Jon Ronson’s son went into a castle – and found a modern nightmare

Let’s begin with a reality hit. Joel Ronson, a 25-year-old English-born flautist who specialises in electronica and styles himself The Admiral, is billed by Boston online music guide Allston Pudding as “a genre-bending producer”.

Having read the latest release by his father, Jon, with its Kafkaesque title and derivative themes, I find it easy to see where Joel has inherited the genre-bending from – and Jon has gone one step further. The Castle is not a genre-bender – I really had to check whether it’s listed as fiction or non-fiction (it’s the latter) – so much as a genre-blender. At one level, it is a work of investigative journalism; at another, a sociological study for our times.

Like Gregor in The Metamorphosis, the men he foregrounds in this work experience the crisis of being made to feel sub-human – despised as insects. In Kafka’s The Castle, the protagonist, K. (whom most assume to be Kafka himself), is lured to a castle by the promise of an important job, which turns out to be a menial one.

In Ronson’s castle, the protagonist is his son Joel, and his mates of both sexes, who are lured to an actual castle in a New England forest by a Hugh Hefner-inspired playboy who’s running a sex racket and amassing a fortune in the process. As teledramas and movies have long warned, for their producers’ legal protection, “The characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”. Except, in these pages, they’re not. The owner of the castle is one Chris Mark, heir to a steel fortune, who did indeed build a medieval-style castle in Connecticut.

There are times when the plot reads like stock shock schlock, with too easy a resort to cheap effects, for example: “I nodded for them to continue, then I let out a scream.”

Spring is the season of swooping magpies. Jon Ronson, a British-born journalist now living in the US, collects indiscriminately from history (Watergate, 9/11 and Princess Diana all feature) as well as raiding his own nest. An appearance Ronson made on Q+A in 2024, in which he observed that “it’s a strange time to be a man”, becomes the springboard for this book-length exploration of what can turn likeable, innocent boys into hateful men.

He argues persuasively that frustrations born of the COVID-19 lockdowns in many countries accelerated the cancer-like spread of toxic behaviour among the males of our species. With limited job opportunities squeezed further and AI overshadowing those that remain, Ronson characterises many of today’s youth fatalities as “deaths of despair”. To the common question “Where have all the men gone?” Ronson answers in a word: “YouTube”. He illustrates the weirdness that ensues when self-created web stars can reach tens of millions of viewers.

In just under 18 months, an American adult, Greg Chism, scored 13 billion views on the platform from posting a series of “home videos”, the bulk of which featured him and his daughters then aged seven and nine. All three played the part of infants in a series billed as the Bad Baby collection.

Annoyingly, Ronson sometimes uses juvenile jargon himself instead of making his meaning plain. When he used the term MILF, he presumed his readers would know the acronym. (I didn’t and had to look it up.) If his target readers are the only ones who understand, how is this book going to be effective in reducing the exploitation of women?

In some of his most satisfying passages, Ronson describes how the #MeToo movement first demonised, and then demonetised, some of the most egregious misogynists.

Occasionally, the author finds almost the right word but, falling just short, provides unintentional comedy. In a text exchange with son Joel, the latter stops typing. Ronson writes: “Then he started again, the ellipsis waving”. Text ellipses don’t wave (that’s a greeting emoji); they waver.

As you’ve probably gathered, this is a book with more than its fair share of psychopaths among its dramatis personae. It may induce insomnia, so don’t say you haven’t been warned. But, if you’re already wide awake to the world, this may well be for you. As always, there’s another reason to buy it – and I’d tell you what that is, but discretion forbids. I don’t want to gross you out.

The Castle by Jon Ronson is published by Penguin ($37).

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