This is an exceptional essay, critically, historically, and philosophically—the best thing I've ever read by you and one of the best things I've read anywhere on substack. A high watermark that delighted, informed, and challenged me. Thank you!
I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Your articles, no matter how long, make me stop whatever I'm doing and read. No matter the subject matter, no matter the time of day, I'll find myself reading through to the end. Every single time.
On the subject of “_____ stories”: a dear friend of mine spent a summer in college working on the archives of The Atlantic. She decided that she wanted to give a story to the editor, so she began to pay attention to what “Atlantic stories” had in common, and she found that there were a lot of… cows in Atlantic stories. Cows. As in Holstein, etc. So at the tender age of 21, she wrote a story with a cow in it, and lo and behold, it made its way into the Atlantic. (And it was a good story, though I’m biased. But COWS!!!)
This is a great piece, but as a Cheever mega-fan, I found it a bit stingy in its praise. I admit that my love of Cheever probably has to do with some soft-minded Mad Men-inflected nostalgia for a world I never knew -- the world of my grandparents and their upper-middle-class mores. The formula must also play a part. But for me, the pleasure of reading Cheever is the pleasure of encountering a singular voice -- not the voice of a house author, but the unique language (keenly perceptive, self-aware, a bit Latinate but never stodgy) of a literary genius.
His sentences themselves (like that masterful 200-worder you cite here) are the magic. The final paragraphs of "The Country Husband," for example, are as beautiful as anything I've read elsewhere in American lit. Formula or not, the man could fucking WRITE!
I loved this essay! I've been a subscriber to the New Yorker for some 30 years (after the period you cover, of course) but I never thought so comprehensively about the magazine. Fascinating stuff.
I wonder if Cheever might have been considered in the same way W. Somerset Maugham -- also a writer known for his short fiction whose novels are much less well regarded -- evaluated himself: "In the first rank of the second raters"?
It's interesting about Salinger -- I think he's a writer who has not at all fallen entirely from grace, but who has declined slightly in reputation. (Partly because he stopped publishing long before his death (and rumor has it that what he wrote since he stopped is pretty awful.) You say "writers wanted Salinger's career" or words to that effect, and I think that's true -- but nowadays I think if you offered a writer the posthumous reputation of Salinger or O'Conner -- I think most might pick O'Connor. (At any rate, I think her a greater writer.)
Probably they would pick her posthumous reputation yes :) I do agree his reputation has fallen a bit. I was actually a bit surprised to see how highly he was regarded in the 50s and 60s. He was not only regarded as a great literary talent in the 1950s, but in the 1960s became kind of a counterculture icon too!
Good piece, got me thinking... Something gets chosen, maybe for good reason, maybe not. Once something's held up, it becomes guide, model, standard. It gets written toward. Or, in the case of the chosen, they write toward themselves. Taste doubles down on itself. The form becomes
formula? Excellence is real, but also random, arbitrary, or seemingly so—hard to pull these things apart, in the moment and in retrospect. Who you know, who happens—well, it doesn't quite just happen—to be sitting next to you on a train. It's a small world…
You've totally convinced me to check out the giant Cheever book.
Using Loong's list, the most likely new Cheever is George Saunders, with his 21 stories since 1992 (I think he's got some past 2019 now)? He's even got the bad novels! 21 stories in 30 years is kind of astonishing given how many more authors they give a chance to now. It's hard to say that there's a house style in the 21st century based on the numbers. In the eighties and nineties, it's Alice Munro.
Before diversity novels, the 90's and 00's had a lot of "edgy" novels (Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Denis Johnson, Jeffrey Eugenides, large parts of the big Franzen and DFW novels, Percival Everett, Michel Houellebecq). I don't think that Franzen or Johnson actually belongs in that list and was thrown in there (you've written about his before), but the formula was "letting it all hang out" in a way that became pretty frowned upon by the time the 2010s rolled around.
Also, one of the few mentions of Peter De Vries I've ever seen. Dutch Calvinist from Grand Rapids, where I live, graduate of Calvin College, my own alma mater. Used bookstores here stock his books regularly, The second most well-known to come from Calvin, after Paul Schrader.
I too greatly enjoy Peter De Vries. I know a couple guys who went to Calvin College… alas they didn’t know of De Vries! I strongly recommend The Blood of the Lamb, his most explicitly Calvinist (or post-Calvinist) novel.
I enjoyed some of De Vries’ stories, but I had trouble with his first person humor pieces. In general the humor style of the New Yorker (except when it was a story w scenes and characters) didn’t hit for me.
I read his early collection, No But I Saw the Movie, and I was underwhelmed. It was a bunch of short humorous pieces (I think from the New Yorker). I haven’t really read any other short fiction from him. But his best novels are excellent. He was part of the New Yorker’s staff, so that may have constrained his contributions to them.
Great piece! Poor, in a way, John O'Hara, who banged out his stories as if they were newspaper pieces (i think I read in a John Updike intro to O'Hara' collected stories). I love O'Hara's September 17, 1960 New Yorker story, like many people, I guess. I wonder who wrote the title?
This is an illuminating essay and I thank you for all of the work it implies. But what's revealing to me is how you manage to write this historical review without once recognizing that between 1958 and 1978 the New Yorker school was fundamentally challenged by what was called postmodern fiction or Black Humor. That's typical of cultural memory of the period in general. It never happened. It never happened because it was such a fundamental challenge to the New Yorker sensibility, which tried so hard to be the dominant American sensibility. Fellini was once asked why he made his movies in the way he did, and he replied, "I create in order to find myself free." Barthelme, who you do mention, wrote to no formula other than his own. The same is true for Barth, Coover, Gass, Elkin, Ishmael Reed, and hundreds of uncelebrated writers like Gilbert Sorrentino who published primarily with the independent presses of the time like the Fiction Collective, Dalkey Archive, Sun and Moon, Coffee House and many others. So, my question is, "what about the anti-formula writers?" They still exist and so do the independent publishers they write for.
Thanks for the thoughtful, historical, and absurdly entertaining essay. One might argue that the 'classical' New Yorker style is still very much alive in US literary fiction, even if it is now taking on more diverse tones.
This is amazing. Thank you. It is an essay on a subject, a long, complete answer to a question I never articulated but now realize I always desired to be answered by someone who could answer it incredibly well and completely. Thank you! Took me away from the news to the timeless.
Thank you for this assiduous and revealing look at New Yorker fiction. Probably like most readers, my first encounters with the magazine were then-current issues. I developed a notion of its orientation and goals by reading it as a whole rather than just the fiction. Nor did I have any historical understanding until eventually reading accounts of its earlier years and the editors and writers. The magazine’s editorial constraints quickly became obvious to me, as did what I’ll call its persona. If these were shortcomings, they were also its power and integrity. I did come to regard Cheever as a Chekovian master whose depictions of suburbia were the equal of Updike, and until reading your piece, I wasn’t aware of the earlier critical attacks on his writing. This is just one of many things I learned from your piece. I first came to fully realize the liberating potential of constraints through the work of the Oulipians. Nowadays I’m not fussed about genres or even about reputations. I’ve learned enough about writing to know what I think of a piece when I read it. I believe our varying opinions are valid if backed by experience. Finally, as your post demonstrates, talent can surmount even the effects of commercialization.
"Privileged formulas" as a definition of literary fiction is one that is external to works of literature themselves, while describing the aesthetic and sociopolitical values of certain places in time.
Another name for “literary fiction” is “serious fiction.” Serious fiction, which can be tragic, epic, or highly comedic, and so on, has existed from the times of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer, if not before. Serious fiction renders consciousness, and often society and culture, in deeply humanistic and perceptive ways.
It can be written for the masses, or for elites, or both. Regardless, it's often considered to be relatively profound or borderline profound, or at least especially insightful and otherwise moving or momentous, even sometimes when seeming to be deceptively slight.
Much more could be said, including about the internal characteristics of such literature, as there has been a great amount of analysis and focus on "serious fiction" - aka - literature, throughout the ages.
Serious fiction requires some art and writers with perceptive and moving views of society and culture, people and things, which will naturally push the bounds consciousness, including conscience and lack thereof.
As usual, great work (that I am commenting while still finishing) about which I have three comments (so far):
1) I think it is ROGER Angell, not Robert;
2) Cheever's novels are actually kind of great -- Falconer and the Wapshot Scandal are both pretty heart-breaking and funny;
3) You keep mentioning Peter Taylor, and I want to stress that while he was definitely a house writer, he wrote some really damn good stories (I alluded to his particular skill at limning middleclass Southerners of a certain generation in my ROL piece https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/on-reading-faulkner-and-weeping-in) but he also wrote 4 novels that tend to get forgotten but which are well-realized;
I also realized have a 4) which is that Maxwell's novels are little perfect gems that capture some of the house style you articulate while exceeding it in event and quality. Even Brandon Taylor has mentioned that he loves The Chateau, while disdaining the others. But I really like all of them that I have read and would recommend them to anyone.
Gah shoot! I had the vague feeling I was getting Angel’s name wrong but forgot to double check. He actually comes up very often when you read about TNY, so that’s really on me
Now that I have finished, I have two remaining comments, I think. One is, I think the "privileged formulas" formulation is a good one, that gets at how constraint can actually expand your depth and repertoire. See the entirety of the Oulipo for an example, especially Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, and Jacques Roubaud. I will say that I bristle at The Girls being placed as comparable to the odious Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, but that is no doubt a product of my own prejudice as to what topics are inherently interesting to me -- I loathe A Separate Peace while I love noir crime novels. Still, Sittenfeld really is awful as to my taste, while The Girls was a lot better than its plot summary would have led you to believe.
Meanwhile, although you do not by any means absent yourself from this piece, or any other, the tone you always adopt is a very big part of both what people engage with and what you describe in your discussion of the New Yorker style -- slightly removed, cool and calmly appraising, and open-minded while not fearing to so to speak call a spade a spade clearly and without venom. It seems significant that you are also getting mileage from this tone/form, and that maybe there is some greater appeal to it worth exploring.
Oh, and I just remembered I did not want to let it pass what a dreary tool Tom Wolfe was with his ranting about New Yorker stories being too lady-filled and insufficiently macho by implication. I try never to miss a chance to point out that Wolfe was mostly a failed novelist despite good sales, and a very interesting if extremely self-obsessed non-fiction writer.
Your research and thoroughness and analysis are astonishing. Even people who know a lot about the history of The New Yorker will learn a lot from your writing here. Thank you!
One thing that should be fixed, if you think that the correct spelling of names isn’t trivial, is the multiple occurrences of the misspelling of Katharine’s White’s first name. It’s not Katherine, it’s Katharine.
This is an exceptional essay, critically, historically, and philosophically—the best thing I've ever read by you and one of the best things I've read anywhere on substack. A high watermark that delighted, informed, and challenged me. Thank you!
I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Your articles, no matter how long, make me stop whatever I'm doing and read. No matter the subject matter, no matter the time of day, I'll find myself reading through to the end. Every single time.
On the subject of “_____ stories”: a dear friend of mine spent a summer in college working on the archives of The Atlantic. She decided that she wanted to give a story to the editor, so she began to pay attention to what “Atlantic stories” had in common, and she found that there were a lot of… cows in Atlantic stories. Cows. As in Holstein, etc. So at the tender age of 21, she wrote a story with a cow in it, and lo and behold, it made its way into the Atlantic. (And it was a good story, though I’m biased. But COWS!!!)
This is a great piece, but as a Cheever mega-fan, I found it a bit stingy in its praise. I admit that my love of Cheever probably has to do with some soft-minded Mad Men-inflected nostalgia for a world I never knew -- the world of my grandparents and their upper-middle-class mores. The formula must also play a part. But for me, the pleasure of reading Cheever is the pleasure of encountering a singular voice -- not the voice of a house author, but the unique language (keenly perceptive, self-aware, a bit Latinate but never stodgy) of a literary genius.
His sentences themselves (like that masterful 200-worder you cite here) are the magic. The final paragraphs of "The Country Husband," for example, are as beautiful as anything I've read elsewhere in American lit. Formula or not, the man could fucking WRITE!
I loved this essay! I've been a subscriber to the New Yorker for some 30 years (after the period you cover, of course) but I never thought so comprehensively about the magazine. Fascinating stuff.
I wonder if Cheever might have been considered in the same way W. Somerset Maugham -- also a writer known for his short fiction whose novels are much less well regarded -- evaluated himself: "In the first rank of the second raters"?
It's interesting about Salinger -- I think he's a writer who has not at all fallen entirely from grace, but who has declined slightly in reputation. (Partly because he stopped publishing long before his death (and rumor has it that what he wrote since he stopped is pretty awful.) You say "writers wanted Salinger's career" or words to that effect, and I think that's true -- but nowadays I think if you offered a writer the posthumous reputation of Salinger or O'Conner -- I think most might pick O'Connor. (At any rate, I think her a greater writer.)
Probably they would pick her posthumous reputation yes :) I do agree his reputation has fallen a bit. I was actually a bit surprised to see how highly he was regarded in the 50s and 60s. He was not only regarded as a great literary talent in the 1950s, but in the 1960s became kind of a counterculture icon too!
Good piece, got me thinking... Something gets chosen, maybe for good reason, maybe not. Once something's held up, it becomes guide, model, standard. It gets written toward. Or, in the case of the chosen, they write toward themselves. Taste doubles down on itself. The form becomes
formula? Excellence is real, but also random, arbitrary, or seemingly so—hard to pull these things apart, in the moment and in retrospect. Who you know, who happens—well, it doesn't quite just happen—to be sitting next to you on a train. It's a small world…
You've totally convinced me to check out the giant Cheever book.
Using Loong's list, the most likely new Cheever is George Saunders, with his 21 stories since 1992 (I think he's got some past 2019 now)? He's even got the bad novels! 21 stories in 30 years is kind of astonishing given how many more authors they give a chance to now. It's hard to say that there's a house style in the 21st century based on the numbers. In the eighties and nineties, it's Alice Munro.
Before diversity novels, the 90's and 00's had a lot of "edgy" novels (Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Denis Johnson, Jeffrey Eugenides, large parts of the big Franzen and DFW novels, Percival Everett, Michel Houellebecq). I don't think that Franzen or Johnson actually belongs in that list and was thrown in there (you've written about his before), but the formula was "letting it all hang out" in a way that became pretty frowned upon by the time the 2010s rolled around.
What a marathon of an essay!
Also, one of the few mentions of Peter De Vries I've ever seen. Dutch Calvinist from Grand Rapids, where I live, graduate of Calvin College, my own alma mater. Used bookstores here stock his books regularly, The second most well-known to come from Calvin, after Paul Schrader.
I too greatly enjoy Peter De Vries. I know a couple guys who went to Calvin College… alas they didn’t know of De Vries! I strongly recommend The Blood of the Lamb, his most explicitly Calvinist (or post-Calvinist) novel.
I enjoyed some of De Vries’ stories, but I had trouble with his first person humor pieces. In general the humor style of the New Yorker (except when it was a story w scenes and characters) didn’t hit for me.
I read his early collection, No But I Saw the Movie, and I was underwhelmed. It was a bunch of short humorous pieces (I think from the New Yorker). I haven’t really read any other short fiction from him. But his best novels are excellent. He was part of the New Yorker’s staff, so that may have constrained his contributions to them.
Great piece! Poor, in a way, John O'Hara, who banged out his stories as if they were newspaper pieces (i think I read in a John Updike intro to O'Hara' collected stories). I love O'Hara's September 17, 1960 New Yorker story, like many people, I guess. I wonder who wrote the title?
This is an illuminating essay and I thank you for all of the work it implies. But what's revealing to me is how you manage to write this historical review without once recognizing that between 1958 and 1978 the New Yorker school was fundamentally challenged by what was called postmodern fiction or Black Humor. That's typical of cultural memory of the period in general. It never happened. It never happened because it was such a fundamental challenge to the New Yorker sensibility, which tried so hard to be the dominant American sensibility. Fellini was once asked why he made his movies in the way he did, and he replied, "I create in order to find myself free." Barthelme, who you do mention, wrote to no formula other than his own. The same is true for Barth, Coover, Gass, Elkin, Ishmael Reed, and hundreds of uncelebrated writers like Gilbert Sorrentino who published primarily with the independent presses of the time like the Fiction Collective, Dalkey Archive, Sun and Moon, Coffee House and many others. So, my question is, "what about the anti-formula writers?" They still exist and so do the independent publishers they write for.
Thanks for the thoughtful, historical, and absurdly entertaining essay. One might argue that the 'classical' New Yorker style is still very much alive in US literary fiction, even if it is now taking on more diverse tones.
I think you would enjoy Elif Batuman's article on Nabokov's relationship with his New Yorker editor: https://eliflife.substack.com/p/speak-institutional-memory
This is amazing. Thank you. It is an essay on a subject, a long, complete answer to a question I never articulated but now realize I always desired to be answered by someone who could answer it incredibly well and completely. Thank you! Took me away from the news to the timeless.
Thank you for this assiduous and revealing look at New Yorker fiction. Probably like most readers, my first encounters with the magazine were then-current issues. I developed a notion of its orientation and goals by reading it as a whole rather than just the fiction. Nor did I have any historical understanding until eventually reading accounts of its earlier years and the editors and writers. The magazine’s editorial constraints quickly became obvious to me, as did what I’ll call its persona. If these were shortcomings, they were also its power and integrity. I did come to regard Cheever as a Chekovian master whose depictions of suburbia were the equal of Updike, and until reading your piece, I wasn’t aware of the earlier critical attacks on his writing. This is just one of many things I learned from your piece. I first came to fully realize the liberating potential of constraints through the work of the Oulipians. Nowadays I’m not fussed about genres or even about reputations. I’ve learned enough about writing to know what I think of a piece when I read it. I believe our varying opinions are valid if backed by experience. Finally, as your post demonstrates, talent can surmount even the effects of commercialization.
"Privileged formulas" as a definition of literary fiction is one that is external to works of literature themselves, while describing the aesthetic and sociopolitical values of certain places in time.
Another name for “literary fiction” is “serious fiction.” Serious fiction, which can be tragic, epic, or highly comedic, and so on, has existed from the times of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer, if not before. Serious fiction renders consciousness, and often society and culture, in deeply humanistic and perceptive ways.
It can be written for the masses, or for elites, or both. Regardless, it's often considered to be relatively profound or borderline profound, or at least especially insightful and otherwise moving or momentous, even sometimes when seeming to be deceptively slight.
Much more could be said, including about the internal characteristics of such literature, as there has been a great amount of analysis and focus on "serious fiction" - aka - literature, throughout the ages.
Serious fiction requires some art and writers with perceptive and moving views of society and culture, people and things, which will naturally push the bounds consciousness, including conscience and lack thereof.
As usual, great work (that I am commenting while still finishing) about which I have three comments (so far):
1) I think it is ROGER Angell, not Robert;
2) Cheever's novels are actually kind of great -- Falconer and the Wapshot Scandal are both pretty heart-breaking and funny;
3) You keep mentioning Peter Taylor, and I want to stress that while he was definitely a house writer, he wrote some really damn good stories (I alluded to his particular skill at limning middleclass Southerners of a certain generation in my ROL piece https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/on-reading-faulkner-and-weeping-in) but he also wrote 4 novels that tend to get forgotten but which are well-realized;
I also realized have a 4) which is that Maxwell's novels are little perfect gems that capture some of the house style you articulate while exceeding it in event and quality. Even Brandon Taylor has mentioned that he loves The Chateau, while disdaining the others. But I really like all of them that I have read and would recommend them to anyone.
Gah shoot! I had the vague feeling I was getting Angel’s name wrong but forgot to double check. He actually comes up very often when you read about TNY, so that’s really on me
Now that I have finished, I have two remaining comments, I think. One is, I think the "privileged formulas" formulation is a good one, that gets at how constraint can actually expand your depth and repertoire. See the entirety of the Oulipo for an example, especially Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, and Jacques Roubaud. I will say that I bristle at The Girls being placed as comparable to the odious Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, but that is no doubt a product of my own prejudice as to what topics are inherently interesting to me -- I loathe A Separate Peace while I love noir crime novels. Still, Sittenfeld really is awful as to my taste, while The Girls was a lot better than its plot summary would have led you to believe.
Meanwhile, although you do not by any means absent yourself from this piece, or any other, the tone you always adopt is a very big part of both what people engage with and what you describe in your discussion of the New Yorker style -- slightly removed, cool and calmly appraising, and open-minded while not fearing to so to speak call a spade a spade clearly and without venom. It seems significant that you are also getting mileage from this tone/form, and that maybe there is some greater appeal to it worth exploring.
Oh, and I just remembered I did not want to let it pass what a dreary tool Tom Wolfe was with his ranting about New Yorker stories being too lady-filled and insufficiently macho by implication. I try never to miss a chance to point out that Wolfe was mostly a failed novelist despite good sales, and a very interesting if extremely self-obsessed non-fiction writer.
Your research and thoroughness and analysis are astonishing. Even people who know a lot about the history of The New Yorker will learn a lot from your writing here. Thank you!
One thing that should be fixed, if you think that the correct spelling of names isn’t trivial, is the multiple occurrences of the misspelling of Katharine’s White’s first name. It’s not Katherine, it’s Katharine.
Good catch! I’ll fix this
Thanks! 🙌