In June, 1981, a hundred and twenty-five delegates from twenty-one states met in Houston for the first annual National Congress for Men. Their goal, according to William K. Stevens, who reported on the gathering for the Times, was “not to fight feminism or roll back its gains, but to extend sexual equality to both sexes.” This did not, however, prevent feminists from coming in “for some hard words.” The keynote speaker, Stevens notes, criticized feminism for being “sexist” and “monopolized by female concerns.” Compared with the modern men’s-rights movement, the idea of an orderly congress, with delegates and keynote speakers, may seem quaint, even humorous. But it’s also a reminder that with each wave of feminism has come an organized backlash, that, when men have been confronted by the possibility of female power, they have felt the need to retrench and regroup, often literally.

It’s also a useful context within which to read Leonard Michaels’s novel “The Men’s Club,” first published in 1981. “Women wanted to talk about anger, identity, politics, etc.,” the novel begins. “I saw posters in Berkeley urging them to join groups. I saw their leaders on TV.” The titular club, it is implied, has convened in response to these women, and their desire to talk, and their forming of groups. The novel is essentially choral: it has multiple protagonists, and it aims to speak to the condition of men generally. At the beginning of the evening, the narrator suggests that each man “tell the story of his life”—but this idea is quickly forgotten in favor of another: the men decide, instead, to talk about their “sexual experience.” The narrative, which spans several increasingly debauched hours, consists largely of the stories the men proceed to tell one another—stories about sex, primarily, which means, because these men are straight, stories about women. That each man’s story about his relationships with women turns out to be the story of his life is not surprising; what is less expected is that these stories are filled not merely with tawdry details but with overwhelming emotions: love and hate and fear and shame and the kind of desire that is part need, part confusion, and part terror.

Chris Bachelder’s new novel, “The Throwback Special,” is also about the ritual gathering of men: it tells the story of twenty-two friends who, each fall for sixteen years, have reënacted an iconic moment from a football game. On November 18, 1985, the New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor accidentally snapped both bones in the Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann’s lower right leg, live on “Monday Night Football.” Despite their apparent obsession with a moment of stunning violence, and despite the occasional predictable display of machismo, these men are not brutes. They worry about their children; they text their wives; they search fruitlessly for ginger ale; they have “good feet, expressive of proper values.” College-educated, the reader imagines, probably in their mid-forties—you know, nice guys. The novel is told in the omniscient third person, which allows Bachelder to reveal to his reader the thoughts his characters dare not voice.

“The Throwback Special” is considerably quieter than “The Men’s Club.” Partly this is, I suspect, a matter of technique: because Michaels’s never-named narrator speaks in the first person, the drama in his book must be more visible, his characters brasher and more emphatic. But the candor of Michaels’s protagonists also reflects a deeper sense of entitlement more recently threatened. Considered side by side, the two books make clear the yawning gap between the ways, then and now, we expect a certain kind of man to express his existential rage. Michaels’s men terrify, and whatever respect they command comes partly through fear. Bachelder’s men amuse; their worries inspire, first, laughter—Bachelder was recently awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for humor—and then pity. Michaels’s novel forces the reader to ask herself, What might men who speak their desires so plainly not be capable of? Bachelder’s makes the reader wonder whether his protagonists are capable of doing anything at all.

The men in “The Throwback Special” do not, as a rule, tell one another stories; they do not disclose vulnerabilities; they do not discuss their emotions. And yet, beneath their rote performance of homosocial bonding, these men worry, inwardly, about what things mean and how they feel about those meanings. Sometimes, these feelings burst out in sad, ineffectual ways. One man, Gary, drives around the parking lot “in slow circles . . . blasting his horn and shouting community-sustaining threats and maledictions.” Another is nicknamed Fat Michael, despite being “remarkably lean and muscular and well proportioned.” His nickname is explained as “a typical masculine joke, a crude homemade weapon that indiscriminately sprayed hostility and insecurity in a 360-degree radius.”

Two of them, Andy and George, sit together in Andy’s car for a while, early on—Andy is not yet ready to join the other reënactors, has been more or less hiding from them. George is a librarian who, until recently, sported a thin gray ponytail; he enjoys earnest discussions about “the power of information, the marketplace of ideas, the future of the book.” One of the first things George says when he gets into the car is “I just read a fascinating study.” Andy, in what seems like an effort to shut George up, tells him that he’s getting a divorce. George, from the backseat, moves to comfort Andy, grips the tops of his arms, asks Andy to tell him what happened. “As long as the windows remained fogged,” Bachelder writes, “as long as the rain made that sound on the thin roof of the car, as long as George’s face was invisible in the mirror, as long as George gripped the tops of his arms and did not try to rub his shoulders, Andy felt that he could talk.” The story that he tells is striking for its lack of apparent drama: at a dinner party, Andy mentioned a story he heard on NPR about a dinosaur, the oviraptor, long thought to be an egg thief; evidence is emerging, he explained, that the male of the species might have been guarding, not stealing, eggs. At the end of the night, Andy and his wife go home and have sex in their bathtub; the next morning, she tells him it would be best if he left.

This is how Bachelder’s novel, which takes place over the two-day reënactment, functions as a whole: unremarkable events become, in the minds of his protagonists, fraught with symbolism, and provoke outsized passions and consequences. One man confesses to being “sexually curious” about the cartoon women and anthropomorphized female animals that populate the illustrated children’s books he reads to his kids. Another, the only black man in the group, ponders the implications of choosing to play Lawrence Taylor, the “black devil” of the drama that the group has gathered to recreate, and his distaste for the way some of his white friends had impersonated Taylor in the past. (During the lottery that determines who will impersonate whom, psychological hangups and personality quirks are revealed with every selection: the men who find “a kind of tragic nobility in ruinous failure” pick those Redskins players most responsible for the play’s disastrous execution. Men who crave “the familiar comfort of anonymity and insignificance . . . overcompensate for this shameful desire by choosing the most significant player available.”) One man, tormented by the fact that his wife doesn’t like his shoes, convinces two other men to throw their shoes out alongside him in a collective act of rebellion—only to be tormented by a desire to retrieve those shoes, and a fear that this will constitute, in the other men’s eyes, a “disavowal of their defiant ritual.”