Early this year, I came across a conversation between the novelists Jonathan Lethem and Ben Markovits. Now in his sixties and a venerated member of a cohort of American writers who grappled with masculinity via pop culture, genre-bending, comic books, and cartoons, Lethem was grouped with Michael Chabon and David Foster Wallace as defining members of Gen X lit, educated and autodidactic philosoph-fictionauts whose postmodern, metafictional works interrogate how cultural forces shape identity. Markovits, one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 2013 and a Booker Prize nominee in 2025, practiced historical fiction (about manhood) for much of his career, in works such as The Syme Papers (2004) and a trilogy inspired by the life of Lord Byron. The two authors concurred that historical fiction is perceived as a backwater genre of middlebrow status. Markovits said, “Even though obviously the stuff that happens in the past is relevant today, it feels a little like an averting of your gaze.”