Jon Ronson: Delving into the modern world and the men having difficulty with it
Jon Ronson's latest book is The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. Picture:
Emli Bendixen
Jon Ronson woke up one morning to the kind of text message that rattles a parent to their core. It was the summer of 2023. Ronson’s son, Joel, had been messaging frantically during the night while Ronson and his wife were asleep. In the morning, Ronson, 59, read his son’s last message first: “We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.”
Ronson’s son and his friends were in the middle of a forest in Connecticut – three hours’ drive from Ronson’s home in upstate New York – having been lured to a gothic castle by a rich man in his early sixties, ostensibly for a party.
Instead of a party, the invitees discovered their host, Chris Mark, the great-grandson of a steel tycoon, wanted to film his female guests for a reality TV show that he was making called 101 Princesses – in which princesses would audition to be queen to his king, all a grubby ruse, one of many, to get sex slaves for his harem. Unsurprisingly, it emerges that Hugh Hefner is “one of his idols”.
Ronson has written several bestselling non-fiction books about weird and irrational corners of the world, including which was made into a Hollywood movie starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. He scented a trail.
Securing an interview with Mark in his castle – which has a drawbridge, old tanks and a fighter jet in the lawn, and a hot tub grotto and pole-dancing nightclub inside the castle walls – set Ronson off on an investigation, including camels starved-to-death and death threats from Mark, that wouldn’t be out of place in a Coen Brothers movie.
“I've never met anyone like Chris Mark,” says Ronson. “He’s so eccentric. He says the strangest things and does the strangest things. This was an extraordinary story [to work on], like something out of Sam Spade. He sends people to tell me things that aren't true to put me off the scent. It's a story that just gets odder and odder. When I started to find out what was really going on inside the castle, I couldn’t believe it.”
The behaviour of Mark, who suffers from bipolar, lurches wildly. One minute, he can be coercing women in his castle and the next he can be dialling back on the death threats to Ronson by suggesting he’ll cover the costs if Ronson brings the murderers on his trail out to dinner: “If you take my murder friends out, I’ll Venmo you the money.”
Ronson uses Mark’s erratic behaviour as a jumping-off point in his book, , to explore how some western world men have been unmoored by modernity. Many of the old jobs for men in factories and traditional sectors like heavy industry, for example, are no more.
Ronson uses a telling 2022 statistic from the Brookings Institution that one in six American men aged between 25 and 54 are jobless; disturbingly, two-thirds of that cohort weren’t even looking for work. He argues this has left a lot of men casting about for purpose; some are unravelling as a result.
Among his case studies, who include a culture war YouTuber and a lawn care influencer, is the saga of Graham Linehan, the Irish screenwriter and co-creator of Father Ted who was once a friend of Ronson’s, and has since become a controversial figure in the debate around transgender issues.
“There are special circumstances with Graham,” says Ronson. “Me and Graham bonded in past years for both being bullied in school."
In the book, Ronson delves into Linehan's public trajectory and his own dealings with the Dubliner. “I was swept up into Graham's world – I'm one of his bêtes noires," says Ronson.
"He's tweeted and posted about me; I would be amazed if it isn't thousands of times. Until now, I've always stayed silent about it. So, the section in the book about Graham – which is slim; he’s a minor figure in the book – is a sad lament for what our friendship had become and secondly, it's trying to understand, what's going on there?”
One of Ronson’s most entertaining detours in examines “Doofus Man”, the type of man portrayed in TV adverts who can’t do anything right, a buffoon who leaves his baby on a restaurant conveyor belt, a hapless guy who’s consistently bailed out by an exasperated wife. Think Daddy Pig in the Peppa Pig books.
“Back in the old days, women were figures of mockery in ads,” says Ronson. “If you look back in the ’50s, one I quote in the book is, ‘Don't worry, darling, at least you didn't burn the Schlitz [beer].’
"But now men are the new women. Women control most household spending decisions. Advertisers thought it was financially unwise to keep portraying women as idiots, but someone must be the idiot. So, let's make it men.”
- Jon Ronson’s is published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin
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