Unravel with November's book of the month

Many of the best stories start with a mystery, and our pick of the month certainly has an intriguing one: A creepy multimillionaire entices the author’s son into spending a strange, confusing night in an enormous New England castle, for reasons that nobody seems quite clear on. 

Perhaps the young man is there to star in a bad TV show. Perhaps he’s there as the observer of some kind of strange sex cult… the only thing that’s clear is that he’s definitely there under false pretenses. It’s low stakes, all things considered, but concerning. And it forms the center of our pick of the month for November, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson, published by Riverhead this past September. 

Ronson, a British journalist in America whose previous work includes The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, has a knack for finding his way into odd, vaguely threatening situations and then turning them into a genuine yarn that is about us, about the world, and about him too. 

And so he expands it beyond the story of this one man and his attempt to build a Hugh Hefner-esque empire. The book grows to include a series of vignettes about men who are looking for some purpose in life and often get encouraged—usually through some kind of technology—into unsettling and bizarre situations. 

There’s a YouTube influencer whose life fell apart as he chased more and more attention; a wannabe journalist drawn to fake extremism; a comedian who lets his obsessions take over his life.What emerges is a book that is about men, but also just about being unmoored from reality. What happens when the usual rules stop applying to you? What happens when you’re encouraged to go down a slippery slope? And at the center is Jon himself, a man who is fascinated by other peoples’ lack of purpose because he’s terrified of losing his own.

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This isn’t a book about the manosphere, thank goodness, although it gets a look in here and there. And this isn’t a book with too many answers, either: anyone looking for an argument about precisely why men unravel and what we can do about it won’t find it here, not exactly. But The Castle does ask a lot of questions and present some interesting examples, in Jon’s typically self-effacing and anxious manner.

According to Publisher’s Weekly this is “a blockbuster portrait of men gone mad”; Kirkus said it was “a mesmerizing work of gonzo journalism at its most intriguing.”

I agree, but I’ll say one more thing: it’s funny and disquieting. Jon’s approach—his gonzo-esque ability to find himself in confusing situations and engage with them in a way that was both disarming and somehow very brave—made him one of the first journalists I ever really admired, and somebody I interviewed right back at the beginning of my own career. We both worked for The Guardian around the same time; We’ve kept in touch sporadically since, and I was lucky enough to say hi when he came through San Francisco on tour with the book a few weeks ago.

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I’m really pleased to be able to share his book with you. It’s already on its way to members, and if you’re intrigued enough to join the club you can join now to get your copy.