Rant in D Minor: No Country for Young Men?

The publishing industry has come to regard young male readers as a write-off, a dead demographic, a marketing black hole. According to the bean-counters, young men would rather spend their time kicking a leather orb around a pitch or boy-racing or playing shoot ’em up video games or downloading porn or slaughtering small furry animals than getting stuck into a book or – god forbid – attending a literary event.

So how come last Thursday night, October 30, Eason’s on O’Connell Street was jammed to the back walls with not just goth girls and manga amazons, but also young men in the first growth of their beard, avidly – if not adoringly – sitting through a reading and Q&A session by Neil Gaiman while nursing copies of The Graveyard Book and Sandman and Coraline and American Gods and lord knows what else, patiently waiting to have these sacred artifacts signed by their author? These were the kind of blokes who looked like they hadn’t left their computer stations in a decade, ponytailed, goggle-eyed, unaerobicised and attired in the Comicon geek/net nerd/engineering student uniform of hoodie, jeans and leather trenchcoat.
Of course, Neil Gaiman is a cult unto himself, a writer whose constituency derives from the notoriously fanatical comic book community, who maintains regular contact with his faithful through a blog that’s updated almost daily, and who exhibits the kind of dedication to service that involves staying until ten o’clock to sign every last dog-eared copy of Neverwhere or Good Omens.
But he’s not the only one. Mayo writer Mike McCormack told me a couple of years ago that Chuck Palahniuk was the only writer he’d ever seen cheered onto the stage like a rock star at the Cúirt festival (and while the Chuck’s last three books were turkeys, there’s no doubt titles like Fight Club, Choke and Survivor have done more to exploit the testosterone dollar than almost any other modern novels over the last decade).
A couple of weeks ago I spoke with the librarian of a local Vocational School, who mentioned that the most favoured title amongst her male charges was No Country For Old Men. If you can get teenage boys reading Cormac McCarthy, something’s going on. There’s a whole world of male readers out there with leisure time and disposable income to spare. Publishers blithely abandon this goldmine at their peril.