I still have a lot of thinking (and hopefully writing) to do about what I think about middlebrow. But the first writer I thought of when you were talking about Ferber was Willa Cather (who is one of my favorite American writers.) And I believe that Cather was, for a time, dismissed as, essentially, middlebrow. (Though the term often used was "regional", which is fair in a sense but was, I think, used rather condescendingly in Cather's case.) All that changed after a while, and Cather's reputation became rehabilitated. (I read Anne Trubek's pieces, which I enjoyed very much, but I think she slightly overstated things in suggested that only her weaker novels, like One of Ours (her Pulitzer winner) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, received attention in her time. One of her best novels was, I think, also very well-received back then: Death Comes for the Archbishop. (Her lovely novella A Lost Lady deserves more attention, too.))
You make a very good point about some middlebrow writers descending into formula. (Frederik Backman is perhaps my wife's favorite writer, by the way.)
I wonder if the center of "middlebrow" in the early 21st Century could be called "Oprah fiction" -- the books Oprah Winfrey chose for her book club. (That being why Franzen got so mad when she picked him!) And some of those books are very good.
There is a list of once very popular and critically acclaimed writers from the '20s through the '60s who are now perhaps called (disparagingly) middlebrow -- Cozzens. O'Hara. Maybe even Dos Passos, though I see James McLoughlin in the Republic of Letters is trying to rehabilitate him!
I haven’t read Dos Passos myself but I just read a pretty good review of his USA by the excellent Ted Giola that you might like if you’re a fan of him.
It’s funny that MacDonald was influential through that reprint. I remember reading that essay and thinking that it certainly got at the middlebrow culture and aspirations of, say, my dad, who believed in literature and being cultured and loved Faulkner (he grew up in the south) but mostlu read books that were solidly in that populist aspirational realistic mode. He loved Peter Taylor who is a better than middlebrow writer but who wrote about the middlebrow; and that it was really just the Frankfurt School of Adorno and company in its scathing and very performative elitism (did you know Auden liked to read detective novels? So much class and other distinctions that don’t matter). Ultimately what I see in stack is that the Substack Boyz and their enablers are basically middlebrow tastes, wanting realism and Art and cultural sanction that fundamentally came from the middlebrow culture existing. Because the secret is that middlebrow readers didn’t ONLY read middlebrow books, at least not all of them. It was an aspiration to cultured refinement. Enough critical attention to a Faulkner or a Mailer or a Yates or a Cheever (three writers who I think were borderliners) and middlebrows would try them. They would pay attention to the critics but also feel a bit huffy that the critics didn’t like Wouk or Michener much.
A lot of writers derided by Substack Boyz litcultism basically ARE middlebrow, like Rooney or Zavin (someday we are going to fight about Kushner, whose Flamethrowers and Mars Room are two of the best books of the last 25 years) at the same time the authors they flog as great are ALSO middlebrow…middlebrow could have plenty of sex and be surface anti-bourgeois too. Lots of writers didn’t know they weren’t reaching the heights.
Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt are two examples of the latter, writers who think they are literature and are really missing the mark.
It’s all a kind of tribal signaling and it can be useful when trying to define or analyze, but always has to be remembered as contingent and unreliable
1. I was kind of getting at something w/ the middlebrow discourse when I was talking about Forster in the comments of sympathetic opposition's latest newsletter -- I almost called him the king of the middlebrow novelists but figured the term muddied more than it helped (I don't considere it a bad thing or anything, I love Forster). I feel like the novel is a middlebrow form at bottom. It emerged at the same time as the middle classes, so that makes sense, right? And the novels considered the most highbrow are deformed or mutated in some way. Like Moby Dick is half a novel and half an Anatomy of Melancholy style prose treatise on whaling. Woolf and Faulkner and James have that minute attention to consciousness, etc etc. Sometimes you read something and you're like "what a good solid *novel* novel, no funny business" and that usually accords with being slightly middlebrowish. It's not very productive to go around categorizing everything into Brows but there's something there, I think. I'm sure some Marxist literary critic I haven't read has made this exact point more eloquently.
2. I agree that Masscult and Midcult doesn't really hold up but the essay about the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in that same volume is very funny and scathing, and ultimately a kind of better and nobler version of Mass/Midcult as he is standing up for the ability of the average person to appreciate the archaic grandeur of the King James bible vs. a flat and conversational version meant to be "relevant" to "people today." It's actually one of my favorite essays. (https://dwightmacdonaldarchivio.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/updating-the-bible/)
3. Those Ferber covers are nice! I wonder whose idea it was to reprint them, it's interesting that publishers think there's still enough demand. I would have thought she went the way of Booth Tarkington or whatever.
Point 3 doesn't surprise me at all: going into this I was under the impression Ferber had better name recognition than Cather, entirely because "Show Boat" and "Giant" were adapted into such canonical works of musical theater and film, respectively. (She was so widely adapted that "Cimarron" doesn't even merit a mention in this piece, lol.)
This is a great comment — have been thinking for some time that there is no universally-agreed-to-be-‘highbrow’ novel which is formally a straightforward novel-like novel. At the same time, I suppose, the deformed novel has its roots in the Quixote, so who's to say that we're not mis-labelling original vs. mutant ...
I do think perhaps we are all being a little harsh on Masscult and Midcult here, though; I know it is very enjoyable to cast down our idols and burn our graven images and so on, and certainly there is plenty of ignoble snobbishness in it, but I think the seeds of the KJV essay (which I agree is the better one!) are in there even so. (And surely there is a direct correspondence between M's 'Midcult' & 'middlebrow', and not 'Masscult' = 'middlebrow' as Naomi has it?) MacDonald's characterising the avant-garde in it with ‘It was an elite community, a rather snobbish one, but anyone could join who cared enough about such odd things.’ has stuck with me for many years. Cared enough about such odd things. Cared enough!
Yeah I agree and this is a pro-DMD account, I just happen to think he's better at specifics than at generalizing and doing big pithy theories. I'd have to give it another look though, it's been a while. I do remember reading that essay for the first time soon after seeing some bad superhero movie and being like brother...I'd kill for a little midcult right now.
Thanks for the pointer to Macdonald's essay -- it is excellent indeed. (I probably have a half-dozen different translations, but for reading pleasure I always use the KJV. The RSV and NIV are right out, and "The Message and the Good News Bible, I trust, are already burning in the hellfire Macdonald thought might await those who don't marry. But some others are useful for accuracy -- the Revised English Bible, for example, partly because it includes the deuterocanonical books.
This is interesting! I'm not sure if I quite have this, but it feels to me like the distinction between what you're reading and appreciating in Edna Ferber and what MacDonald is denouncing is this: "Masscult is not really the art of the people, it’s an art produced for the people." I'm reading you to say, basically, that "So Big" is good because it accurately captures the experience and value system of middle-class America--a class that Ferber emerged from and a value system that she probably shared. Basically--you're calling it middlebrow and not highbrow because it's middle-class art instead of upper-class art. My sense is that what MacDonald is objecting to is the idea of erudite, new york intellectuals (or something) creating stuff that they think will appeal to Milwaukee housewives instead of creating stuff that they, themselves, love. And maybe to the extent that Ferber's writing isn't quite good enough in terms of craft to qualify as great work, but is expressing something authentic, that it's sort of the folk art of the middle class.
The time I most remember being exposed to the idea of middlebrow was sometime after college. I was reading "House Rules"--a Jodi Picoult book about the family of an autistic child, and my roommate (who majored in English) reacted like I was sitting in the living room snacking on human feces. He said something like that of course it's fine to enjoy camp and trash, but that he can't understand why anyone would want to read middlebrow literature. My reason for wanting to read it is that my sister is on the autism spectrum and Picoult captured a lot of stuff that was really compelling to me, and helped me understand my own life better.
And maybe in some sense that can get at what (if anything) it means for middlebrow fiction to be good in a unique way. Work that's written, in some sense, for the author is successful if it does something like convey the author's truth or experience or something to the reader. But, if everyone only writes about their own truth, we just get a bunch of intellectual novels about being an intellectual (maybe also being a child who will grow up to be an intellectual). Jodi Picoult, if I remember, doesn't have an autistic child or sibling, but did talk to lots and lots of families with autistic children and lots and lots of autistic people, and maybe what determines whether her book was a success is whether it says something meaningful to the people she's writing *for*, even if that meaningful thing isn't in some sense *hers*.
Uneducated opinion incoming: Having just finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, I nominate John Gunther as the Patron Saint of Mid-Century American Middlebrow writing.
Wrote a TON of non-fiction & fiction best sellers (but was constantly being scolded by his wife that his Non-Fiction too surface level/vapid, his fiction was apparently just regurgitating his life in incredibly obvious ways but apparently sold A TON), and then wrote one masterpiece (Death Be Not Proud), that has remained in print ever since unlike IIRC every single other book he ever wrote (TBF his non-fiction is incredibly dated)
I think there's a really deep vein here and in other of your posts of a fundamentally hopeful art that isn't just kitsch, a vein which has been concealed by quite a lot of the highest-status arts for a hundred years (certainly for 60.) Hope you keep digging.
Be very careful, Naomi, you could wander into the land of the bodice-rippers and discover that there are some very good writers there, women who kept their feet on the ground, where most readers live, and at the same time legitimized the life choices of women who chose not to look at men as the enemy. Instead, he is just a complicated human being who needs chaperoning and a little gentle guidance. There's a book by two of those good writers, Jayne Krentz and Ann Maxwell, called "Dangerous Men, Adventuresome Women. A collection of essays by creators who broke the mold of Mills&Boon (Harlequin) in the 1970s and went on to great success. Yes, there can be commercialism involved but these women wrote stories that other women simply wanted to read. They continue to sell very well but seldom get credit for providing a good cash flow for publishers to plow back into their "high-class" authors. La-dee-dah.
Romance is a fascinating genre; you can do just about anything as long as the FMC and MMC get together. The plot and to some extent characters are fixed but you have enormous freedom of setting, style, etc.
It's really funny that SO BIG as described is simultaneously a very familiar narrative (parent hustles in unglamorous field to eke out a quiet-but-noble middle class existence, their child uses that middle class existence as a springboard into wealth sans scruples) but also... like... one that doesn't get literary treatments anymore.
In part because so much of our culture is written BY those wealthy amoral children -- the 2025 version of this narrative (SO CHONKY?) is a novel about the child of farmers who becomes a McKinsey analyst, which is good actually, because you should get your bag, and also blue collar work is icky.
Wonderful thoughts. I have occasionally had very nice meals at Applebees and Chili’s. I sometimes get more from a Substack essay than from a NYRB essay. I just had manufactured LVP flooring from Vietnam installed in my house, and it’s wonderful. I don’t finish 50% of best selling books.
Remember the theme when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes in 2020? “I’m never doing this again, so I just don’t care.” That’s a philosophy that I should inculcated earlier about life.
Wow, I tried "So Big" this spring and couldn't finish it. I looked back at my goodreads review of it and realized that I loved the first chapter (I called it "electric") but then I felt totally bogged down when Selina moved to the farm. I guess I really didn't like Selina's interior monologues, the descriptions of the other farmers in the town, and I thought the plot was obvious?
All of this was happening when my very small child wasn't sleeping, because I recognize the novel you're describing and I'm interested in it, but it just didn't happen for me at all!
On the other hand, I just read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in an absolute fever of a week (I used the immersion technique of audiobook, paper copy, and ebook on my phone rather than reading other stuff on my phone) and I loved it, so our tastes aren't that different. I just reread your post about it and you are entirely correct! There is just something about HBS the person that must have really, really rubbed people the wrong way, because as an author she's just a master. I didn't even find the first ten chapters that boring. I've lived in Cincinnati and New Orleans and it's absolutely creepy how much of Stowe's description of the social life of those places is STILL impacted by the respective cultures described in Uncle Tom's Cabin. There's still this legacy of the tremendous violence of the fugitive slave law in Southeastern Ohio (I mean, it's where Beloved was set, too) in Cincinnati, and it's a place with political views (white-nationalist, old-money conservative, Quakers, progressives) that definitely show up in the novel. And the St. Clares in New Orleans are so perfectly a representation of the kind of people in that city...HBS is great, great, great.
I guess the teacher who used to teach this advanced placement class before me for decades (she retired rather than teach during the pandemic) might have assigned it because she's got some class copies and that's the copy I read last week. Though I'd never assign this to the whole class, if a kid is looking for a choice novel during our "power and social control" unit, I think I'd recommend it! It's probably just as or even more compulsively readable than Dickens. A lot of my students come from families who go to evangelical churches, so the biblical allusions wouldn't even be off-putting! They could even draw some parallels to the hypocrisies in their current churches to the way that Stowe devastatingly points out the complicity with the churches in the 1850's with slavery.
This was such a warmly written piece on an author I wasn't really familiar with, and I love reading some of your pieces introducing me to little-taught often American writers.
Intrigued by this quote:
"many of these other novels toodle around for a hundred pages, getting the hero and heroine together and establishing their conflict, in a way that ultimately dissipates a lot of the energy of the book."
This has been my experience with much high brow literature, but it seems here to be something you consider a mark of this middle register. Is the high brow toodling different, more purposeful in a way that the uninitiated might miss? Is it simply not happening at all, perhaps and I've mislabeled it?
Not a mark of middlebrow fiction per se, just a problem with this specific writer's subsequent novels. And mostly noticeable because _So Big_ is much better structured.
Good read. So much to unpack here. I was thinking about one of my girlhood favs, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place. I do think it is snobby to be told what is acceptable to like.
Hmmm. I HATED Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but for reasons that have nothing to do with its being middlebrow. It was more the way that for a novel ostensibly centered on games and game design, the actual games and the experience of gaming seemed so perfunctory. Even when Zevin writes an entire chapter from the perspective of someone identifying with a character in a game, it didn't ring true - it didn't feel like the actual experience of playing a game.
But that said, I agree with your basic premise, though I would extend the category of "middlebrow" more broadly: not just celebrations of the middle class, but any works written with literary skill but which in narrative and style and characters and themes keep themselves within the confines of what average readers can read without difficulty. This category of works CAN be misfires like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but can also produce absolute masterpieces. I would categorize Graham Greene as a quintessentially middlebrow writer - narratively undemanding, focusing on dramatic crises which the average reader can appreciate - but also unforgettable in the way he constructs his narratives and characters. Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca is another book. Neither of those are baggy writers - they are taut and gripping.
I feel like everyone has their own definition of "middlebrow," which is probably why it isn't the most useful term. To me, there's "entertainment" fiction, which can be in most genres but is characterized by obviously just trying to entertain, and there's high-brow/literary fiction, which is characterized by having something interesting to say about human nature/society/etc. In the middlebrow, you have stuff that really ought to be just entertainment but is basically BS-ing some sort of theme even though it has nothing really to say about it.
But then, I've never read any of the academic literature on the middlebrow. I didn't even know that existed! I'm interested to check it out and see what they say though.
I still have a lot of thinking (and hopefully writing) to do about what I think about middlebrow. But the first writer I thought of when you were talking about Ferber was Willa Cather (who is one of my favorite American writers.) And I believe that Cather was, for a time, dismissed as, essentially, middlebrow. (Though the term often used was "regional", which is fair in a sense but was, I think, used rather condescendingly in Cather's case.) All that changed after a while, and Cather's reputation became rehabilitated. (I read Anne Trubek's pieces, which I enjoyed very much, but I think she slightly overstated things in suggested that only her weaker novels, like One of Ours (her Pulitzer winner) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, received attention in her time. One of her best novels was, I think, also very well-received back then: Death Comes for the Archbishop. (Her lovely novella A Lost Lady deserves more attention, too.))
You make a very good point about some middlebrow writers descending into formula. (Frederik Backman is perhaps my wife's favorite writer, by the way.)
I wonder if the center of "middlebrow" in the early 21st Century could be called "Oprah fiction" -- the books Oprah Winfrey chose for her book club. (That being why Franzen got so mad when she picked him!) And some of those books are very good.
There is a list of once very popular and critically acclaimed writers from the '20s through the '60s who are now perhaps called (disparagingly) middlebrow -- Cozzens. O'Hara. Maybe even Dos Passos, though I see James McLoughlin in the Republic of Letters is trying to rehabilitate him!
O’Hara was definitely on the line. But I’ve never heard anyone suggest Dos Passos was middlebrow.
Fair enough. But he does seem to get less attention these days than he used to get.
I haven’t read Dos Passos myself but I just read a pretty good review of his USA by the excellent Ted Giola that you might like if you’re a fan of him.
It’s funny that MacDonald was influential through that reprint. I remember reading that essay and thinking that it certainly got at the middlebrow culture and aspirations of, say, my dad, who believed in literature and being cultured and loved Faulkner (he grew up in the south) but mostlu read books that were solidly in that populist aspirational realistic mode. He loved Peter Taylor who is a better than middlebrow writer but who wrote about the middlebrow; and that it was really just the Frankfurt School of Adorno and company in its scathing and very performative elitism (did you know Auden liked to read detective novels? So much class and other distinctions that don’t matter). Ultimately what I see in stack is that the Substack Boyz and their enablers are basically middlebrow tastes, wanting realism and Art and cultural sanction that fundamentally came from the middlebrow culture existing. Because the secret is that middlebrow readers didn’t ONLY read middlebrow books, at least not all of them. It was an aspiration to cultured refinement. Enough critical attention to a Faulkner or a Mailer or a Yates or a Cheever (three writers who I think were borderliners) and middlebrows would try them. They would pay attention to the critics but also feel a bit huffy that the critics didn’t like Wouk or Michener much.
A lot of writers derided by Substack Boyz litcultism basically ARE middlebrow, like Rooney or Zavin (someday we are going to fight about Kushner, whose Flamethrowers and Mars Room are two of the best books of the last 25 years) at the same time the authors they flog as great are ALSO middlebrow…middlebrow could have plenty of sex and be surface anti-bourgeois too. Lots of writers didn’t know they weren’t reaching the heights.
Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt are two examples of the latter, writers who think they are literature and are really missing the mark.
It’s all a kind of tribal signaling and it can be useful when trying to define or analyze, but always has to be remembered as contingent and unreliable
Great essay today!
1. I was kind of getting at something w/ the middlebrow discourse when I was talking about Forster in the comments of sympathetic opposition's latest newsletter -- I almost called him the king of the middlebrow novelists but figured the term muddied more than it helped (I don't considere it a bad thing or anything, I love Forster). I feel like the novel is a middlebrow form at bottom. It emerged at the same time as the middle classes, so that makes sense, right? And the novels considered the most highbrow are deformed or mutated in some way. Like Moby Dick is half a novel and half an Anatomy of Melancholy style prose treatise on whaling. Woolf and Faulkner and James have that minute attention to consciousness, etc etc. Sometimes you read something and you're like "what a good solid *novel* novel, no funny business" and that usually accords with being slightly middlebrowish. It's not very productive to go around categorizing everything into Brows but there's something there, I think. I'm sure some Marxist literary critic I haven't read has made this exact point more eloquently.
2. I agree that Masscult and Midcult doesn't really hold up but the essay about the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in that same volume is very funny and scathing, and ultimately a kind of better and nobler version of Mass/Midcult as he is standing up for the ability of the average person to appreciate the archaic grandeur of the King James bible vs. a flat and conversational version meant to be "relevant" to "people today." It's actually one of my favorite essays. (https://dwightmacdonaldarchivio.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/updating-the-bible/)
3. Those Ferber covers are nice! I wonder whose idea it was to reprint them, it's interesting that publishers think there's still enough demand. I would have thought she went the way of Booth Tarkington or whatever.
Point 3 doesn't surprise me at all: going into this I was under the impression Ferber had better name recognition than Cather, entirely because "Show Boat" and "Giant" were adapted into such canonical works of musical theater and film, respectively. (She was so widely adapted that "Cimarron" doesn't even merit a mention in this piece, lol.)
This is a great comment — have been thinking for some time that there is no universally-agreed-to-be-‘highbrow’ novel which is formally a straightforward novel-like novel. At the same time, I suppose, the deformed novel has its roots in the Quixote, so who's to say that we're not mis-labelling original vs. mutant ...
I do think perhaps we are all being a little harsh on Masscult and Midcult here, though; I know it is very enjoyable to cast down our idols and burn our graven images and so on, and certainly there is plenty of ignoble snobbishness in it, but I think the seeds of the KJV essay (which I agree is the better one!) are in there even so. (And surely there is a direct correspondence between M's 'Midcult' & 'middlebrow', and not 'Masscult' = 'middlebrow' as Naomi has it?) MacDonald's characterising the avant-garde in it with ‘It was an elite community, a rather snobbish one, but anyone could join who cared enough about such odd things.’ has stuck with me for many years. Cared enough about such odd things. Cared enough!
Yeah I agree and this is a pro-DMD account, I just happen to think he's better at specifics than at generalizing and doing big pithy theories. I'd have to give it another look though, it's been a while. I do remember reading that essay for the first time soon after seeing some bad superhero movie and being like brother...I'd kill for a little midcult right now.
Thanks for the pointer to Macdonald's essay -- it is excellent indeed. (I probably have a half-dozen different translations, but for reading pleasure I always use the KJV. The RSV and NIV are right out, and "The Message and the Good News Bible, I trust, are already burning in the hellfire Macdonald thought might await those who don't marry. But some others are useful for accuracy -- the Revised English Bible, for example, partly because it includes the deuterocanonical books.
This is interesting! I'm not sure if I quite have this, but it feels to me like the distinction between what you're reading and appreciating in Edna Ferber and what MacDonald is denouncing is this: "Masscult is not really the art of the people, it’s an art produced for the people." I'm reading you to say, basically, that "So Big" is good because it accurately captures the experience and value system of middle-class America--a class that Ferber emerged from and a value system that she probably shared. Basically--you're calling it middlebrow and not highbrow because it's middle-class art instead of upper-class art. My sense is that what MacDonald is objecting to is the idea of erudite, new york intellectuals (or something) creating stuff that they think will appeal to Milwaukee housewives instead of creating stuff that they, themselves, love. And maybe to the extent that Ferber's writing isn't quite good enough in terms of craft to qualify as great work, but is expressing something authentic, that it's sort of the folk art of the middle class.
The time I most remember being exposed to the idea of middlebrow was sometime after college. I was reading "House Rules"--a Jodi Picoult book about the family of an autistic child, and my roommate (who majored in English) reacted like I was sitting in the living room snacking on human feces. He said something like that of course it's fine to enjoy camp and trash, but that he can't understand why anyone would want to read middlebrow literature. My reason for wanting to read it is that my sister is on the autism spectrum and Picoult captured a lot of stuff that was really compelling to me, and helped me understand my own life better.
And maybe in some sense that can get at what (if anything) it means for middlebrow fiction to be good in a unique way. Work that's written, in some sense, for the author is successful if it does something like convey the author's truth or experience or something to the reader. But, if everyone only writes about their own truth, we just get a bunch of intellectual novels about being an intellectual (maybe also being a child who will grow up to be an intellectual). Jodi Picoult, if I remember, doesn't have an autistic child or sibling, but did talk to lots and lots of families with autistic children and lots and lots of autistic people, and maybe what determines whether her book was a success is whether it says something meaningful to the people she's writing *for*, even if that meaningful thing isn't in some sense *hers*.
Uneducated opinion incoming: Having just finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, I nominate John Gunther as the Patron Saint of Mid-Century American Middlebrow writing.
Wrote a TON of non-fiction & fiction best sellers (but was constantly being scolded by his wife that his Non-Fiction too surface level/vapid, his fiction was apparently just regurgitating his life in incredibly obvious ways but apparently sold A TON), and then wrote one masterpiece (Death Be Not Proud), that has remained in print ever since unlike IIRC every single other book he ever wrote (TBF his non-fiction is incredibly dated)
I think there's a really deep vein here and in other of your posts of a fundamentally hopeful art that isn't just kitsch, a vein which has been concealed by quite a lot of the highest-status arts for a hundred years (certainly for 60.) Hope you keep digging.
Be very careful, Naomi, you could wander into the land of the bodice-rippers and discover that there are some very good writers there, women who kept their feet on the ground, where most readers live, and at the same time legitimized the life choices of women who chose not to look at men as the enemy. Instead, he is just a complicated human being who needs chaperoning and a little gentle guidance. There's a book by two of those good writers, Jayne Krentz and Ann Maxwell, called "Dangerous Men, Adventuresome Women. A collection of essays by creators who broke the mold of Mills&Boon (Harlequin) in the 1970s and went on to great success. Yes, there can be commercialism involved but these women wrote stories that other women simply wanted to read. They continue to sell very well but seldom get credit for providing a good cash flow for publishers to plow back into their "high-class" authors. La-dee-dah.
Romance is a fascinating genre; you can do just about anything as long as the FMC and MMC get together. The plot and to some extent characters are fixed but you have enormous freedom of setting, style, etc.
It's really funny that SO BIG as described is simultaneously a very familiar narrative (parent hustles in unglamorous field to eke out a quiet-but-noble middle class existence, their child uses that middle class existence as a springboard into wealth sans scruples) but also... like... one that doesn't get literary treatments anymore.
In part because so much of our culture is written BY those wealthy amoral children -- the 2025 version of this narrative (SO CHONKY?) is a novel about the child of farmers who becomes a McKinsey analyst, which is good actually, because you should get your bag, and also blue collar work is icky.
Wonderful thoughts. I have occasionally had very nice meals at Applebees and Chili’s. I sometimes get more from a Substack essay than from a NYRB essay. I just had manufactured LVP flooring from Vietnam installed in my house, and it’s wonderful. I don’t finish 50% of best selling books.
Remember the theme when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes in 2020? “I’m never doing this again, so I just don’t care.” That’s a philosophy that I should inculcated earlier about life.
Wow, I tried "So Big" this spring and couldn't finish it. I looked back at my goodreads review of it and realized that I loved the first chapter (I called it "electric") but then I felt totally bogged down when Selina moved to the farm. I guess I really didn't like Selina's interior monologues, the descriptions of the other farmers in the town, and I thought the plot was obvious?
All of this was happening when my very small child wasn't sleeping, because I recognize the novel you're describing and I'm interested in it, but it just didn't happen for me at all!
On the other hand, I just read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in an absolute fever of a week (I used the immersion technique of audiobook, paper copy, and ebook on my phone rather than reading other stuff on my phone) and I loved it, so our tastes aren't that different. I just reread your post about it and you are entirely correct! There is just something about HBS the person that must have really, really rubbed people the wrong way, because as an author she's just a master. I didn't even find the first ten chapters that boring. I've lived in Cincinnati and New Orleans and it's absolutely creepy how much of Stowe's description of the social life of those places is STILL impacted by the respective cultures described in Uncle Tom's Cabin. There's still this legacy of the tremendous violence of the fugitive slave law in Southeastern Ohio (I mean, it's where Beloved was set, too) in Cincinnati, and it's a place with political views (white-nationalist, old-money conservative, Quakers, progressives) that definitely show up in the novel. And the St. Clares in New Orleans are so perfectly a representation of the kind of people in that city...HBS is great, great, great.
I guess the teacher who used to teach this advanced placement class before me for decades (she retired rather than teach during the pandemic) might have assigned it because she's got some class copies and that's the copy I read last week. Though I'd never assign this to the whole class, if a kid is looking for a choice novel during our "power and social control" unit, I think I'd recommend it! It's probably just as or even more compulsively readable than Dickens. A lot of my students come from families who go to evangelical churches, so the biblical allusions wouldn't even be off-putting! They could even draw some parallels to the hypocrisies in their current churches to the way that Stowe devastatingly points out the complicity with the churches in the 1850's with slavery.
This was such a warmly written piece on an author I wasn't really familiar with, and I love reading some of your pieces introducing me to little-taught often American writers.
Intrigued by this quote:
"many of these other novels toodle around for a hundred pages, getting the hero and heroine together and establishing their conflict, in a way that ultimately dissipates a lot of the energy of the book."
This has been my experience with much high brow literature, but it seems here to be something you consider a mark of this middle register. Is the high brow toodling different, more purposeful in a way that the uninitiated might miss? Is it simply not happening at all, perhaps and I've mislabeled it?
Not a mark of middlebrow fiction per se, just a problem with this specific writer's subsequent novels. And mostly noticeable because _So Big_ is much better structured.
Good read. So much to unpack here. I was thinking about one of my girlhood favs, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place. I do think it is snobby to be told what is acceptable to like.
Hmmm. I HATED Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but for reasons that have nothing to do with its being middlebrow. It was more the way that for a novel ostensibly centered on games and game design, the actual games and the experience of gaming seemed so perfunctory. Even when Zevin writes an entire chapter from the perspective of someone identifying with a character in a game, it didn't ring true - it didn't feel like the actual experience of playing a game.
But that said, I agree with your basic premise, though I would extend the category of "middlebrow" more broadly: not just celebrations of the middle class, but any works written with literary skill but which in narrative and style and characters and themes keep themselves within the confines of what average readers can read without difficulty. This category of works CAN be misfires like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but can also produce absolute masterpieces. I would categorize Graham Greene as a quintessentially middlebrow writer - narratively undemanding, focusing on dramatic crises which the average reader can appreciate - but also unforgettable in the way he constructs his narratives and characters. Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca is another book. Neither of those are baggy writers - they are taut and gripping.
I wrote about The Sleepers
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-millennial-darkness-of-matthew-gasda/
I feel like everyone has their own definition of "middlebrow," which is probably why it isn't the most useful term. To me, there's "entertainment" fiction, which can be in most genres but is characterized by obviously just trying to entertain, and there's high-brow/literary fiction, which is characterized by having something interesting to say about human nature/society/etc. In the middlebrow, you have stuff that really ought to be just entertainment but is basically BS-ing some sort of theme even though it has nothing really to say about it.
But then, I've never read any of the academic literature on the middlebrow. I didn't even know that existed! I'm interested to check it out and see what they say though.
Would Pearl S. Buck also be considered middle-brow?