In 2023, the author Jon Ronson woke one Sunday in upstate New York, where he lives, to a string of alarming messages from his son. Joel, in his mid-twenties, had gone with some friends to a party in Connecticut that they’d been told about by a guy on a dating app. ‘Castle party Saturday!’ was the message that had lured them all in. ‘3pm to whenever. Dress code: Formal. Tell your friends.’
When Joel and his pals arrived, they found what looked like a castle – turrets, gargoyles, a drawbridge – but no party. Instead there were a few bemused party-chasers like them, a bitey guard dog named Cerberus and a man in his mid-sixties, Chris Mark, the owner of the castle. ‘I’d like you all,’ Mark announced, ‘to take part in my reality show.’
By the time Ronson awoke, his son was safe. But Joel’s last message (and subsequent description of the night) intrigued the journalist in Ronson. ‘We left. Was completely f***ed. All good now,’ Joel had written.
Ronson has long had a talent for coaxing extraordinary stories from very weird people; in Them (2001), he walked among the extremists (Islamists, the KKK, David Icke). In The Psychopath Test (2011) he delved into the world of psychos and the people who diagnose them. He is often compared to Louis Theroux: both are ambiently funny and give the impression of slightly floating above experience, rather than being slapped around by it like the rest of us. And, like Theroux, Ronson has become more serious in recent years, more drawn to ‘issues’; less interested in the freak show.
Now Ronson uses the story of how Chris Mark came to lord it around his castle as a springboard into one of the hotter subjects of the day: masculinity. Ronson is worried, he writes, by the state of men. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, one in six American men aged 25 to 54 were not working in 2022. Two-thirds of them weren’t even looking for jobs. ‘So how are they filling their days?’ Ronson asks the author of the report. ‘It’s a mystery,’ the author replies.
The Castle never fully answers the question, but keeping Ronson company as he ambles around, thinking about masculinity and talking to people about it, is a pleasure. Rather unexpectedly, Mark turns out to be one of the weaker characters in the book: though luridly manipulative and sex-obsessed, his mental-health issues are clearly the major driver of all that he does. Ronson returns over and over to him and his mad schemes (assembling a harem, opening an orphanage), but there’s only so much raving one can take.
More compelling is the story of how Greg Chism, a sympathetic American ‘lawncare influencer’, got into social media after a truly terrible start in life. Aged 18, he was landed in more than $200,000 of debt after he developed heart problems. Then the mother of his two young daughters walked out, leaving him to bring up his girls alone.
Though luridly manipulative and sex-obsessed, Mark’s mental-health issues are clearly the major driver
Chism found money and fame, however, by making videos about trimming verges and so on; then he pivoted to creating content with his daughters. Initially, it was fairly anodyne stuff. But gradually he became a slave to the algorithm, until he was churning out ‘Bad Baby’ videos in which he posed as a baby (dummy and all), alongside his daughters, who posed as babies too (but more credibly, given they were actual kids). Eventually, the internet’s collective stomach turned, and Chism’s life fell apart.
Ronson also considers the story of how Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, became so rabid on social media that he lost his marriage and career, as well as a friendship with Ronson that had stretched back to the 1990s. Ronson video-calls Linehan to try to understand what happened.
‘Have you started involuntarily saying things out loud? Because I have,’ Ronson asks, to break the ice. Linehan doesn’t reply. After a moment Ronson realises it’s because he is crying. ‘I talk to myself a lot because I’m alone in a flat down the road from the family,’ Linehan says. He feels anger ‘all day, every day’. It’s rather a pity that Ronson doesn’t get down and dirty with the meat of what Linehan believes to be their disagreement: trans rights. Rather than consider in depth whether Linehan might be justified in his views, Ronson instead expresses genteel concern for Linehan’s obsessive state of mind.
The larger flaw of the book, and it feels rather unfair to Ronson to blame him for it, is the familiarity of the terrain. America’s famous ‘deaths of despair’ are discussed. Also covered is the changing depiction of men in adverts. (They used to be portrayed as heroes; now they come across as great big idiots.) This isn’t a Jon Ronson book, in short, that will make you wonder – as with some of his other books – how he pulled the rabbit from the hat. But it is intelligent and engaging and, as with everything he writes, worth reading pretty much the moment you can.
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