Your piece reminded me of a "problem subplot" in John Edward William's Stoner. Here the principal antagonist Professor Hollis Lomax is a highly talented literature professor who suffers from a physical deformity, and favours the passing of a Student who suffers from a similar condition. Stoner opposes this as he clearly wasn't up to the mark, and opposing Lomax becomes his professional undoing: Shouldn't merit be only criterion for judging academic excellence? Alas, Stoner was cheated out of the good life just for this very reason.
Thanks! I just read it a month ago, and loved it! The right thing to do is fail the student. If I am being honest with myself, I would've passed the student, even as Stoner clearly pointed out he didn't cut the muster. I don't think I would have had it in me to suffer through both a failed marriage and a failed career 😅
I think I would pass the student, too. I was a teacher when I was in my 20s, and I was an absolute monster — so strict, so. by-the-book, and absolutely willing to fail people. Now I’ve chilled out for whatever reason. I think I’d have a hard time ruining anybody’s transcript like that. So I’d say I’m softer but wiser. Hey, I looked at your writing and it’s really interesting! So different from a lot of what’s floating around. I’m going to follow you to keep up.
If I had to guess, the problem novel flourishes in societies where there's a drive towards solving problems. The current fashion is that we live in the best of all possible worlds, even if it isn't very good, and everything is just going to go to shit anyway. So why bother depressing yourself?
This is an interesting take! I like the observation of novels flourishing based on societal consciousness, but I wonder if it has more to do with disempowerment of the individual in current western (particularly U.S.) consciousness than with the belief that living in a world that’s as good as it’s going to get. Thinking about macro-level problems like climate change or authoritarianism. Some of us find comfort in individual action but by and large we are observers of what unfolds. Current litfic skews towards that observational role, but I don’t think it’s inherently pessimistic to do so.
I'm really interested in what you're saying here. Can you think of examples you make about litfic? My personal perception is that currently litfic is focused on problems, but problems exclusively; ie, everything seems unsolvable.
Hey Andrew! I’m building off of the observation in the article:
“But with contemporary novels, even if they feature social issues, that sense of communication is missing. For instance, Detransition, Baby is about two characters: a trans woman whose life is affected by transphobia and a detransitioned person who seems somewhat-content. The book does not make a particularly strong case that transitioning is a beneficial act that ought to be enabled by the state. If the detrans person had gotten super depressed and committed suicide, it would've been more of a problem novel.”
I’m curious about a potential correlation between observation vs solution (contemporary litfic trends vs problem novels) and the felt-empowerment of citizens, based on the commenter above me considering the impact of societal influence on the prevalence or tone of problem novels.
You’re making an interesting point. My assumption could certainly be wrong, but my hunch is that literary fiction is read by a group of people that skews high in terms of educational attainment and income. If that’s right (again, maybe isn’t), the readership of litfic are the people who are in fact the most empowered in the society. But maybe they still feel powerless, and maybe esp. so, because in spite of their being on the top of the pile, they can’t seem to prevent everything from spinning out of control.
Incidentally, I just joined Substack recently. I’m still figuring out how it works but I’m just so enthused to be running into people who, like you, give a damn about these things!
I guess you're disagreeing with the current fashion of thinking we live in the best of all possible worlds? I definitely do! I think we live in a disaster of a world. I feel like a lot of people are shunning all but the most fantastical of novels because they can barely handle the problems that actually exist!
Maybe "this is the best it will ever get" is more accurate. Everything is doomed to decay, so fixing, say, mother's and father's true desire to fulfill themselves is beside the point. It's all almost over!
"The current fashion is that we live in the best of all possible worlds, even if it isn't very good, and everything is just going to go to shit anyway."
- Because the empire is in decline right now? And we are on a downward turn of an Turchin cycle? Or is this just vibes based?
I was JUST thinking about this, even though I didn’t know about the vortex. I have read about the idea that a sign of coming collapse of one kind or another is a surplus over over-educated people (essentially). Is this what you’re referring to?
Oh My Actual Absolute God!!! The sentence that jumped out and hit me (in this interesting debate) was ...
"about five years ago I realized that I’d read every novel that was supposed to be good"
Ahem, are you 100 years old? Or do you read at the speed of light? Or, as one of my university contemporaries did, 50 years ago, only read every facing page?
Will look forward very much to your eventual list of "every novel that was supposed to be good". And who it was who supposed this.
I used to read a lot of fiction when I was much younger. At some point in my 70s, about 10 years ago, that switched to non-fiction. I'm wondering now if that is age-related. I got bored with current fiction and was more challenged with non-fiction. Any thoughts about that? Have other elderly, or soon to be elderly, encountered the same phenomenon??
I'm 72, and have acquired a great interest in reading history books. At this age, I'm quite aware of the basic facts about the historical period I might choose to read about. However it is always possible that the writer will have discovered new information in archival research.
Yeah,, history is always fun, Jane. Fifty years sometimes makes a night and day difference between what documents were available during the the first and subsequent efforts at telling our story. Case in point is human evolution (my current interest). That changes almost daily as new eyes look at old bones.
Well, I am not elderly (43), but I recently had my first child, and have begun to feel elderly, because I am so tired all the time! But I have also lost a lot of interest in a lot of what is being published right now. I read a lot of fiction, but most of it is from 20th and 19th centuries. I'm curious about your opinion. MY perception is that the role of serious novels has declined, but is that true? Respectfully -- you have more life experience than I do. Is this something you've perceived, or is my pessimism just something people experience perennially, age after age?
Trying to answer your question, I went and rummaged through the books I had ordered from Amazon (before I ditched Amazon for Bookshop.org). Not a whole lot of fiction purchased from 2022 to 2025. My favorite was about a grouchy octopus and his widowed caretaker. Lovely book, "Remarkably Bright Creatures". There was another octopus book that I must have bought somewhere else. Even better than the grouchy one. Non-fiction, I think. The rest for the last 5 years was Russian history, political best sellers, religious history (emphasis on archaeology), many of Michael Lewis' books. A mixed bag to say the least.
I read the Washington Post Review of Books faithfully every week but not much seems to catch my interest. So who's to say? Are the books not being written or have my interests just expanded past what they write? Maybe yours have too. Check back with me in 20 years after your little one learns to sleep all night. Maybe you will have the answer. :-))
I’m so honored that you would do research to answer my question!
My step-mother runs two bookstores in Pittsburgh, so I’m familiar with the ditch-Amazon move.
3. You mention the Post — do you live in DC? I do, which is why I ask.
Your focus on octopus books is interesting. I actually think my grandmother-in-law read the second one, and she liked it. She’s a pretty clever lady, so you’re in good company.
I really think there’s been a deterioration in the ambition of fiction since I first started reading “for real,” in the 90s. I think about it a lot because I write fiction, and I think you’ve got to trace it all the way back to the conglomerates’ seizing control of the publishing houses. A conglomerate paid for every meal I ate as a child and every semester of my college tuition, so I’m not about to get too cute about big corporations. But it seems to me like publishers used to be run like the Times and (once) the Post — companies with a public mission. Now they’re just companies.
Again, thank you for your research!
Good God, I hope it doesn’t take 20 years.
If you’re interested, you can take a look at the literary-but-not-snobby novel I’m serializing here on Substack. Maybe I can draw you back into fiction. It’s about a dictator’s butler. :)
Dictator's butler, huh? Butlers always know everything. Interesting concept. I'll give it a try. Has to be more interesting than the current wanna-be dictator's doings. Do you post as Andrew Wilson? Can I find you that way?
No, to DC. Florida for the moment on my way to Indiana.
Love octopi. They are so smart, intelligence off the chart, so different from homo sapiens. Nicer, for one thing. That's my current interest. Where did all this nastiness come from? I think Malthus was right in principle, just wrong on method.
On that less than cheerful note, I'm off to pack some more boxes. Early November is the shoot for move date and I've already done all the easy stuff. (sigh)
You'd never think fo Substack favorite Middlemarch as being dismissed as a non-literary problem book, but that seems to be how famous critics Edmund Wilson and John Bayley treated it. Clive James had a response that I think would find sympathy here in this review of a Bayley book. I urge you to read the whole thing, but the passage on Middlemarch (which supposedly has no literary influence) is striking to me. https://archive.clivejames.com/books/john-bayley.htm
I agree with you! Like there's nothing you can put your finger on to say Baldwin is wrong, but then you go and read Native Son and the book is so blisteringly powerful. Baldwin had a point he wanted to make, and maybe that point was good, but if it relies on Native Son somehow being a bad book that shouldn't have been written then Baldwin is clearly missing the mark.
At first I thought this was another one of your tales, and "The Home Maker" was an entirely made up book. I'm glad to see I was mistaken, though, I want to read it!
You recently (or, sort of recently) wrote about Emily St James' "Woodworking." Would you say this was a problem novel? St James includes a conclusion that pretty clearly frames it this way. Of course, to your point, the book wasn't nearly as lauded as "Detransition Baby."
Yes I would say that her book is much more straightforwardly a problem novel. And this brings up a good point, which is that in women's fiction there is much more room for issues fiction of various sorts.
I wish I only had one character flaw! Interesting analysis of "problem" novel. Any novel worth reading has a "problem" to be solved, doesn't it? No one would read a novel that was without conflict. These nooks and crannies of human idiosyncrasy are the reasons literature exists...to explain and analyze. Keep up the good work!
This is a good point. The dividing line between what is a problem and what is a problem "just" for the characters is maybe ultimately arbitrary. I hadn't thought of that.
I especially enjoyed the final section of this essay, where you discuss the differing rubrics of art. Personally, I prefer a story that makes an argument rather than just setting characters loose from an initial configuration to bump against each other in artful ways. I’m somewhat of the opinion that most novels are problem novels if you look at them the right way (ie, with regard to the context of their real-life circumstances), even if they don’t know that that they are.
This had me recall being in a small audience with Chimamanda Adichie in Portland Or (ahead of her lecture- 2012?) and that she kinda scolded American writers for being too safe, not wanting to write about politics in fiction. Oof. In 2023, I assigned Danielle Evans Boys Go to Jupiter and received so much kick back about the topic— how uncomfortable the mostly white folk felt. Well..sigh.
It does not seem so surprising, given your description, that this novel would be good. After all, the way the problem influence the story is merely in the premise "two people live together and are unhappy because neither of them holds the social role in which they'd flourish". This allows for a lot of freedom in developing this premise, and if I understood well it uses one of my favorite narrative line, "you think you know these people but you actually don't".
Perhaps the line between problem literature and legitimate literature is not so clear cut ; problem literature needs to have some freedom to be good, and legitimate literature most often does need to engage with human concerns and issues. I mean, you can say that basically all greek tragedies are a variation on "don't engage in hybris".
I suppose the decline of problem novels may come from the fact that there is now more preference for first person accounts, and more distrust for novels written in the third person about a social issue : does the author intimately knows the social issue ? Is (s)he legitimate in writing about it ? A big evolution has been in the potential reach of the first person accounts : there was a time where well-meaning progressives (I'm not saying this in a pejorative sense) were a necesary channel for some issues to reach a general public. Now there is an audience for a more diverse set of voices. To try and illustrate, slaves and freed slaves did write and express themselves during slavery, but there was no way they'd get published and read out of a certain niche, which is why books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, which were tailored to the sensibilities of the audience of the time, were necesary. Nowadays, people are more likely to want to read the actual testimonies and accounts from the slaves & freed slaves. In that framing of art being good, true or beautiful, we could say it's out of a concern for truth.
(There are recent books I think can be linked to problem novels imo, but I'll have to think this one a bit further)
I read The Home-maker last fall and loved it. Definitely feared it was going in much less subtle and truthful directions than it did. Among other things, I've rarely read such an accurate portrayal of a child's perspective.
Your piece reminded me of a "problem subplot" in John Edward William's Stoner. Here the principal antagonist Professor Hollis Lomax is a highly talented literature professor who suffers from a physical deformity, and favours the passing of a Student who suffers from a similar condition. Stoner opposes this as he clearly wasn't up to the mark, and opposing Lomax becomes his professional undoing: Shouldn't merit be only criterion for judging academic excellence? Alas, Stoner was cheated out of the good life just for this very reason.
This is a good point. I actually read that book, but didn't make the connection until you pointed it out!
Would you pass the student?
Thanks! I just read it a month ago, and loved it! The right thing to do is fail the student. If I am being honest with myself, I would've passed the student, even as Stoner clearly pointed out he didn't cut the muster. I don't think I would have had it in me to suffer through both a failed marriage and a failed career 😅
I think I would pass the student, too. I was a teacher when I was in my 20s, and I was an absolute monster — so strict, so. by-the-book, and absolutely willing to fail people. Now I’ve chilled out for whatever reason. I think I’d have a hard time ruining anybody’s transcript like that. So I’d say I’m softer but wiser. Hey, I looked at your writing and it’s really interesting! So different from a lot of what’s floating around. I’m going to follow you to keep up.
If I had to guess, the problem novel flourishes in societies where there's a drive towards solving problems. The current fashion is that we live in the best of all possible worlds, even if it isn't very good, and everything is just going to go to shit anyway. So why bother depressing yourself?
This is an interesting take! I like the observation of novels flourishing based on societal consciousness, but I wonder if it has more to do with disempowerment of the individual in current western (particularly U.S.) consciousness than with the belief that living in a world that’s as good as it’s going to get. Thinking about macro-level problems like climate change or authoritarianism. Some of us find comfort in individual action but by and large we are observers of what unfolds. Current litfic skews towards that observational role, but I don’t think it’s inherently pessimistic to do so.
I'm really interested in what you're saying here. Can you think of examples you make about litfic? My personal perception is that currently litfic is focused on problems, but problems exclusively; ie, everything seems unsolvable.
Hey Andrew! I’m building off of the observation in the article:
“But with contemporary novels, even if they feature social issues, that sense of communication is missing. For instance, Detransition, Baby is about two characters: a trans woman whose life is affected by transphobia and a detransitioned person who seems somewhat-content. The book does not make a particularly strong case that transitioning is a beneficial act that ought to be enabled by the state. If the detrans person had gotten super depressed and committed suicide, it would've been more of a problem novel.”
I’m curious about a potential correlation between observation vs solution (contemporary litfic trends vs problem novels) and the felt-empowerment of citizens, based on the commenter above me considering the impact of societal influence on the prevalence or tone of problem novels.
You’re making an interesting point. My assumption could certainly be wrong, but my hunch is that literary fiction is read by a group of people that skews high in terms of educational attainment and income. If that’s right (again, maybe isn’t), the readership of litfic are the people who are in fact the most empowered in the society. But maybe they still feel powerless, and maybe esp. so, because in spite of their being on the top of the pile, they can’t seem to prevent everything from spinning out of control.
Incidentally, I just joined Substack recently. I’m still figuring out how it works but I’m just so enthused to be running into people who, like you, give a damn about these things!
I guess you're disagreeing with the current fashion of thinking we live in the best of all possible worlds? I definitely do! I think we live in a disaster of a world. I feel like a lot of people are shunning all but the most fantastical of novels because they can barely handle the problems that actually exist!
Maybe "this is the best it will ever get" is more accurate. Everything is doomed to decay, so fixing, say, mother's and father's true desire to fulfill themselves is beside the point. It's all almost over!
"The current fashion is that we live in the best of all possible worlds, even if it isn't very good, and everything is just going to go to shit anyway."
- Because the empire is in decline right now? And we are on a downward turn of an Turchin cycle? Or is this just vibes based?
My goodness. You taught me the phrase Turchin vortex. The definition I found seems pretty apt.
Intellectuals sometimes indeed do deliver helpful models.🙃
Elite overproduction is a concept that resurfaces quite often when I think about topics like the above one.
I was JUST thinking about this, even though I didn’t know about the vortex. I have read about the idea that a sign of coming collapse of one kind or another is a surplus over over-educated people (essentially). Is this what you’re referring to?
Oh My Actual Absolute God!!! The sentence that jumped out and hit me (in this interesting debate) was ...
"about five years ago I realized that I’d read every novel that was supposed to be good"
Ahem, are you 100 years old? Or do you read at the speed of light? Or, as one of my university contemporaries did, 50 years ago, only read every facing page?
Will look forward very much to your eventual list of "every novel that was supposed to be good". And who it was who supposed this.
Yes, we need that list. Once and for all we need it, so that I can pin it up and be done with the search
I used to read a lot of fiction when I was much younger. At some point in my 70s, about 10 years ago, that switched to non-fiction. I'm wondering now if that is age-related. I got bored with current fiction and was more challenged with non-fiction. Any thoughts about that? Have other elderly, or soon to be elderly, encountered the same phenomenon??
I'm 72, and have acquired a great interest in reading history books. At this age, I'm quite aware of the basic facts about the historical period I might choose to read about. However it is always possible that the writer will have discovered new information in archival research.
Yeah,, history is always fun, Jane. Fifty years sometimes makes a night and day difference between what documents were available during the the first and subsequent efforts at telling our story. Case in point is human evolution (my current interest). That changes almost daily as new eyes look at old bones.
Well, I am not elderly (43), but I recently had my first child, and have begun to feel elderly, because I am so tired all the time! But I have also lost a lot of interest in a lot of what is being published right now. I read a lot of fiction, but most of it is from 20th and 19th centuries. I'm curious about your opinion. MY perception is that the role of serious novels has declined, but is that true? Respectfully -- you have more life experience than I do. Is this something you've perceived, or is my pessimism just something people experience perennially, age after age?
Trying to answer your question, I went and rummaged through the books I had ordered from Amazon (before I ditched Amazon for Bookshop.org). Not a whole lot of fiction purchased from 2022 to 2025. My favorite was about a grouchy octopus and his widowed caretaker. Lovely book, "Remarkably Bright Creatures". There was another octopus book that I must have bought somewhere else. Even better than the grouchy one. Non-fiction, I think. The rest for the last 5 years was Russian history, political best sellers, religious history (emphasis on archaeology), many of Michael Lewis' books. A mixed bag to say the least.
I read the Washington Post Review of Books faithfully every week but not much seems to catch my interest. So who's to say? Are the books not being written or have my interests just expanded past what they write? Maybe yours have too. Check back with me in 20 years after your little one learns to sleep all night. Maybe you will have the answer. :-))
I’m so honored that you would do research to answer my question!
My step-mother runs two bookstores in Pittsburgh, so I’m familiar with the ditch-Amazon move.
3. You mention the Post — do you live in DC? I do, which is why I ask.
Your focus on octopus books is interesting. I actually think my grandmother-in-law read the second one, and she liked it. She’s a pretty clever lady, so you’re in good company.
I really think there’s been a deterioration in the ambition of fiction since I first started reading “for real,” in the 90s. I think about it a lot because I write fiction, and I think you’ve got to trace it all the way back to the conglomerates’ seizing control of the publishing houses. A conglomerate paid for every meal I ate as a child and every semester of my college tuition, so I’m not about to get too cute about big corporations. But it seems to me like publishers used to be run like the Times and (once) the Post — companies with a public mission. Now they’re just companies.
Again, thank you for your research!
Good God, I hope it doesn’t take 20 years.
If you’re interested, you can take a look at the literary-but-not-snobby novel I’m serializing here on Substack. Maybe I can draw you back into fiction. It’s about a dictator’s butler. :)
Dictator's butler, huh? Butlers always know everything. Interesting concept. I'll give it a try. Has to be more interesting than the current wanna-be dictator's doings. Do you post as Andrew Wilson? Can I find you that way?
No, to DC. Florida for the moment on my way to Indiana.
Love octopi. They are so smart, intelligence off the chart, so different from homo sapiens. Nicer, for one thing. That's my current interest. Where did all this nastiness come from? I think Malthus was right in principle, just wrong on method.
On that less than cheerful note, I'm off to pack some more boxes. Early November is the shoot for move date and I've already done all the easy stuff. (sigh)
You'd never think fo Substack favorite Middlemarch as being dismissed as a non-literary problem book, but that seems to be how famous critics Edmund Wilson and John Bayley treated it. Clive James had a response that I think would find sympathy here in this review of a Bayley book. I urge you to read the whole thing, but the passage on Middlemarch (which supposedly has no literary influence) is striking to me. https://archive.clivejames.com/books/john-bayley.htm
What do you think of James Baldwin’s takedown of Native Son? I feel like he misses the point entirely, despite being correct in every detail.
I agree with you! Like there's nothing you can put your finger on to say Baldwin is wrong, but then you go and read Native Son and the book is so blisteringly powerful. Baldwin had a point he wanted to make, and maybe that point was good, but if it relies on Native Son somehow being a bad book that shouldn't have been written then Baldwin is clearly missing the mark.
At first I thought this was another one of your tales, and "The Home Maker" was an entirely made up book. I'm glad to see I was mistaken, though, I want to read it!
You recently (or, sort of recently) wrote about Emily St James' "Woodworking." Would you say this was a problem novel? St James includes a conclusion that pretty clearly frames it this way. Of course, to your point, the book wasn't nearly as lauded as "Detransition Baby."
Yes I would say that her book is much more straightforwardly a problem novel. And this brings up a good point, which is that in women's fiction there is much more room for issues fiction of various sorts.
I wish I only had one character flaw! Interesting analysis of "problem" novel. Any novel worth reading has a "problem" to be solved, doesn't it? No one would read a novel that was without conflict. These nooks and crannies of human idiosyncrasy are the reasons literature exists...to explain and analyze. Keep up the good work!
This is a good point. The dividing line between what is a problem and what is a problem "just" for the characters is maybe ultimately arbitrary. I hadn't thought of that.
I especially enjoyed the final section of this essay, where you discuss the differing rubrics of art. Personally, I prefer a story that makes an argument rather than just setting characters loose from an initial configuration to bump against each other in artful ways. I’m somewhat of the opinion that most novels are problem novels if you look at them the right way (ie, with regard to the context of their real-life circumstances), even if they don’t know that that they are.
Great piece, Naomi. Thank you.
This had me recall being in a small audience with Chimamanda Adichie in Portland Or (ahead of her lecture- 2012?) and that she kinda scolded American writers for being too safe, not wanting to write about politics in fiction. Oof. In 2023, I assigned Danielle Evans Boys Go to Jupiter and received so much kick back about the topic— how uncomfortable the mostly white folk felt. Well..sigh.
This sounds like a very interesting incident. I would like to hear more :)
It does not seem so surprising, given your description, that this novel would be good. After all, the way the problem influence the story is merely in the premise "two people live together and are unhappy because neither of them holds the social role in which they'd flourish". This allows for a lot of freedom in developing this premise, and if I understood well it uses one of my favorite narrative line, "you think you know these people but you actually don't".
Perhaps the line between problem literature and legitimate literature is not so clear cut ; problem literature needs to have some freedom to be good, and legitimate literature most often does need to engage with human concerns and issues. I mean, you can say that basically all greek tragedies are a variation on "don't engage in hybris".
I suppose the decline of problem novels may come from the fact that there is now more preference for first person accounts, and more distrust for novels written in the third person about a social issue : does the author intimately knows the social issue ? Is (s)he legitimate in writing about it ? A big evolution has been in the potential reach of the first person accounts : there was a time where well-meaning progressives (I'm not saying this in a pejorative sense) were a necesary channel for some issues to reach a general public. Now there is an audience for a more diverse set of voices. To try and illustrate, slaves and freed slaves did write and express themselves during slavery, but there was no way they'd get published and read out of a certain niche, which is why books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, which were tailored to the sensibilities of the audience of the time, were necesary. Nowadays, people are more likely to want to read the actual testimonies and accounts from the slaves & freed slaves. In that framing of art being good, true or beautiful, we could say it's out of a concern for truth.
(There are recent books I think can be linked to problem novels imo, but I'll have to think this one a bit further)
This post is full of oxygen for considering and appreciating many kinds of writing. Refreshing!
I read The Home-maker last fall and loved it. Definitely feared it was going in much less subtle and truthful directions than it did. Among other things, I've rarely read such an accurate portrayal of a child's perspective.
I really liked that aspect! One of the most powerful parts of the book.