FICTION: THEMES
Manly Tears Fiction
15 books
There's a specific category of book that makes men cry — not because it's manipulative or sentimental, but because it has earned the emotion through two or three hundred pages of honest, rigorous storytelling that arrives at the human truth in a way that lands differently when you're sitting quietly in a chair than it would anywhere else. Fifteen novels here, selected not because they're sad but because they're true, and true things, arrived at honestly, have a way of breaking through the defenses that most men keep up most of the time. The list includes some of the most celebrated novels of the last century alongside a few less obvious choices. None of them apologize for what they do. The ones that hit you hardest are the ones that earned it most honestly.
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The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Already on multiple AoM lists and the natural anchor of this one. A father and his young son walk south through a dead America, the father dying, the boy the only thing keeping him moving. McCarthy writes about fatherly love with a directness that most writers spend entire careers avoiding, and the accumulated weight of small moments — the father checking his son's breathing in the night, a can of Coca-Cola found in a ruined vending machine treated as the greatest luxury in the world — arrives at the end with the force of something you didn't see coming even though it was there on every page. The line about the fire. You'll know it when you get there.
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A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean
Already on the AoM lists and it belongs here most of all. Maclean's novella ends with one of the great last paragraphs in American literature — a man in his eighties standing in a river, fly fishing alone, thinking about his dead brother and his dead father and how the world is full of things you can't help. It is the kind of ending that doesn't announce itself. It simply arrives, and then you sit with it for a long time.
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Where the Red Fern Grows
Wilson Rawls
A ten-year-old boy in the Ozarks saves his money for two years to buy two coonhound puppies — Old Dan and Little Ann — and what follows is one of the great stories of the bond between a boy and his dogs. If you read this as a child, you already know what happens and you are already steeling yourself. If you somehow missed it, be advised: Rawls earns every tear with two hundred pages of genuine warmth, humor, and the specific texture of a rural American boyhood before the modern world arrived. Read it again as an adult and you will find that it hits considerably harder than it did the first time.
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Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's short novel about two itinerant ranch hands — the quick-witted George and the enormous, gentle, mentally disabled Lennie — and their shared dream of one day owning a small piece of land. The dream is simple: a few acres, some rabbits for Lennie to tend, a place that belongs to them. Steinbeck tells you on the first page that it isn't going to happen. He tells you again in the structure of the thing, in the foreshadowing, in every scene. And when the end comes anyway, it lands like a punch to the chest precisely because you saw it coming and couldn't stop it. One of the most perfectly constructed short novels in American literature.
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Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon is a thirty-two-year-old man with an IQ of 68 who undergoes an experimental surgery to increase his intelligence, and the novel is told entirely through his journal entries — first in the broken, misspelled prose of a man who struggles to form sentences, then in increasingly sophisticated language as his intelligence soars past everyone around him, then in something else entirely as the experiment begins to reverse. Keyes structures the whole thing as a trap: you fall in love with Charlie on the way up, and then you have to watch what happens on the way down. The final journal entry is one of the most devastating things in American fiction.
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A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's most emotionally direct novel, written shortly after his own wartime experience in Italy and his famously complicated feelings about the women he loved and lost there. Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in WWI Italy, falls in love with a British nurse named Catherine Barkley, and the novel follows their relationship across the slow catastrophe of the Italian front. Hemingway strips the prose down to almost nothing — no adjectives, no commentary, just what happened — and the restraint is what makes the ending so devastating. Hemingway reportedly rewrote the last page thirty-nine times.
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Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Already the pinnacle of the AoM Westerns list and it belongs here too. At nearly nine hundred pages, McMurtry builds something rare: a world you genuinely don't want to leave, populated by people you have come to love as though they were real. Which means that when McMurtry begins to take them from you — and he does, methodically, without sentimentality, because that is what the frontier did — the losses accumulate into something that is less like crying at a book and more like grieving actual people. The death of a particular character roughly two-thirds of the way through is one of the most discussed moments in American popular fiction, and readers who reach it for the first time consistently report being unprepared despite all warnings.
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The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
O'Brien's linked short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam blur the line between fiction and memoir so deliberately that the book itself becomes a meditation on what stories are for and why men tell them. The title story — a meticulous inventory of everything the soldiers carried, physical and otherwise — is one of the great pieces of American short fiction. The story called "How to Tell a True War Story" will make you rethink every war narrative you've ever read. And the story about a little girl named Linda, which closes the book, will quietly destroy you.
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East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's most ambitious novel, a multigenerational saga set in California's Salinas Valley that retells the story of Cain and Abel across two families and several decades. At its center is the question of whether a man is fated to repeat the sins of his father or whether he can choose otherwise — whether the damage done to us is something we pass on or something we can stop. The novel's climax, in which a dying patriarch speaks one word to his grandson, is one of the most discussed and most argued-over moments in American literature. The word is timshel. You will know what it means by the time you get there.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Three friends grow up together at what appears to be an unusually sheltered English boarding school in the 1970s, and the novel gradually, devastatingly reveals what the school actually is and what their lives actually mean. Ishiguro never raises his voice. The prose is as quiet and precise as a scalpel, and the horror of the story — which is a horror about mortality and acceptance and the specific human capacity to accommodate almost anything — arrives in stages, each one landing more quietly and more heavily than the last. It is the most controlled exercise in literary devastation on this list.
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens is the perfect English butler — dignified, discreet, entirely devoted to his profession and his employer — and this novel is his account of a road trip across the English countryside during which he slowly, reluctantly, examines the choices he has made. What he finds, underneath the professional dignity, is a life organized around the avoidance of the things that mattered most: a woman who loved him, a father whose last days he was too professional to properly attend to, an employer whose politics he was too deferential to question. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize largely on the strength of this novel. The tears it produces are not for anything that happens but for everything that didn't.
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The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
An old Cuban fisherman goes out alone and hooks the greatest fish of his life — a massive marlin that pulls his small skiff far out into the Gulf Stream. What follows is three days of the most sustained man-versus-nature writing in American literature, and a meditation on age, pride, defeat, and the specific dignity of a man who does his utmost and is beaten by something larger than himself anyway. Hemingway wrote it as his answer to the critics who said he was finished, and it won him the Nobel Prize. At under one hundred and thirty pages it can be read in a single sitting, and it is best read that way.
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Watership Down
Richard Adams
A group of rabbits leave their warren after one of their number foresees its destruction and travel across the English countryside in search of a new home. Adams builds a complete rabbit mythology, culture, and language, and the novel is simultaneously a genuine adventure story and a meditation on leadership, community, and what a group of individuals will sacrifice for one another. The final chapter, in which the rabbit leader Hazel's life ends, is one of the most quietly perfect endings in English literature.
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A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
The warning comes first: this is the most emotionally devastating novel on this list by a considerable margin, and it is not for everyone. Four friends navigate their adult lives in New York over several decades, and at the center is Jude St. Francis — a man of exceptional intelligence and professional achievement whose past was defined by abuse so sustained and extreme that the novel becomes, over its seven hundred pages, an almost unbearable act of witness. No novel in recent memory has generated more raw emotional response from male readers, and for many of them it was a book they needed even as it destroyed them. Approach with full knowledge of what you're getting into.
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Charlotte's Web
E.B. White
Yes, it's a children's book. No, that doesn't make it easier. White's story of the friendship between a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte is one of the most perfectly constructed short novels in the English language — a book about mortality, loyalty, and the specific nature of love between friends who know their time together is limited. The final chapters have been making adults cry for seventy years. If you have children, read it to them. If you don't, read it alone. Either way, the ending will get you just as surely at forty as it did at eight.