeps and said how
overwhelmed
they were by the sights and the sounds.
Mango-colored saris anticipates how Westerners compare the culture and skin color of non-Westerners to food as if they are also items to be consumed. Meanwhile, the romanticization of cows (who in reality, at least in cities, wander solo to graze on trash, looking not quite fat or stately) and the phrase the sights and the sounds inhabit the mindset of the predictably dazzled, dazed, and definitely condescending Western tourist. Harsh humor keeps the reader (from the West or not) on constant alert: He sat down on a chair, whiter than a Western panel on racial diversity; The parents had described him as a good boy who needs help and dont I know a lie the size of the British are only setting up a trading post when I see one. In one passage, the narrator regrets not having started a yoga ashram to draw in suggestible white folk who would pay for the honor of suffering diarrhea branded as enlightenment. (Convincing white people to pay to part uncomfortably with their food is also a device in McElroys work.) No one eludes satire, especially the white men who in 1947 left behind a legacy of inequality and factionalism.
It is telling that both Raina and McElroy employ cults or spiritual retreats as devices to solve the problem of men. Outside the military or organized religion, where else can men seek direction? Certainly not in themselves; that would require a man from outside Dysons system of classification. So even as they free the rest of the world from the pain of dealing with them, they seek the same power dynamic they knew in that world: the despot and the subjects, the abuser and the abused. Agency belongs to the man at the top, to the man who gets the most reactions.
This piece was originally published on June 8, 2021.
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Alex McElroy
How to Kidnap the Rich
Rahul Raina
The Atmospherians
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About Author
April Yee
April Yee is a writer and literary translator published in Newsweek, Electric Literature, and Lunch Ticket. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK, where she reads fiction for TriQuarterly, serves as mentor for the Refugee Journalism Project at University of the Arts London, and tweets @aprilyee.
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