October 06 2025, 20:35

The Men

Author: Sandra Newman

First published: 2022

~70,000 words. 15 chapters. First person, Jane Pearson. Also, third person, other characters.

On a camping trip in the North Californian mountains with her husband and son, Jane Pearson experiences "an intense nothing" and is suddenly alone. Across the world, all males have simultaneously disappeared—men, children and babies. This conceit launches us into an exploration of how the world might feel for women without men around, and the potential female utopia that could be created.

The men's shadow is still present in snippets of video that start appearing online. The men are faceless and altered, existing like zombies in a hellish world inhabited by strange creatures within an ever-shifting desolate landscape. Some women become addicted to watching, and those who do tend to see the loved ones they've lost on their screens.

Tying the story together is our protagonist, Jane, and her ex-lover, Evangelyne, who bonded on a college campus when both were infamous for different reasons. Jane was in a devastatingly abusive relationship with her ballet teacher, Alain, who manipulates the underage Jane into having sex with ever-younger boys, leaving her with a reputation as a paedophile. Evangelyne is escaping her own traumatic teenage relationship with a girl whose psychosis leaks into the story of the men's disappearance.

The prose is terrific. Sandra Newman has a wonderful way of describing her uncanny world. The level of detail is intimidating. She invents an entire social movement around commensalism, a biological term for one organism benefiting from another without affecting it for better or worse, while diving deep into the fraught waters of racism, sexism and police brutality, all while telling a love story.

The women are almost all shown as better off without the men in their lives. Both Jane and Evangelyne have life experiences that could be inferred as the cause of the men's disappearance, and this is part of the book's mysterious dance.

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