Book Review: The Castle - Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson (2026)

It's been a minute since I had time to blog, but as I just finished typing this up anyway, I thought I'd share it here! I am optimistic that November will contain a little more opportunity for posting, although the rest of October is unlikely.

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I'm generally a fan of Jon Ronson - both So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test are high on my list of non-fiction / journalism books - but I don't think he quite nails it with this one. I think the main problem is that he can't seem to make up his mind if he's writing an expose of an undeniably creepy overgrown elderly frat boy, Chris Mark (the owner of the eponymous castle), or if he's trying to write a more comprehensive thesis about the crisis in modern masculinity, and using Mark as the anchor case. 

As the former, the book is reasonably successful. I definitely got a feel for Mark as a skeevy Hefner wannabe with outstandingly dodgy and weird behaviours, and I'll follow with interest the progress of investigations into him. I even think Ronson landed his contention that Mark himself is reaching for a disturbed and exaggerated, but recognisable, 70s vision of what it is to be a successful man - rich, hypersexual, dominant over women, and at the same time, catered to like a little baby at all times. 

Where I think Ronson gets muddled is in the larger thesis, and particularly the weak to non-existent linkages he posits between the other subjects of the book. 

Some of the chapters are interesting in their own right, particularly the one on the vituperative former-winner now-loser Graeme Linehan, which left me feeling immensely sad that someone could so thoroughly author their own downfall out of what amounts to obsessive spite. But it is not self-evident what the unifying factors are between the experience of a guy in a dying mill town, a former comedy great fallen to darkness, a manosphere influencer, a formerly huge family comedy YouTuber, Armie Hammer, and Chris Mark - unless it's that they all, explicitly or implicitly, blame their woes on women? 

Quite honestly, though, if that's all Ronson's really got to draw these threads together (and despite a few diffuse musings on displacement and loss of community and economic dislocation and the excesses of 00s cancel culture, it really is), it's both obvious enough to not be an insight at all, and pedestrian enough to not be worth trying to spin a coherent book around. Hubristic men have blamed women for their demise since the dawn of time, misogyny is alive and well, and I don't think anything about that has changed, even if the specific rhetoric around feminism and female participation in public life has.

Overall, it's an interesting read, because Ronson is a highly literate and interesting writer, but as yet another entry into the current flavour of the month topic (masculinity in crisis), it's not above fair to middling. If you want a fictional but funnier and actually more insightful take on the topic, try Luke Kennard's Black Bag (from this year's Booker shortlist).