The novel of ruined life

Is there a genre that we can call the ruined-life novel? It would be the genre that describes those whose live hope-and redemption-forsaken lives of fragmentation and pain, usually from close up.
It's a twentieth-century genre, and women write it about women (for obvious reasons) more often than men write it about men. It works especially well in the first person. Some examples: Jean Rhys's fictions; Joan Didion's Play it as it lays; Mary Robison's fictions; Anne Enright's recent The Gathering.
Examples by men? I will try to think of some (Beckett in a modernist mode? not really, the metaphysical and ethical intentions of the writing itself are too apparent). Men seem to be too addicted to hope and the possibility of retrieving a redeeming heroic gloss even from the most destroyed of existences.
Why does this genre (if we allow it to exist) emerge in the middle of the 20th century? Perhaps because that's when hegemonic urbanising capitalism prised hierarchised gender relations apart not just because the economy needed more labour or because of the liberating technologisation of domestic work, but by shifting the relation between public and private lives for the bourgeoisie. Women begin to occupy the public sphere differently, including the workplace. In the logic of democratisation, they were called upon to participate in the polity; in the logic of the market, they were called upon to consume. At least after about 1956, the paradigmatic ruined life is a woman who is alienated from and stranded in domesticity under this regime.