The dharma of writing high-brow fiction

Once upon a time, a woman was asked to elaborate upon the value she provided for society.

"Well," she said. "I write fiction. It's pretty entertaining to read, I think."

"Great," said her interlocutor, who was definitely not a demon. "So a lot of people enjoy reading your work?"

"Well...no. I mean some people do, but not really enough people to make it remunerative for a publishing company. With each book, I have to convince some publisher that a lot more people will like this book than liked my last one."

"Oh, okay," said the demon. "And how do you do that?"

"Well...basically there's this phenomenon where everyone decides that a given book is the book to read this year. It's called breaking out. And the existence of this phenomenon is great, because anybody can break out! Authors can break out even after their eighth or ninth book."

"Why does this phenomenon occur?"

"Nobody knows! But I guess it’s basically because human beings are social. Most people who read books don't read that many books—if they're gonna sit down and read a book, they want it to be the same books other people are reading, because that confirms that these are the books that it's important to read! I’m not at all immune to this feeling, myself! I was recently at a dinner with a bunch of PhDs and doctors where people were saying how much they liked Fourth Wing, and it made me think. Oh my god, I should read that book! It reminded me of Twilight, where I only read it because a girl I knew from high school (we were not in high school at the time, we were about twenty-three) insisted that I read the books and talk about them with her. And I did, and it was great. Anyway...even I am like, 'Should I actually read Fourth Wing? It seems like the thing to read this year!'"

"Okay, so that sounds wholesome enough. What determines whether a book will break out or not?"

"Well, that's the thing. Nobody really knows what's going to break out, but in practice publishers won't believe your next book might have breakout potential unless you can demonstrate to them how it’s both: a) similar to other popular books: b) different from your past books, which were all failures.”

"Oh, okay, and how have you done that in the past?"

"Well, I wrote three commercial novels that were all the type of thing that might break out, but in each case my particular execution was a bit too morally ambiguous to really please the target audience. As a result, I thought perhaps I could have success in this category called ‘literary fiction’ that consists of books which are extolled as containing unusually high amounts of complexity and nuance. These books are marketed to the small subset of readers who pride themselves on taste, and it’s believed that these readers are notionally more open to ambiguity."

"Oh, and are you going to say these readers are secretly very close-minded and terrible?”

"No! The thing about these readers is that they fundamentally have a lot of trust for authority. If a book critic tells them a book is really smart, these readers will expend a lot of effort trying to read that book. I think that's very sweet! It also makes marketing to this reader a lot easier, in some ways, because this is the reader that is probably gonna read a book just because it got reviewed well in the Times or because it got an award."

"I've heard that these readers don't exist."

"They are dwindling. They are definitely dwindling. I would say it's because many of the books they're asked to read are actually bad. But others would have different opinions. Anyway...my problem is that there is no possible way that this reader is ever gonna read my books."

"Surely you're joking."

"This reader—they're great and all—but they read books that get reviewed in big outlets and get awards and stuff, and that doesn't happen for my books."

"Why not?"

"Well...I mean, I could definitely say a bunch of things that are true about race, class, gender, etc. But what's also true is that stylistically speaking, on the level of the line, my writing just doesn't seem that special to the people who are in charge of deciding which books ought to excite people. Personally, I think the lines that do seem special to them are usually quite bad, and that in fifty or a hundred years, the way we write high-brow fiction now will seem extremely mannered and artificial, with its pointless, showy insistence on a lot of extraneous detail. Ultimately, I think my own style is a much more fruitful path for the future of fiction."

"That makes it sound like you're ahead of your time."

"Yes...I’m making it sound that way. And I do think novels in English fifty years from now will look and sound much more like my novella than like, say, Ocean Vuong. But...that's not because of me! That's just a natural development—a regression to a better way of telling stories. I'm reading Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy right now, and this book is only forty years old, and yet it feels like it was written much earlier, because the writing is so simple, and there's so much focus on creating simple situations from which we can allow drama to flow organically. In general, the apparatus of storytelling seems to be much smaller in this novel than in a contemporary novel. So yes, I do think in fifty years, novels will be a lot more readable, and they will look a lot more like my own work, but...will people actually be reading my work? I dunno. Hard to say."

"I feel like I, the demon, am being asked to convince you that your own work is good. Shouldn't you believe in it yourself?"

"Of course I believe in it! Every blog post is something that I'm confident has a readership. But when it comes to putting together an actual book, the question becomes more difficult. I can definitely put out books, but I have to think about my own ends and about what's realistic. Unless I can gain some kind of critical acclaim for my fiction, it's highly unlikely that a publisher would believe it could break out as a literary novel. And if a publisher doesn't think I can break out, then they're unlikely to publish me at all."

"So how do you get that critical acclaim?"

"Well, I could submit myself to awards and fellowships and/or I could try to put out a novella with a small press or something, but really…why bother? The effort of convincing people that the work is good seems so extraneous to actually doing the work itself. Moreover, if I wanted critical acclaim then I couldn't talk trash. Like if my path forward in life really depended on, say, some small magazine starting to say nice things about my work then I'd have to conduct myself completely differently!"

"So all your trash-talking sounds like self-sabotage then."

"Kind of, yeah. If I really believed very strongly that work like my novella was at the core of why I exist as a person and why I write—if I thought that I had some unique creative vision that only I could bring into this world—then I would need to act completely differently. My whole existence would be held hostage to the future impact that I hoped my work would someday have. In my case, the work is good, and I do think that would be a valid choice to make. But...I personally think that my time is better spent on other things than playing the literary game. That's what I meant when I said it’s hard imagine that my own dharma could be to write novels."

"Okay, yeah, because that sounded very dismissive of people who write fiction."

"No, I understand. I read lots of contemporary books. I am entertained by lots of contemporary books. Obviously, it is peoples' dharma to write those books! I was mostly just talking about my own dharma, and my own inability to really fit any of the niches that the publishing industry has demanded of me. The truth is, I have tried many times to produce breakout work. With every one of my YA novels, my fans are like, How did this get published as a YA novel despite the fact that its characterization, plotting, and worldview are utterly unlike most YA novels? And the fact is, with every one of those books, I wanted to produce something that would sell! I convinced my publisher that each of those books could be a breakout! I just completely failed in the end to produce the actual book that people wanted from me. Which is praiseworthy in the abstract—I had a vision that I ultimately couldn’t compromise—but...are you gonna go out and read my YA novels?"

"No..."

"Why not! They're good books, better than most literary novels!"

"Well..."

"Because you don't read YA novels! So, you see? Like...if the NYRB was to reprint my YA novels and be like, Strange, unsettling deviations from the early 21-st century adolescent fantasia then you'd be like, shit, I better check them out!¹ But, barring that, it's not gonna happen. Anyway, it's very hard to describe, but I just know quite intuitively that playing the game is not the right course of action for me right now. I meet many writers who are still playing it, and I can tell most of them have a much better chance of success than I do. Oftentimes aspiring writers ask if they should invest more in Substack or be more outspoken here, etc, and I tell them, no, your first focus should on your book. Because usually these writers not only believe in the concept of contemporary serious literary fiction, they also still have a chance themselves of meeting success in that category."

"Except what if they don't actually believe most contemporary hype-machine books are good? But they still want to be successful anyway?"

"Well...that ultimately leads to a very dark place. Because if you don’t believe these books are good, then that means you’ve lost faith in the taste of the agents, editors, and critics who fostered those books. However, if you truly want to write thoughtful, complex, or formally inventive novels—how can you do that when you've lost faith in the apparatus that would potentially allow those novels to succeed?

"Hasn't that always been the problem artists faced?"

"Well...yes, I suppose, but it's still a problem. Writing something when you genuinely aren't sure who, if anyone, will be its reader—this is hard. Yes, everyone can tell themselves, Herman Melville died forgotten, but...we can't all be Herman Melville! There's only one Melville! Ultimately if you stop believing there is an audience of people out there who have good taste and might be receptive to your work, it becomes quite hard to write.”

"So...what should people do?"

"I have no idea! That's why I write for this blog—this whole story is just an explanation of why I've prioritized writing on this blog, which people actually read, versus continuing to dream of breakout success. For me, cutting ties to that unrealistic dream has also meant cutting ties to certain forms—the literary novel and literary short story—that ultimately were keeping me from attaining a real readership. But I understand if other people aren't yet willing to make that final break.”

Afterword

I mentioned Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy in this story, and I realized that I better introduce this book. Any Indian-American person of my generation would find it hysterically funny that I was reading this novel, which came out in 1993 and my mom has tried repeatedly to convince me to read (even though she’s never attempted to read it herself!). Reading this book is kind of like reading The Joy Luck Club if you’re an Asian-American millennial. Is The Joy Luck Club good? I have no idea, because who would actually read the book to find out?

Anyways, I think A Suitable Boy is might actually be good.

This book appears to be a British-style novel of sentiment, very reminiscent of Brideshead, Revisited. But…it’s about Indian people. A mother in the 1950s, living in a fictional city somewhat reminiscent of Patna, who is scheming to make a good match for her third daughter. I am very excited to see what happens next. Because this book is thirteen hundred pages long, I might be reading it for several weeks, so I thought I’d mention it here.

Here’s a paragraph from the section I’m currently reading, so you can get a flavor of the narration:

Mrs Rupa Mehra glanced in a cursory manner over her piles of old New Year cards before returning to the birthday roses. She took out a small pair of scissors from the recesses of her great black handbag, and tried to decide which card she would have to sacrifice. It was very rarely that Mrs Rupa Mehra bought a card for anyone, no matter how close or dear the person was. The habit of necessary thrift had sunk deep into her mind, but eight years of the deprivation of small luxuries could not reduce for her the sanctity of the birthday greeting.

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Two Notes

• First, I published an article in ARC: “Literary awards ought to be a popularity contest.”

• Second, I am going on hiatus next week for American’s Thanksgiving holidays (rather incredibly, my child has an entire week off from school). So you should hear from me next on December 3rd.

1. The NYRB put out a collection of romance comics, and I read the collection, which was fantastic, and then I got very into romance comics myself and bought tons of them. And…in the end, I do think that the Ogden Whitney collection that got me started—it was the best of the bunch! That collection did so much justice to the range and breadth of romance comics. It has what’s good about romance comics—the art style and the breezy 1950s set-ups—but the actual storytelling is wild. Like it’s hard to overstate how different these Whitney stories are from regular romance comics unless you’ve actually read the regular ones. I wrote more about romance comics here:

Spotlight on: anthologies of 1950s romance comics