What if a male writer were the author of Murdoch's Under the Net"

Iris Murdoch's debut novel, Under the Net (1954), is an atypical first-fiction in that IM was a well-established philosopher by that time in her life, having earned advanced degree(s), teaching position, several publications. I wish I could say more about her philosophy - recently read a detailed essay on same but can't claim to understand how she fits among the various "schools" of her time, except that she was ore interested in moral decisions rather than explaining the nature of being - yet w/ that as background we can see how and why she was drawn to literary fiction as a way to examine moral predicaments and conundrums. I haven't reach any such point in the first 50 or so pp of Under the Net, but she does establish a first-person narrator who, I believe, over the course of his narration will be faced with some kind of moral or ethical crisis. We immediately recognize in this novel, from the voice of the narrator, that we're in the hands of a skilled and intelligent author. The narrator, Jake, is a writer and essayist, though we don't yet know much about his work, in dire financial straits, 30 years old (he seems much older; that may be his Britishness?), who has one close friend - Finn, whom many people think is his servant; the precise nature of their friendship is a little odd to an American reader, as Jake is clearly the "boss" and Finn is taciturn and seemingly uneducated, tho he performs "odd jobs." Novel opens as Fin reports to Jake, just returning from France (where he does some translations for publishers), that they've kicked out of their housing: They live rent-free w/ a woman who says she's about to be married (to a well-known theater producer) and they have to leave (said producer would kill them if he found them at woman's house). This announcement sets Jake off on a mini-odyssey in search of at least temporary housing - visiting an elderly woman shopkeeper where he stores a lot of his papers, a friend (Dave) who runs some sort of leftist philosophy salon where it seems he parks Finn at least for the night, and then to find a former girlfriend, Jacky, whom he tracks down in the costume and props room of an experimental theater troupe. It's a little surprising to see a female novelist adopt a man's POV for the narration of her first novel; that said, though Murdoch is convincing and witty in her appropriation of the male POV, I think this novel would have met w/ much opprobrium if a guy had written it: In Jake's world, all a guy has to do is show up on the his ex's doorstep 6 years after a breakup and she'll welcome him in, indicate that she loves him, give in as he literally throws himself on her - and nothing has changed in her life in 6 years, as if she's just been waiting for the prodigal's return. We'll see how Jake's life takes shape - or falls apart.