Our literary landscape rewards demagoguery

I'm very conscious that a lot of what I do on my Substack is demagoguery. There's a large cadre of people with MFAs, publications, book deals, etc, who feel they've been expelled by the literary world, which generally only rewards relentless puffery and flattery of those it has pre-selected as the winners. I make implicit appeals to this mass of disaffected literary people, and I try to use their support as a way of amplifying my voice and hopefully being heard by institutions that would otherwise ignore me.

The fact is, within the literary world, there is a lot of honest talk, but it's usually behind closed doors. You're not really supposed to air it in public. If a book is overrated, you say so to your friends. If a review seems sycophantic, you mention it at a party. This undercurrent of talk does eventually influence what's published—it's how reputations correct themselves.

But now, because of the internet and social media, there is a strong temptation to take to the airwaves and litigate conflicts in public. Which is to say, there is a temptation to raise a mob of people who agree with you and then use their voice to overpower the institution through sheer numbers.

This happens quite frequently nowadays with bad reviews. Just a few weeks ago, Rachel Kushner's husband tried to raise a ruckus against Brandon Taylor for the latter's bad review of her novel in the London Review of Books. But don't feel sorry for him, Brandon did the exact same thing to Laura Miller for a bad review of his last book. Jamil Kochai did it to the reviewer who covered his book for the NYT. Most recently, Garth Greenwell wrote a long post trying to shape and explain away his bad review in the NYT.

The current structure of the literary world strongly rewards demagoguery. Basically, you have these corporate conglomerates making huge bets on books, and those bets require every critic to fall in line and praise the book. If that doesn’t happen, then the book underperforms and doesn’t win awards, doesn’t get selected by book clubs, doesn’t “break out”. Oftentimes a book’s fate is determined even before its release—it needs to have a lot of pre-release buzz just so bookstores order it in the first place!

This means there is an incentive for an author to get on social media and cut short any negative messages about their book. And you do this by arousing these strong emotions in your audience (usually feelings of being misunderstood or rejected) and then you more or less explicitly turn your own work into the avatar of their hopes. Your bad review is now the same as, say, the workshop leader who misunderstood them or the agent who rejected them.

And if you have a block of people who is already very emotionally invested in your own work, then that's a powerful thing, because I find literary people really tend to dislike conflict.

Literary people typically did well in school and are highly-educated—we’re the kind of people who strive for consensus. For instance, I keep getting messages from people with regards to my Greenwell review. They’re like, "So and so said something—does that change your opinion of the book?" I'm like...no? Why would it? Similarly when people disagree with me I'm like...you can just read the book yourself! They usually don't. Because if they liked it, then they'd be in conflict with me. The mildest form of conflict! But still kind of uncomfortable.

This means if there is a group of people who claim to passionately believe a book is good, then ultimately the literary world will likely defer to them.

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You might ask…is this really a problem? Authors have always complained about their critics. Is this any different from the usual state of affairs?

Well, I do think it’s actually different, because the industry is very different from what it was fifty years ago or even ten years ago. Right now, you have two huge publishers, Penguin Random House and Macmillan, that make big bets on literary fiction. Then you have a few smaller ones that can sort of compete, but not really. And a bunch of tiny publishers that nobody notices.

Most literary authors who break out these days are published by one of two large corporations, each of which has huge shiny offices and thousands of employees. Penguin Random House, which controls about half the book business, is owned by Bertelsmann, which is a privately held German corporation. Rather incredibly, Macmillan is also owned by another privately-held German corporation, Holtzbrinck. And one often wonders: who are these German people?! Why do they care about literary fiction?! Like...I don't think it makes them any money!

You might ask: what about the other mega-publishers? Aren’t there actually five of these guys? Well, the dirty secret is that Simon and Schuster has been acquired by a private equity group, KKR, which I assume is going to strip-mine them for valuable assets, load them up with debt, and then spin them off so they can quietly die. KKR destroys companies; it’s what they do. As a result, S&S is not making big acquisitions right now. HarperCollins has a literary imprint, Ecco, but it’s not a huge priority; they don’t make big, splashy acquisitions. William Morrow (another of Harper’s literary imprints) mostly does up-market books, their books don’t get that much awards attention (although there are exceptions, like Tony Tulathimutte’s latest). Hachette has Little, Brown, and they’ve purchased a few other literary imprints (HMH and Algonquin) but seem quite half-hearted and haven’t really invested the money to compete with the Germans. So yes, these companies exist, but they’re not where the big money is for literary authors. If you really want to break out and get attention, you probably want to be published by the Germans.

This is quite different from even ten years ago! Ten years ago, Simon and Schuster was a much bigger competitor. Ten years before that, Penguin and Random House hadn’t even merged yet! So this current regime is actually quite new. And my contention is that because this regime picks winners and losers in a very arbitrary and opaque manner, it’s created a lot of anxiety, and this has given rise to demagoguery.

When institutions contain some fundamental underlying dishonesty, they become vulnerable to demagoguery.

In contrast, an honest institution doesn’t get targeted by demagogues and it isn’t harmed even if it does. For instance, demagoguery can’t harm the The New York Review of Books, because...it just seems like they're doing the best they can! Like, good on them for making a go of it and for continuing to exist! I'm honestly worried that even by mentioning their names, someone is gonna be like, oh yeah, let's buy those guys.

I mention the New York Review of Books because they published an essay recently that I did think was kind of sexist.¹

This review in the NYRB was about the exhibition of this artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker, who's been rediscovered. Modersohn-Becker died at thirty-one as a result of childbirth. Anyway, the critic, who is a woman, wrote that she really wanted to like this exhibition, but she wasn't sure that Becker really merited this attention. The piece mentions a bunch of other female artists and basically says this is the problem with rediscovering woman artists—you don’t know if they’re really good or not.

The critic is really trying to dig deep, beneath her feelings about woman artists, to investigate whether she actually likes this work. But I’d say the fact that she feels compelled to give that extra level of scrutiny to a woman artist—that is the sexism.

The critic in this case refuses to come to a clear conclusion. They want to like the artist, but they're just not sure she really merits their attention. As a result, all this hemming and hawing carries no other message besides “many female artists are overrated, but people refuse to say so, because they are women”. And that is a sexist message!

What the critic should've done is simply come to a judgement—actually, I do think they’re good! Or, actually, I think they’re overrated. There’s no need to go on and on about how actually the real reason people think they’re good is because they’re a woman. Because the fact is, you’re the one on the ground, at the exhibition, looking at the pictures—nobody else can judge for you. If you don’t know, then nobody does, and if nobody does, then why write the article?

I think you can tell from the tenor of my reaction to this piece that although I feel emotional about it, I really don't think anything can or should be done! I think we can just discuss this piece and have a reaction because...that's the whole point of publishing stuff!

When criticizing an article in the NYRB, there's no avenue for demagoguery. Even if I felt the desire to get mad at them and take them down (which I don’t), I still wouldn’t be able to get traction with a complaint against them because there’s no prevailing anger towards them.

In other words, the institution is honest. I pay for what they provide, because I value it. I assume other people do too, and that's why it continues to exist. I trust that whatever they print is what they honestly think, and that they have good reasons for printing it. They also tend to publish kind of late, often reviewing a book months after it came out, and they really don't review that much contemporary fiction. They're just not playing the game that, say, Bertelsmann or Holtzbrinck would like them to play.

As a result, we have this strong and healthy chatter about, say, the value of rediscovering women’s artists (here’s two other articles that’re essentially about this same question). And even if it offends people (like me), it’s no big deal, and there aren’t huge complaints. This is how the criticism is supposed to work. And it does work this way—when you’re dealing with fundamentally honest businesses like the NYRB—businesses that people respect and understand.²

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But the moment you touch upon the less-honest side of literary fiction, suddenly the conversation is quite different. There are these two families in Germany who put many millions of dollars into literary fiction. Why? I have no idea! I do not think their reasons are nefarious at all! Huge corporations are not really run that efficiently—they make TONS of highly questionable decisions. There’ve been several studies for instance that the vast majority of mergers add no value to the companies that merge, and yet…mergers and acquisitions still happen constantly, because when you have a lot of cash and no vision, what you do is blow the cash by buying another company. Eventually these decisions pile up, and the company goes out of business, but that can take a really long time! And with a privately-held company, you really don’t know what their balance sheet looks like. A private company can hide its mistakes for a long time.

I genuinely do not think the Germans have evil intentions! But...if I did think it was nefarious and wanted to spin some conspiracy theory about global capitalism trying to destroy our literary culture, people would likely believe me! I mean the existence of these two German families sounds so absurd. I had to look up these families to make sure they weren't Jewish (they are not! Both families had pretty strong ties to the Nazi party!)—because if they were Jewish then I was afraid this whole post would come off sounding like an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Anyway, their (highly-questionable) business model relies on a lot of people falling into line and praising these books. And most of those people aren't really being paid to do it, they're doing it either because they really like them (totally possible!) or because, on some level, they want to get that German money themselves someday.

And writers are very afraid of that process being disrupted, so they go to war when they get a bad review. There are a lot of emotions involved in the process of picking who's gonna win the critical sweepstakes each year. Many of these books have serious money, serious marketing power, behind them. And why these books instead of other books? Well...it's hard to say. How does a corporation decide to pay one and a half million dollars to an author, as they did to Ocean Vuong? Or two million to Emma Cline? They're making a very big bet that this author is a genius, but even when the author is good, the amount of money and attention often seems totally disproportionate to the worth of the underlying book. Like, a critic in the NYRB is out there questioning whether it makes sense for us to pay attention to one dead woman artist, but few people raise questions about whether any book can really be worth the kind of immense marketing campaigns that companies are putting into some of these contemporary books.

The way the Germans publish fiction is not an honest process, and that dishonesty arouses strong emotions in both the losers and the winners. And those emotions demand some kind of assuaging or explanation. If you can provide an explanation for why some books get picked (i.e. this book got picked because of racism! Or this book is being criticized because of racism!), then people become very interested in that explanation!

But there really is no explanation, because it simply does not make sense for these companies to be putting so much money into the tiny and close-knit world of high-brow fiction. It just doesn't seem like a particularly good use of these German peoples' time, money or attention. Yes I understand that at these corporations there are powerful editors who've convinced their bosses that what they're doing is important—and maybe they can show some numbers that all this activity somehow pays for itself, or even generates a profit. But...does it? I don't really think so (which is why none of the other conglomerates does it anymore). And I have to assume that sooner or later the Germans will realize that.

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A friend of mine recently told me, "You wrote a novel—you wrote TWO novels—and they both came out this year. Why do you not publicize them at the end of your posts?".

And I think the answer is obvious! I’d be broadcasting sour grapes: Don't pay attention to these people—pay attention to me instead.

I think it would really taint the reception of my ideas if people thought I was just angling for a big German book deal myself.

Like, yes, to whatever extent I’m able to get people upset, maybe I could also somehow channel that energy into some concrete gain for myself. But to what end? So that I could be the overrated person that everyone is afraid to say they hate?

Because that's fundamentally the goal when it comes to being a literary person right now. You publish some stories or essays or small-press books, you convince a small subset of the literati (trans people, Asian men, white gay men, Gen Z women, etc) to become very invested in your success, and then you get an agent to pitch you to One World (Bertelsmann) or FSG (Holtzbrinck) as the next big thing—I mention these houses in particular because they're the ones that make big bets on queer and/or PoC writers. (I think for transgressive white people, there are slightly different imprints, but I don't pay as much attention to that side).³

Obviously you do write a book! And hopefully you believe in the book! But what matters more than the content of the book is that you’ve demonstrated an ability to turn your book into a vessel for the feelings of a group of people who usually haven't even read it!

I'm not saying I have the ability to do that for myself. I probably don't. I have been around a long time! I have tried for so many years with so many projects to pitch myself as the next big thing, so believe me, I am not at all too good to try and play this game.

But I genuinely think it would be better for high-brow fiction (which many of us do love and enjoy reading and support with our money), if that whole star system stopped existing. And I think there's actually a chance that this could happen! If we draw attention to the fact that it's so silly for these companies to invest SO MUCH money into acquiring and marketing literary fiction, maybe they'll stop doing it entirely. That's basically what happened with HarperCollins—they're simply not into it anymore. S&S will be out of business in ten years. Hachette seems pretty ambivalent about the endeavor.

It's really only the Germans who we need to reach!

And if they stopped paying big money to literary authors, I guess it would be bad for the people who they pay, but would it really? I mean ultimately whichever customers want to buy and read and discuss serious books will still do it! Whatever actual interest that actually exists will still be there—to whatever extent it's possible for an author to earn money from actual book sales, they'd still be able to do it! I do think there's a lot of organic interest in great literature. But that interest really isn't served well by all this big corporate money.

When I say 'organic interest' I'm talking about you—the people. You just want good books to read! You will always find and discuss good books, no matter what. But right now you have to wade through oceans of stuff that's bad, and you're left wondering—does anyone really like this?

And it's because of that money! That money is what incentivizes people to lie about what's good. If that money didn't exist, then at least if a book was bad and overrated, you'd be like, "Huh, I guess people have terrible taste!" You wouldn't have to suspect, perhaps correctly, that people are censoring themselves and/or lying about their true opinions.

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P.S. A few years ago I got so tired of the big publisher fare that I just started reading the offerings of Persephone Books, which reprints books by woman writers. Their volumes are great! Their most famous is Mrs. Pettigrew Lives For A Day, which is utterly charming and got made into a movie. But I also enjoyed The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski. It’s about a woman who buys a chaise-longue from a vintage store, and then falls asleep on it, and when she wakes up she’s a chronically ill Victorian lady who lies abed all day with one of those mysterious womanly maladies Victorian ladies always have. Very creepy book.⁴

On antisemitism in the literary world

I'm sure at least one of my Substack followers even now is saying, “FINALLY! Naomi is seeing the light! Jewish money has destroyed publishing!"

Believe me, I cannot stress this enough, when I am talking about these faceless German corporations, I do not believe there is anything nefarious happening here. It's just a terrible business move, nothing more. They are not Jewish. If anything they are Nazis. Some might wonder why I'm going on and on about Jewish people right now, and it's because if I was an antisemite who blamed Jewish people for destroying America’s literary culture, this is exactly the kind of post I’d write. Antisemites often start off talking about the Cathedral and trans-national elites and faceless corporations and stuff like that, but if you actually get them in a room, you realize all these words are just a sly way of saying “the Jews”.⁵

Ironically, antisemitism in the literary world is a huge problem. These faceless German corporations have put a lot of money into these publishing imprints, and my impression is that these imprints are not really very hospitable places for a Jewish person to work. Certainly many of the authors that they publish seem, to me, to be on a crusade against Jewish people.

I strongly disagree with Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank, but in practice, in the Anglophone literary world, what seems to happen is that Jewish people are scrutinized very heavily for any ties to Israel, and then they are essentially bullied or ostracized. And to what end? It has nothing to do with helping the people of Gaza—it's Jew-baiting. We literally have the term “Jew-baiting” to describe the behavior of seeking out and persecuting Jewish people, and that’s what this is.

Like, PEN America—it had a Jewish executive director. That's ultimately the reason it got targeted. Same with the Giller Prize. At this point, any Jewish person who runs an organization and who isn't avowedly anti-Israel is gonna feel like they are putting their organization in danger!

Obviously there's always some ostensible reason why these organizations get criticized—but at the end of the day what’s happening is that Jewish individuals, who often lost family in the Holocaust and/or have relatives in Israel, are being pressured to make statements condemning Israel.⁶ When they balk at making these statements, they are bullied relentlessly and accused of supporting genocide.

And this is an activity that lots of people think is...somehow okay? I could have arguments ALL DAY LONG with people I know personally who think this is okay behavior. I understand their arguments. I just don't agree.

When you make condemning a certain foreign government into a litmus test, this often turns into a way of persecuting people who have some tie to that region (a point that an Arab American leader recently made in a Senate hearing, with relation to Hamas). Antizionism doesn't equal antisemitism, but to demand that Jewish people condemn Israel, and to make it a precondition of their ability to exist peacefully in the literary world, is, I think, antisemitic.

Retraction

Wasn’t sure where in the post to put this, but I guess here’s a good place. I want to say that I’ve regretted for awhile now the remarks I made concerning Judaism in a previous post. I said, essentially, "Even if you could convert to Judaism, you wouldn’t want to, because God seems to have a very difficult relationship with the Jewish people, where they’re special, but he also punishes them, and I don’t think anyone else would want to be a part of that." I think that’s a pretty accurate summary: you can definitely read these comments if you want, I don't think the article is paywalled yet, although I will be thankful when it finally is!

These remarks were rightfully called out at the time by my commenters for being facile and reductionist—I was taking a potshot at Judaism, of the sort I often take at Christianity and Hinduism. But unlike those faiths, Judaism is very small, and it has within living memory suffered from a genocide, and I think that gives my comments a very different tone. Anyway, nobody is pressuring me to apologize—nobody has brought up these remarks recently or anything—I don't think many people even unsubscribed (other than the usual few who unsubscribe each time I publish)! But...it wasn't a good thing to say. I would not say it again. I'm sorry.

1. The author of this article writes:

A question nags at me after seeing the exhibition, and even after reading about Modersohn-Becker’s strength of purpose, her substantive if small cadre of admirers, and her readiness to experiment with various techniques and approaches: How is one finally to assess her talent in the face of her growing reputation? It’s difficult to take in her work without viewing it through the prism of her tragic early death from inadequate postpartum care and the lack of recognition during her lifetime. Who, one wonders, might she have become?

I ask because as I walked around the show in June I felt a host of different reactions: “Yes, yes,” I would think excitedly about one piece; “perhaps,” about another; and sometimes a definite “no.” Her work seemed to veer from fluidity to an almost intentional klutziness or awkwardness, and her palette often appeared brownish, despite her insistence that she loved color. Clearly her potential was enormous, and her receptivity to the artistic forces around her laudable. But is one to judge her by her passion for making art, or by her paintings on the wall? Intention and inspiration are not, after all, the same as accomplishment…

And then it continues in this vein for a few more paragraphs. I’m aware I haven’t mentioned the name of the article’s author, which is something I tend to do when I disagree with a piece! Just don’t want my readers to have a bad association with her name. If you think this is isn’t a good practice on my part, please let me know.

2. Businesses like this have become so rare that when I looked into NYRB I kept being like wait, so is this a nonprofit? And if not, what is it? It’s not! It’s literally just a magazine, owned by a guy, Rea Hederman, who bought it from its founders (and allowed them to keep editing it). He operates it as a private business. I do not think the intent is primarily to make a profit, but I also believe it does actually make a profit—or certainly I couldn’t find any suggestion online that it does not.

3. All this male novelist discourse on Substack is nothing more than an attempt to establish straight men as another interest group that the Germans will need to placate. I totally support the effort—I don’t see why straight men shouldn’t get fed, the same as everyone else. But eventually a straight guy will rise up, claim the mantle of “The millennial straight guy who wins awards and gets all the hype these days” and then all the other straight guy literati will get told to shut up because, look, you’ve got Manny BigDick here to represent you.

4. As an aside, I think feminist publishing is very important precisely because it produces so many readable and entertaining books (thereby proving the essential point, which is that traditional institutions under-value women’s work).

5. I’m not saying everyone who uses this lingo is an antisemite, just that a lot of antisemites talk this way. I think unconscious bias does exist, but I also think there’s quite a bit of conscious antisemitism that people just…don’t talk about. A lot of people genuinely think the Jews are rich and control everything, but you just can’t say it out loud, because the Jews will come get you. So they use a code that gives them plausible deniability.

6. Re-reading my post, I realize there’s a contradiction in my argument. I’m saying that institutions aren’t vulnerable to demagoguery if they’re honest, and yet…clearly PEN America and the Giller Prize were somewhat vulnerable to demagoguery! But my argument isn’t that demagoguery only harms bad or deserving people—that would obviously be untrue. Instead I’m saying that dishonest circumstances create a lot of energy that demagogues are able to shape and turn toward a cause of their choice. In this case, many of them are using that energy to harm Jewish people, in a way that doesn’t really seem to benefit the Palestinian cause.