Nowhere man

In US author Sandra Newman's latest speculative novel, The Men, all those with Y chromosomes mysteriously disappear overnight. How much would they be missed, MARK BROATCH asks the author.

- MARK BROATCH

THE MEN, by Sandra Newman (Granta, $32.99)

The blurb of The Men asks: "What if the price of a better world was losing the person you love?" Early on, the narrator, Jane, imagines an alternative present in which she is single. Is this an indication of how we might read the novel?

There is a kind of a joke reading of the novel where everything that happens is a reflection of Jane's ambivalence about being a stay-at-home mother. I'm always trying to shoehorn more ideas into my novels, and here it's about mundane personal discontents and how hard it can be to tell if they really are normal. Is it normal that being a stay-at-home mother is isolating and often boring? Or is it the malign result of a cruel patriarchal system that needs to be dismantled? What calls for a political solution and what just calls for a glass of wine at the end of the day? How do you know when your life is good enough?

On the face of it, the novel is a kind of Rapture meets radical feminist utopia. Although, for a utopia, it is pretty sombre in places, given the inevitable mourning of all the Y chromosome people. What would you personally most miss and not miss?