Book Review: Men at sea

Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men begins with an eccentric millionaire building a Gothic fortress in Connecticut, complete with a drawbridge, aspiring princesses and a fantasy of ruling his own kingdom. But the real subject sits well beyond that castle. Ronson is examining what happens to men when familiar sources of work, status and purpose begin to disappear or take on strange new forms. Some men have lost their jobs. Others have found entirely new ways of making a living. A few have inherited more wealth than most people could imagine. Yet their lives seem equally capable of unraveling.

I both read and listened to the book. Ronson’s British accent gave the audio version an interesting flavor, and his storytelling kept me engaged throughout. He is a seasoned journalist who knows how to recognize an extraordinary story and pursue it. He also seems genuinely grateful to have stumbled upon this material. The characters are so unusual that I kept returning to the same word as I listened. Weird! Not necessarily funny, and certainly not always sympathetic. Just weird. I found myself more curious and amazed than emotionally invested in their misfortunes.

Christopher Mark, the castle’s owner, is the first great curiosity. Born into an industrial fortune, he builds an enormous medieval fortress in Woodstock, Connecticut, and populates it with young women recruited for an improbable reality show called 101 Princesses. He imagines himself as a king seeking a queen. The whole enterprise would seem almost comical if it were not for the troubling allegations and the lives caught up in his fantasy. I was reminded of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which the wealthy antiques dealer Jim Williams inhabits a magnificent Savannah mansion that becomes the setting for a murder investigation. Both books explore the peculiar worlds that wealth can create, although Ronson’s castle seems considerably stranger.

Greg Chism’s story interested me just as much. He begins as a lawn care enthusiast making YouTube videos and discovers that family entertainment attracts a much larger audience. Gradually the videos become more bizarre, with Chism himself playing a baby alongside his daughters. His online success eventually collapses amid controversy and accusations. What makes this story particularly interesting is that Chism is not a man without work. He has discovered a new occupation, earned money and attracted an audience. Yet the very incentives that make his business successful begin to distort his life.

I was reminded of Caro Claire Burke’s book Yesteryear, which I recently reviewed. Its protagonist, Natalie, slips into an online identity, briefly rides the energy of influencer culture and then crashes. The similarity is striking, although the characters could hardly be more different. In both stories, social media begins to shape identity rather than simply reflect it. Every aspect of life becomes potential content, and the algorithms reward emotional intensity and increasingly unusual behavior. What troubles me is how easily the pursuit of validation can overwhelm judgment, particularly when family life becomes a public performance. Chism and Natalie illustrate the same cultural problem from opposite directions. We have created new ways of earning a living without fully understanding what they might do to the people who depend on them.

Then there is Armie Hammer, the Hollywood actor and great grandson of oil magnate Armand Hammer. Here is a man born into considerable privilege who also achieves genuine professional success, particularly through films such as The Social Network and Call Me by Your Name. His career subsequently collapses following disturbing allegations about his private conduct, which he disputes. Prosecutors ultimately decline to bring criminal charges. Hammer is neither an unemployed industrial worker nor an accidental internet celebrity. He has inherited status and earned recognition through an established profession. Yet neither protects him from a spectacular fall. Ronson gives each of these men enough space to make their circumstances fascinating without making them especially admirable.

The larger argument resonated with me because I have followed these issues for many years. I have read Nick Eberstadt’s Men Without Work and followed the research of Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton on deaths of despair. The opioid epidemic and its devastating consequences have been particularly troubling. More recently, the expansion of online gambling has raised another set of concerns about financial and personal ruin. Ronson’s characters are extreme examples, but the larger questions about economic insecurity, addiction and the loss of purpose are familiar. The problem is not confined to men who have stopped working. It increasingly includes men navigating new kinds of work and unfamiliar expectations.

I have a personal connection to this history. In the 1980s, I worked on the factory floor at General Electric, training industrial workers to use computer numerical control machines. American manufacturing was becoming more sophisticated even as Jack Welch was restructuring GE and industrial jobs were disappearing. I later was part of a team that established a Computer Integrated Manufacturing laboratory at Camden County College. By the 1990s, that facility was training nurses, although the building retained its original name. An institution created to prepare workers for a predominantly male manufacturing economy was now preparing people for a healthcare workforce dominated by women. I also watched Philadelphia fight to preserve its naval shipyard while Boston developed into a biotechnology powerhouse. Then came the technology downturn of 2001 to 2003, when educated professionals discovered that their jobs were vulnerable too. The financial crisis of 2008 brought down Lehman Brothers, pushed Merrill Lynch into Bank of America and nearly destroyed AIG. COVID-19 followed. Now AI is the latest technological disruption. Over forty years, I have watched economic change reach almost every category of worker and institution.

This is where I think Ronson’s book could have gone further. The individual stories he narrates are compelling, but the narrative is episodic. Ronson is better at finding extraordinary characters than connecting the dots between them. He also gives insufficient attention to the failure of institutions to meet these changing circumstances. Education has struggled to prepare people for new occupations. Healthcare has been overwhelmed by addiction and mental health challenges. Religious institutions have lost some of their ability to provide belonging and support. Government has too often struggled to help people make difficult transitions. Ronson shows us men whose lives are unraveling, but I wanted more about the institutions that might have helped prevent some of that unraveling.

Despite all this, I remain optimistic. Having witnessed several technological revolutions, I take AI disruption seriously without assuming that every corporate announcement predicts the fate of the national economy. My posture is explicitly Popperian. I hold my conclusions provisionally and ask what evidence would falsify them. I look for meaningful changes in GDP per capita, unemployment, inflation, credit stress and labor’s share of income before drawing sweeping conclusions. The elevator is my favorite analogy. Its significance was not simply that people could travel between floors more easily. It helped make skyscrapers possible. We should leave room for AI to create possibilities we cannot yet imagine. Scenario analysis and careful preparation seem more useful than confident predictions.

But optimism should never become indifference to people experiencing real hardship. We need public support for workers in transition, along with private philanthropy and better training. Above all, we need literacy that prepares people for changing technologies and lifelong learning. This time we must not neglect financial literacy, as we have in earlier transitions. Nearly 40% of American high school graduates do not proceed immediately to college. Many begin working, yet may know little about saving, investing or retirement accounts. Why should a young worker have to wait until joining a large employer to learn about a Roth IRA? High school is our best opportunity to reach nearly everyone before those financial decisions begin.

Ronson has written a compelling and unusual book. Its greatest strength is the extraordinary people he finds and the skill with which he tells their stories. Its limitation is that the larger social argument sometimes remains for the reader to assemble. I finished it entertained, often astonished, and thinking about the ways we interpret economic change through our own circumstances.

Which reminds me of an old story about a king and his barber.

A king gives his barber a gold coin in appreciation for years of service. The barber is delighted. “The kingdom is full of riches and prosperity!” he declares.

One day, the gold coin is stolen.

The next time the king asks how things are going, the barber sighs.

“What can I say, Your Highness? There is looting and injustice everywhere!”