The ABC’s now-defunct current affairs show Q A makes an early appearance in Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men.

A guest in 2024, he reflects on the show as “a delightful hour’s television with everyone being convivial to one another, no matter their politics”. That is, until there was a question about men, which he responded to with: “It’s a strange time to be a man.” He describes the response of host Patricia Karvelas (“Is it? Why?”) as the “sharpest exchange” of the program.

“I didn’t know what I meant by it at the time,” he writes. “It was a new thought for me.” He offered some quick remarks about the plight of everyday working men in deindustrialised towns and cities, everyone relaxed, and the moment passed. But he sensed there was something more to be said, “not least because so many people seemed nervous to broach it. For me, that uneasiness was a reason to head in.”

Review: The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson (Viking Non Fiction)

This is familiar territory for Ronson. Throughout his career, most recently in his culture wars podcast Things Fell Apart (which will have a third season in 2027), he has made a speciality of probing difficult and challenging subjects, searching the social and political fault lines for the human complications that polarised public debate tends to airbrush away.

The dilemma of modern masculinity may not have been an acceptable talking point in 2024, but it’s a hot one now, in 2026, when cultural phenomena such as looksmaxxing and noxious men’s rights figures like Andrew Tate regularly make headlines.

But Ronson, characteristically, takes the road less travelled. He describes his brand of journalism as “the constant quest to understand things I don’t understand”.

Here, that thing is the one in six American men aged between 25 and 54 not working, according to 2022 figures, with two thirds of them “not even looking for jobs” – and what this widespread “purposelessness” means for their lives and loved ones. “I’m a worker,” he writes, and his own anxiety about who he would be without his work to define him is key to the book.

While Ronson’s central story follows Chris Mark, the heir to a Gilded Age steel fortune, who lures women to a literal castle where he invites them to be part of a “princess reality show”, his book is less interested in manosphere-type behaviour than in the plight of unanchored men. This leads to nuanced character sketches of men whose lives have unravelled in surprising ways.

Ronson reveals the monetisation of despair: a sordid and tawdry space where sadness and grievance all too often become raw material and grist for the attention economy.

Each of the men Ronson encounters has, as he puts it,

a similarly dysfunctional relationship with purpose, hunting too desperately for it. And now there was a generation of men, unanchored from society and going it alone – as content creators, culture war influencers, amateur sleuths.

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