In her 2011 study The Prestige of Violence, Sally Bachner elucidates the peculiar “prestige” that the subject of violence carries in American fiction from 1962 through to 2007. She explores exactly how contemporary novelists Don Delillo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon, for example, forge such prestige, and how this special value and power awarded to violence is furthermore fortified by the literary acclaim these writers continue to win. Whether it is in the form of “terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape or murder,” Bachner argues that it is precisely because violence is understood to be “unspeakable” that it functions as a locus of the “real.” Indeed, however much we may “abhor violence,” the claim that it is unspeakable is, according to Bachner, “a tribute paid to its perceived authenticity and inviolability.” To this end, Bachner's book interrogates the way that the “unspeakable” generates a “fictional space in which solutions of a speculative, fantasized, and rhetorical nature can be explored without ever having to talk about that which remains prohibited.” Her work remains, as such, animated by the suspicion that the violence and suffering that takes place outwith the hegemonic social codes of middle-class America is the “product of the very economic and political practices that guarantee US prosperity and security.”Footnote ¹

That which is, in Bachner's words, “habitually left unspoken” on account of the cultural “prestige of violence,” nonetheless, respectively comprises the central dialogue of Maggie McKinley's 2015 study Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–57. Whereas Bachner considers the works of a number of contemporary male writers in order to highlight the way in which violence rests upon a reputable mythology of white American innocence and virtue, McKinley – writing just four years after Bachner, as if in response to her work – employs the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth in order to uncover the “intersections of violence, masculinity and racial and ethnic tension in America” as they are experienced by the chiefly oppressed and emasculated African American and Jewish American male protagonists featured in fiction published between the 1950s and the 1970s (1).

McKinley immediately acknowledges in her introduction the degree to which much critical research has already addressed representations of race and gender in individual texts by the authors considered here, yet proceeds to focus on the fact that never before have these texts been placed “side by side” in order to unveil their “instructive similarities with regard to the role violence plays in each author's representation of masculinity” (2). Through this exceptionally detailed study, McKinley largely succeeds, therefore, to subtly fill this gap in scholarship. Her study showcases the fact that while violence is prestigiously asserted in American culture as an inherent part of a man's liberation and autonomy, it nevertheless is deliberately distorted in this literature as the male protagonists, who are all effectively marked as “other” by either their race or their religion, attempt to paradoxically partake in the violently racist power structures that prevent them from self-realization in the first place.

McKinley arranges the primary texts of her study in a roughly chronological order, beginning with Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and concluding with an examination of Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974). Her intermediate chapters on Wright's The Outsider and The Long Dream, Mailer's “The White Negro” and An American Dream, Bellow's Herzog and Mr Sammler's Planet, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Another Country, altogether engage with masculinity in its various ethnic, religious, and sexually oriented forms, offering invaluable readings of the way in which manhood can be both marked and invisible when it fails to adhere to the socially implicated conceptualization of a “dominant” white, heterosexual masculinity. McKinley proceeds to buttress her claim by focussing on the ambivalence surrounding each protagonist's paradoxical use of violence as either a “form of momentum, a coping mechanism, or a lens with which to understand the world around them” (38). In turn, she cogently demonstrates that each man's flawed interpretation of a “regenerative” violence, which manifests problematically in aggressively misogynistic and homophobic forms, nevertheless undermines his project, thereby prompting the reader to question “what, if anything, this violence has succeeded in changing” (14).

The decidedly unique appeal of McKinley's book, however, lies less in her collective use of these particular novels, and more in her philosophical and historicist approach to the construction of racialized masculinity in postwar American literature. She draws from the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to discern the “status of violence in the modern existentialist reckoning of gendered identity,” particularly as a key to understanding the many “conflicting shapes of American masculinity” (3). She applies de Beauvoir's existential exploration of racial and gendered oppression across the main body of her text, and in so doing provides a useful critical language, as well as an innovative means by which to discuss each protagonist's individual project and perception of violence.

Overall, Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence ultimately assists in drawing attention to the ways that unrealistic but prestigiously idealized images of a traditionally violent masculinity often silence and marginalize those who do not meet the judged standards of “what [makes] a man” (167). McKinley moreover concludes that it is only by “revealing and rethinking these deeply entrenched gender stereotypes that we can begin to alleviate the problems they have caused,” and her critical study no doubt opens the platform for us to begin to do so (171).