an inquiry

"Consider the middle-aged male reader of literary fiction. Previous iterations purportedly read Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Cheever, Roth. Today, I suspect that middle-aged male readers of literary fiction may not even exist?"

My Struggle

"My Struggle" is the original title I have for 200 pages I wrote twenty years ago, in the early nineties. It was my second burst of novel writing, and a parody of the liberal arts grad who winds up broke, slacking, experiencing angst, and so on. See Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City for examples of the genre. It seems like a valid title for anything that intends to draw attention to the fact that the author or narrator has not struggled, has no right to think of his life as struggle, or has struggled in such a psychological or emotional way that it hardly seems like struggle compared to the starving, enslaved, overworked, terminally unemployed, etc.

But I don't know why Karl named his book thusly.