The literati aren't reading new releases anymore

On a recent visit to New York, I did a reading, and a lot of the chatter was about how something seems to be wrong in the literary star-making machine. Publicists keep pulling the usual levers and nothing seems to be happening. Journals ignore their publicity requests. Or if the articles get written, they don’t get shared. The books come out, and nobody talks about them. For instance, Taffy Brodesser-Akner has a new book out. I’m sure it’s excellent—nobody is talking about it.

The only books that’ve received significant attention in the last three months are Lauren Oyler’s No Judgments, Honor Levy’s My First Book, and Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted. Of these, only the latter resembled a typical publicity cycle—the response was mixed, but respectful! The Oyler and Levy books were marked by vicious panning, of the like almost never seen in the last ten years.

It’s no accident that these two books attracted attention, because they were books you could talk about without actually reading them. In other words, they're the perfect books to discuss if your life is built around book discourse, but you haven't actually been able to read a book in months.

A lot of factors have been blamed for the failure of the typical hype machine—I think changes in the Twitter algorithm and user population are mostly to blame. There’s simply no way for someone like me to broadcast that they’ve read and enjoyed a book anymore.

But I think that, in part because of the loss of Twitter, people like me are simply not reading new releases anymore!

It’s a hard thing to put your finger on, but I know that I in particular have almost no desire to read even new releases that I’m fairly certain I’d enjoy. The only book anyone in my circles have talked about these last few months with the slightest excitement is Labatut’s latest, and he’s a foreign writer—not a part of the American writing scene at all (my book club picked The MANIAC for our next selection).¹

I’ve remarked a few times how it’s strange that I’m much more (economically) valuable as a reader than as a writer. I have to give away my fiction essentially for free (and even then, the number of takers is limited), but if I choose to praise a contemporary literary novel I can probably make a material difference in how it’s received. As far as I can tell, there’s a circle of maybe ten or twenty thousand readers, who through reviews, word of mouth, tweets, substack posts, etc, more or less determine which novels will be the winners in the short-term reputational sweepstakes.

A friend of mine is prone to talking about the ‘average’ reader, and how there are a number of readers out there who read literary fiction more-or-less casually. They go into the bookstore, and they might pick up a book by Philip Roth or Kafka or Ben Lerner or Leslie Jamison, and if they like the writing, they’ll buy and read it.

I am just as prone to telling my friend that the opinion of this person (who I am sure exists!) matters not at all when it comes to our culture’s collective attempt to assign literary merit to contemporary authors. That’s because literary merit is determined by expert opinion, and you’re only accounted an expert if you’re in conversation with other experts. The more other experts respect your taste, the more say you get.

Although my stock as a writer has remained pretty flat over the years, my stock as an expert has increased substantially! And until recently I’ve done my part in the process of affirming the worth of several seasons worth of ‘It’ books. I read Luster. I read Real Life. I read Detransition, Baby. I read Sally Rooney’s first two books. I praised them all, both in public and in private conversations, reassuring others who were uncertain about their lasting quality. Brandon Taylor in particular, although a very popular writer amongst readers of literary fiction, is a polarizing writer amongst the literati. But I think his first book was quite honest and nuanced. And since I’m known as an inveterate hater, my opinion is respected.²

There’s a reason that people like me read new releases. We hope to see ourselves occupying that same frontage in LARB or BookForum someday, so we read the current occupants. Sometimes we hate on the current stuff, but we also have an equally strong instinct to praise it, simply to reassure ourselves that good stuff can sometimes make it. As aspirants to literary glory, we invest our psychic energy into the system that we hope to someday inherit.

Without that incentive, why would we bother? Books aren’t movies—you don’t need to race to see them in the theater. Why would we rush to read this summer’s book instead of last summer’s book? Fundamentally it’s a matter of fashion—we care to be in touch with fashion, because that allows us, to some extent, to determine fashion.

Of course the vast majority of us will never inherit the position we seek. Every week I meet young writers working on their first book. Often they’ve been in McSweeney’s or The Missouri Review or Best American, they’ve won the Stegner or Steinbeck, they’ve gone to Iowa or McDowell. They think they’re anointed. They think agents will fight over their manuscript.

Most of them are wrong, and I think increasingly they’re coming to realize that.

And the more the hype machine fails, the harder it is to imagine yourself as a much-hyped author. If someone can have their debut story in the New Yorker, sell their book for a quarter million, and have their book disappear on arrival (I’m not talking about Levy, I’m talking about another friend of mine), then what hope do the rest of us have? And if the hype machine is failing, why read much-hyped books? Why invest in this system anymore, if the rewards prove illusory even for the ostensible ‘winners’?

I suppose we could do it merely for the pleasure of reading a good book, but the fact is, a lot of the products of the hype machine exist in a shadow land between good and bad. They might be good or they might be bad, and it requires an act of will to ignore their flaws and to affirm the literary quality the system claims to see in them. This is exactly what happened in Levy’s early reviews. Reviewers like Dwight Garner announced, well, there’s something here, but it’s underbaked. But later reviewers refused to follow the script. Which is fair enough, but it also felt a bit unfair, because almost any much-hyped book of the last decade probably could've been torn to shreds if reviewers really cared to. Most products of the hype machine, if we truly graded them on the same curve as the fiction we authentically love, would come up lacking.

In talking to my friend about this, I pointed out Sarah Thankam Matthew’s All This Could Be Different. This 2022 release came out in the penultimate year of the hype machine, and the machine managed to eke out a victory. It made lots of lists, got lots of starred reviews, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

But the book is written in this peculiar style that’s common to almost all novels by PoC women (at least those novels anointed by the hype machine). It’s told in an expository voice, where the first-person protagonist gives us a series of judgements and pithy descriptions. But each paragraph is contorted around these cutesy metaphors that occur so frequently that the writing almost seems like nothing more than a vehicle for delivering these strange idioms. Every single page of the book contains multiple such metaphors. From the first page alone:

• “a teak switch of a girl”

• “the economy had punctured like a tire”

• I was “three toddlers hiding in a suit”

• “my client was a baobab of a corporation”

That’s only the first page! It continues in that vein, relentlessly.

Is it bad writing? No, not precisely. If there weren’t so many other books written this way, we might think this was fun or inventive. The problem is that the hype machine only proffers up books that have ‘lyrical’ writing, but it also demands they be written in first- or close-third person point of view. Yet the character who is capable of narrating their life ‘lyrically’ is almost always going to be cutesy and shallow. It’s very difficult to feel deeply when you’re spouting lines like ‘my client was a baobab of a corporation’. When you’re in despair or when you desire deeply, you simply don’t write or think this way. The writing could work if it was an omniscient narrator, but that’s not allowed.

The thing is, it’s a toss-up whether this writing is good or bad. If a friend of mine came to me and they wrote like this, I’d say “Great job!” Because it’s a genuinely great attempt at creating something that might get nominated for a National Book Award! But do I really think it’s good writing? Or that people should aspire to write this way? Not really. The writing isn’t horrible. It’s better than many things. But it’s neither fresh nor interesting; it’s merely cute and clever.

There could be something great in the storytelling or point of view, but it would require an act of will on my part (and, I think, the part of most sophisticated readers) to make themselves believe that this writing style serves some deeper purpose beyond merely announcing the author’s cleverness.

If you think that you’d someday like to be nominated for a National Book Award, you have some psychological incentive to read this book and attempt to see understand whether or not this style is a worthwhile artistic choice. But if you’ve lost hope, then why bother reading this book? It would take five hours to read, and at the end of it would you feel anything at all? The question isn’t whether the book is good or not—we don’t really know, a priori, how good it is. All we know is that people say it’s good, and we’re supposed to think it’s good. But do we believe that judgment anymore? In other words, how willing are we to use our time and our critical faculties to launder the opinions of the hype machine?

If your friends are reading it, and you can discuss it with them, then maybe it’s time well spent! But if your friends are also not reading new releases, because you’re all burnt-out and disillusioned, then why would you bother? That’s why when this book came out in 2022, people read it, and it did well critically. When it came out in 2023 (C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey is also written in a twee-lyrical style), it did less well and aroused less comment and did not get any awards. And when it came out a few months ago (R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, amongst others), hardly anyone bothered to read it. All of these books have stylistic quirks that, on first reading, just strike me as bad writing. I imagine they strike most sophisticated readers the same way! There’s probably something good underneath the seemingly bad writing, but who cares to invest five hours of their life into the effort to find out? You can’t even say this disinclination on our part is ressentiment, because what’s happening is not that that the base of the pyramid is rising up and trashing those at the top—it’s that the base is simply walking away, going off to watch TV and play video games and do other things with their time.³

As for what’s next? I don’t know! Maybe we just need a year off! It’s an election year, we’ve got other shit to worry about. Maybe BookTok’ers will discover lit-fic, and that’ll become the new hype-nexus in our field. I do think that in the arts there is constant regeneration. It’s possible this merely represents a changing of the guard. Millennials are old. We’re not hungry anymore. Maybe the Zoomers will take over the job of consuming the products of the hype machine.

But what I’d like to believe is that we’ve started to hold the hype machine to a higher standard. I think the real problem is the hype machine has gotten a bit lazy.⁴ These companies have almost made a science of publishing the worst-written book that could conceivably be called good. But what if they tried publishing stuff that was new, strange, and inventive? What if we picked up a hype-machine book and were like…wow. This is really not at all what I was expecting. This is not a pre-digested type of book at all. This is really different.

I think that would be disarming in a different way! Instead of disarming us, like Matthew’s book, by merely being “plausibly good”, this would disarm us with its ambition. We’d think—wow, if a book this weird can get picked by the hype machine, maybe there’s hope for our stuff too! And boom, then we’d all be hooked once again.

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Addenda

I.

One person who is still reading new releases is Ross Barkan. He read and liked The Default World and did a Q&A with me for his substack. He’s a very generous literary citizen, and I’m grateful that he’s still doing the work that I’m increasingly unable / unwilling to do. He writes:

The Default World, thankfully, is neither “woke” nor “anti-woke” even as it skewers millenial culture. Kanakia, who has spoken of her own experience as a trans writer, is most interested in the ambiguities and tensions of daily existence that literature is best at addressing.

I think we had a great discussion. Here’s me discussing my relationship to ‘wokeness’:

You know...I generally steer a bit clear of anti-woke stuff. Because I write on Substack and don't call people out and generally don't adhere to political shibboleths, I occasionally get people who ask me, "Don't you hate how crazy and shrill all these trans activists are?" But to be honest, no, I don't hate that. I am happy and glad that a certain kind of out-of-touch big city liberal has taken trans rights to heart.

II.

Speaking of virtue signaling, Lamea Abuelrous is the owner of Temo’s Cafe in the Mission District (here in SF). She’s also Palestinian, and she’s trying to raise money to get her family (four adults and six children) out of Rafah, in Gaza. Her brother in law was recently shot and bled to death because no medical help could get to him. I think the idea is to get them into Egypt, which (since the border is closed) costs an immense amount of money. Lamea is a wonderful woman and a fixture in the community. It’s been so interesting to meet, through her, so many of our neighbors here in the Mission. I’ve already donated a fairly significant amount to Lamea’s GoFundMe, but I got hit up by a friend to also donate a manuscript review. I feel a little embarrassed by the whole thing, since my policy is not to take money from aspiring writers.⁵ I told the organizer that if we didn’t meet the reserve, I’d just donate Lamea the $200 myself, so if you really want to help Lamea, you should bid on a manuscript critique from one of the other authors.

1. I wrote this post before reading the book. The MANIAC was incredible. I deeply enjoyed it, as did everyone else in our book club. It’s exactly the kind of bizarre, ambitious book that’s very, very rare amongst hype-machine products.

2. Of the books mentioned in this paragraph I’d have to say that I liked Luster the most. The writing and storytelling were self-assured, without any of the surface gleam that writers often resort to in order to get a reputation as ‘great stylists’. Both the characters and the racial politics were very nuanced, and as a fuck-up and disappointment myself I definitely related to the portrait of the ‘bad’ Black girl—the one who’s not a credit to her race or her position in life.

3. In this it strongly resembles the crisis of peer review in academia—where it’s become increasingly difficult to find mid-career professors willing to ‘put in their dues’ by reading other peoples’ manuscripts.

4. My least favorite genre of Substack comment is when someone tells me, “Thus has it always been, and thus it always shall be.” Then they say something like, oh, in 1926, Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer instead of The Great Gatsby. Essentially, that it's foolish to expect the literary-critical apparatus to reward stuff that's actually good. But let's take that argument to its logical conclusion: are we saying that in all times and in all places, the literary apparatus is equally good at recognizing virtue? No, obviously there are differences. Look at the Pulitzers. Virtually winner from 2000 to 2009 was a readable and rewarding book. Over the following ten years, only two or three were even readable, much less rewarding. I think there are years when everyone takes seriously their responsibility to find and reward great literature, and there are years when people seem much more concerned for passing fashions. (Also, I liked Arrowsmith a lot. My third favorite Sinclair Lewis novel).

5. If someone wants notes from me, I’ll usually do it for free, even if they’re a stranger, since I sort of admire the chutzpah.