Jon Ronson’s The Castle follows masculinity into stranger territory
The Guardian’s review finds a compelling investigation of Chris Mark, alongside a fragmented portrait of men facing shifting social expectations.
Jon Ronson’s The Castle begins with an unsettling 2023 encounter: after his adult son described visiting a Connecticut castle, the veteran journalist started investigating its owner, businessman Chris Mark. Mark was filming a reality show about “101 princesses”, and Ronson’s reporting follows allegations about the women recruited into his orbit, a proposed floating brothel and threatening private messages.
The book’s central investigation gradually expands into Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men, its revealing subtitle. Ronson moves between cases involving an Australian man disciplined at school over rape, a lone father wrongly accused online of kidnapping, and public figures including Armie Hammer and Graham Linehan.
The Guardian’s review treats Ronson’s approach as both investigative and self-aware. His “gonzo” sleuthing is leavened by comic admissions about journalistic ego, while the Mark story retains the shape of a wild-goose chase. The review makes clear that it does not establish Mark committed a crime, and notes that Ronson ultimately concludes he did not murder his father.
Ronson is at his most persuasive, the review argues, when examining the pressure placed on men to be vulnerable while navigating increasingly exacting social expectations. His account of an Australian school’s collective punishment and of a father targeted by online accusations gives that argument human scale.
But the book’s wider pattern is less settled. Its case studies, including the death of Renée Good and Ronson’s reckoning with Linehan, are linked through parallels the review often finds tenuous. The result is an energetic but piecemeal work that may be investigating modern masculinity, critiquing it, or quietly settling old scores.
