At what point, I wonder as I turn the final page of The Castle, did the gonzo journalist Jon Ronson decide what his latest book was actually going to be about? Was it when he found himself in the nightclub-style basement of a mysterious neo-gothic fortress in rural Connecticut full of princess gowns and tiaras with his foot being bitten by a large dog called Cerberus? Was it watching countless YouTube videos of children dressed as babies having food fights, or Canadian adults dressed as Disney characters like Elsa acting out deranged scenarios? Was it realising he was missing his wedding anniversary by dashing off last minute to Nantucket to investigate a boating accident from 15 years ago that might or might not have something to do with the rest of what we shall loosely term for these purposes “the story”?
Ostensibly, the answer is the flurry of late-night texts Ronson received in June 2023 from his son after he and his friends were lured to a “party” at the book’s eponymous castle. The text stream ends: “We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.” Whether down to basic parental instinct or Ronson’s nose for a good story, soon he is off on a quest to meet the mysterious castle owner and find out why exactly he was trying to enlist young strangers from the internet to be part of a speculative reality TV game show called “101 Princesses”.
But on the way, the hero’s journey morphs into something else. What if Ronson isn’t just trying to get to the bottom of what drives this enigmatic and princess-obsessed scion of a lost industrial empire from Gilded-Age America? What if he’s actually digging into a bigger a story, a story that goes far beyond the spires and turrets of one man’s castle – a universal story about anxious, helpless, left-behind men?
A quarter of a century since Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) propelled Ronson into the elusive Venn diagram crossover of “investigative non-fiction” and “bestseller”, he has honed his storytelling craft to perfection. His books are masterclasses, drawing readers into a bewildering web of controversy and tales of stranger-than-fiction real life – whether the US military’s efforts in paranormal exploration (The Men Who Stare at Goats, 2004), the absurdities of the medical establishment’s attitudes to mental health (The Psychopath Test, 2011), or the messy paradoxes of online cancel culture (So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, 2015). If anyone knows how to weave seemingly disconnected strands of whimsy and outrage into a tapestry that more or less resembles a coherent narrative as long as you don’t look too hard – and crucially, entertain you as he does it – it’s Ronson.
And, to be clear, The Castle is nothing if not entertaining. Imagine a crime thriller, complete with recently released murderers on the author’s trail and hints of FBI involvement, fused with a group therapy session. It achieves Dan Brown levels of page-turning impetus with Adam Curtis levels of psychedelic connectivity. It has forays into the ruthless mechanics of the porn industry. (Did you know that adult performers in their mid-twenties are both too old and too young to be stars unless they have some other defining characteristic – “if you’re 26 with a huge butt, you could do huge-butt movies” – thanks to the uncompromising categorisation of online algorithms?) There’s a subplot where Ronson decides to spend Christmas locked in his office reading every edition of a local news column about a tiny town from 1930 to 1950, just in case he finds something interesting. (He doesn’t, other than glittery snow.)
Astoundingly, the scandal-hit Hollywood star Armie Hammer (who has denied rumours of BDSM abuse and an interest in cannibalism) makes an unexpected cameo. So does Graham Linehan, beloved creator of Father Ted turned anti-trans aggressor, who was once a friend of Ronson’s before he dedicated his life full-time to hurling abuse at people on the internet. Linehan spends hours over Zoom explaining to Ronson exactly why he thinks the people he’s arguing with on X are akin to serial killers.
You might ask at this point what any of this has to do with the castle, the princesses and grand theories about the crisis of masculinity playing out across America and beyond. You will probably not ask it while you are reading the book, because the magic trick is so slickly executed: quick, look over here – there are strippers and exotic animals and a fake Mongolian prince! But let’s go back to basics. The book’s subtitle is “Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men”. Are men unravelling? If so, why does Ronson think that is?
“Every man I’ve spent time with for this book is from a very different walk of life, but each, in his own way, is getting left behind. The world is moving away from them, and they’re acting out or flailing around.”
This is Ronson’s halfway assessment. By this stage of his mission, he has visited a memorial to the pinnacle of left-behind manhood in the form of a once-vibrant town built for steelworkers which has, along with working-class manufacturing jobs across the US, largely disintegrated. Conveniently, it was masterminded by the castle-owner’s steel-tycoon great-grandfather. “Marktown’s story begins with another crisis of masculinity, one from long ago and far away – Great Britain in 1900,” Ronson informs us, tracing a line from the poor physical fitness of British conscripts in the Boer War, through the Utopian vision for this English idyll of a development, all the way to its post-globalisation decay.
He has also spent time with a man who made a lucrative career first out of chronicling his dental work journey on YouTube, then becoming a celebrated “lawncare influencer”, then monetising his daughters in increasingly bizarre viral videos. And he’s reflected on how challenging it is for millionaires these days to channel their inner Hugh Hefner and recreate Playboy Mansion harems in the post-MeToo era. These are the various archetypes Ronson draws under the unifying banner of “flailing” masculinity. To this, somewhat boldly, he adds himself: a man nearing 60, painfully aware of his ageing body’s limitations after having surgery and determined to prove he has a purpose.
Later, after interviewing Linehan and another chronically online man who makes videos warning of civil war driven by “THE WOKE” for a living because employers only wanted female diversity hires, Ronson returns to this theme: “They were men out of time. They couldn’t keep up – and in some cases didn’t want to keep up – with a dramatically changing world.” He cites findings by the father of sociology, Émile Durkheim, that suicides go up during periods of rapid social change, even if prosperity is increasing, and another sociologist who warns that when the rules of society seem to be shifting too fast, “people feel no communal restraint on their actions… [and] go off the rails”.
This is, supposedly, what binds our disparate cast of male renegades together with the castle owner, who by this point has gone from disconcerting eccentric to full-on true-crime villain. They are anxious and fragile. The world they thought they knew has crumbled. They are at the wrong end of power dynamics, even if they seemingly hold all the money and status. We might be horrified by their lack of inhibitions – exhibited through casual misogyny or torrents of online vitriol or ever more alarming attempts to entrap young women – but we should open our hearts and seek to understand them. As we should understand the man who has heroically sacrificed Christmas with his family, and so much more, in order to bring us their vulnerabilities to consider.
It is a wild, exhilarating ride, but when the adrenaline fades you can see the cracks. Do the disenfranchised descendants of steelworkers really have much in common with influencers who contort their identities for clicks, or wealthy nepo babies who are so unfamiliar with the concept of consequences that they don’t realise the harm they are causing? Can we really put a wildly successful, household-name author in that same category of purposeless ennui?
And what of the women in this story – not just those abused online but the ones traumatised by a mad fantasist in a castle who believes rules do not apply to him? This is by far the most fascinating plotline – and, to his credit, Ronson handles it with sensitivity and gratitude. There would almost certainly be no book without the bravery of his female interviewees in what they share with him. They provide vital scaffolding, turning what would otherwise be an anticlimactic wild-goose chase into a genuinely captivating tale.
The trouble is, it’s a tale that has virtually nothing to do with the book’s main thesis of ordinary men in crisis, left behind by a society that no longer values or understands them. Ronson has essentially written two different books – both riveting in their way but with little in common – and smashed them together, hoping the reader will be having too much fun with porn stars and glittery snow and psychopathic Disney characters to notice. He’s probably right. Say what you like about fake Mongolian princes – they provide an excellent distraction.
The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men
Jon Ronson
Viking, 320pp, £20
[Further reading: This was the summer that optimisation died]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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Subscribe here to commentRachel, as usual, nailed it. I just finished this book and couldn’t figure out why it felt like a draft of two books and she comes along and explains why.