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.
This was really good, and I don't say this because I was mentioned. This has been on my mind as well. One can't really resent the "hype machine" because it simply doesn't work. I think it began failing, for a variety of reasons, when we hit the 2020s. Even old novels that were considered flops by the standards of how much they were hyped were, by today's standards, quite successful - I am thinking of Garth Risk Hallberg's "City on Fire" which was a good but not great book and never made back its advance *but* was elevated enough to be discussed and debated in the fall of 2015. Tom Wolfe reviewed it in the Times. Lorentzen panned it. For a few months, it unquestionably "mattered."
I am increasingly distrusting of mainstream critics, and look to word-of-mouth and even Substack for new novel recommendations. Honor Levy's book was actually not panned as much as people think - Garner offered qualified praise, and most tried to "understand" what a young person might be up to. The true pan came from Sam Kahn, via Substack. I still have not read Levy and I don't really plan to; I have too much else to read. I *did* read a novel Garner very much hyped, "Headshot," which got longlisted for a Booker and made Obama's reading list. "Headshot'" convinced me I couldn't trust mainstream opinion much anymore. It's a good but not great book, vignettes strung together to make a novel, and it's a rather strange and deracinated portrayal of youth boxing.
Anyway! One thing I will say, as an aging hyper-ambitious but once young person is that the collapse of the hype machine has had something of a liberatory effect. I have a lot less anxiety today. I don't feel I'm in competition anymore, and I can just write and read about the things I care about. It must have been excruciating to be a novelist in the 20th century or even the 2000s who wanted to be anointed but was not. To have been at the same parties as Franzen or Lethem, but to have toiled in their shadow, despite sharing a generation, a race, a gender ... a bit like being the Jewish writers who couldn't quite make it like Roth or Bellow in the 60s.
Re your last paragraph, I feel something similar. I do often think, "Maybe my work is good and maybe it's bad, but is there anyone capable of saying it's bad who hasn't already hopelessly compromised themselves by overpraising terrible stuff?"
Great article about a world––the literary hype machine–– I don't know very much about. although perhaps I'm influenced by hype more that I know.
I liked Help Wanted quite a bit. But I remembered liking Adele Waldman's first novel so I was going to buy and try her second no matter what.
Ross, I'm going to give "Winner" a try because of your recommendation. I'm coming off a magical reading experience of "Custom Of The Country," which became my favorite Wharton so the comparative bar is quite high!
There seems to be an analogue in the art world according to art world people I know who confirm the themes in this NYT article about the crash of young artists.
The time factor can’t be overstated. Books are such an investment (I mean this in the best possible sense. They require the most of you but can also provide the greatest possible reward), and I’ve found myself gravitating towards books whose quality have been vetted by time. I’m intentionally trying to change that though and just picked up Incel and My First Book. Will be on the lookout for others and am open to suggestions!
My favorite literary fiction of this year is Say Hello to My Little Friend, which hasn’t been talked about very much that I’ve seen. Maybe bc it’s not written in that cutesy-lyrical voice you describe, but rather a kind of 19th century omniscience that also feels very contemporary? It’s a great trick, highly recommend!
The last truly great “novel” written & traditionally published by a native-born American was Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy (which was actually a single novel in three parts released inside one year by FSG in 2014).
Every book I’ve enjoyed since then has been from non-traditional publishing, non-American authors, or by authors who don’t write in English (Labatut, of course, along with Han Kang, Ryō Asai, Knausgaard, and many other European-language/East Asian authors).
It seems like a tired (dead?) horse to beat, I know, but ever since Trump descended that golden escalator in June 2015, the attention of the entire culture was warped by circus journalism to pay more attention to real-life clowns over any conjured by authors in books or fiction more generally.
(The real test of this theory would be to closely examine industry-wide book sales over the course of 2015 to see if the warping effect was as sharp in real time as it has become in retrospect.)
Once Trump left office and the media was forced to report on events beyond his Twitter feed again, the entire information landscape had shifted to video, which simultaneously rendered a whole lot of legacy publication journalists obsolete while also changing the entire incentive structure for which topics get talked about/go viral. Thus the only books to have become “popular” since then are smut/smut-coded chick lit (CoHo, SJM, etc.). A bunch of lowest-common-denominator tripe from TikTok being pushed at us in the supermarket book sections (if they even have one anymore!) or “message pieces” DIEing on the shelves of Barnes & Noble despite rave reviews in the times and the like because no one wants to read “Grievance Studies, the Novel” for the 100 billionth time this decade alone.
The primary problem with publishing & books journalism more generally is that both have been captured by women to such an overwhelming + obvious degree that the average straight man doesn’t even consider reading fiction to be an option for how to spend his free time anymore (Sad!)
This, of course, is due to ever increasing income inequality as the underlying cause … but that’s a topic I’ll save for another time…
To wit: no amount of “hype” can save a bad book from itself!
Thank you for sharing what is happening in the literary world right now. I wonder where books can be promoted anymore. Social media has been changing so much. I'm newer to Substack, which is full of writers, so this is very relevant!
Feel like all the hype these days comes from TikTok rather than the lit machine - Colleen Hoover and Sarah Maas and so on. And I think publishers have started to catch on and are trying to get into the tiktok scene but ultimately they don't have control there.
The Maniac looks stunning. What's your favorite Sinclair Lewis novel?
Oh I went through a big Sinclair Lewis phase a few years back. Main Street is his best. It's about this librarian who marries a doctor and moves to his small town home and decides it's her mission to educate and civilize the small minded inhabitants! They are indeed small minded, but obviously they do not care for her efforts, and she finds herself depressed and distraught. I thought it was just so thoughtful and humane in how it treated everyone involved. I think of the book often! Lewis got steadily less humane as he wrote. Babbit still has traces of that quality, but is mostly judgement, and Elmer Gantry is just all judgement.
btw - big fan of this newsletter. Since subscribing a couple months ago I read every post and they're all different and interesting and I agree with a lot but disagree with some things and I like that.
"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." I wonder when we will get free of algorithms. Increasingly, we serve them and not the other way around.
I'm trying to remember books that I heard buzz about as new releases, say 10 years ago, and whether there was really a time when serious attention amounted to more than a "hype machine." Certainly anything new by Louise Erdrich generated a certain excitement because of her reputation. Debut bestsellers like "The Kite Runner" generated attention in part because of their topical interest, but also largely because of craft. My assumption now is often a curmudgeonly one, namely, that if a book is hyped, it must be literary drek. "Lincoln in the Bardo" is an exception to that, but even that book feels like a partially completed thought experiment.
Curious about your thoughts on "Demon Copperhead"? I think that one has been fairly hyped by now. I started it and put it back on my shelf. I've been wondering if I ought to return to it.
I feel about all this much as Sturgill Simpson feels about the music scene. I suppose the only good choice is always to spend less energy grumbling about the systemic flaws and more energy on my own personal craft. But it is disconcerting that it's hard to find new work that I truly admire or that feels groundbreaking stylistically.
Knausgaard and Ferrante got so much hype. It wasn't machine hype bc they were published by small presses, but people got so excited by their work and it was very well merited! Rachel Cusk was another import that did, I think, get a big US release, and the hype machine was definitely right about that one. This year Labatut has a lot of hype and it's also very merited.
Demon Copperhead read like a good middle grade book to me and could have had at least 100 pages cut. But I didn’t finish it so don’t take my non recommendation.
I liked Poisonwood Bible, but did not like Prodigal Summer. Flight Behavior taught well some years ago. I've heard good things about Unsheltered, but haven't read it. The book she cowrote with Stephen Hopp, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," is quite good if you are interested in sustainability and local food.
loved Poisonwood Bible but Pigs in Heavan and Bean Trees were meh (and that food book was worse: my quick & dirty review:
read this when it first came out and eating local was all the rage. this second turn was for bookclub. my assessment hasn't really changed: aside from the hilarity of her turkeys' sex life, this material is a waste of Kingsolver's talents as a writer and the magazine-like interruptions from her husband lecturing the reader to 'do' (as opposed to our voluntary task: read) were equally unwelcome. but if roping him into the project was an attempt to stay connected and married, it worked. this edition is the 10th anniversary and they are still together, although it may have also cost her name-recognition support of a restaurant he proposed.)
interestingly, she noted in the acknowledgement portion of Poisonwood that this was a book she didn't feel equipped to write, but persevered due to her husband's encouragement. I'm hoping this same tenacity gave us Demon Copperhead b/c I plan to read that one soon
Popping into say I LOVED Demon Copperhead!! And it’s not at all what I’d normally gravitate towards. I can’t comment on whether it’s overhyped, but what I love about it is that it’s a literary novel that, for me, has the propulsive plot of a thriller, it confront a number of hard subjects but the narrator had such a caustic sense of humor and gripping voice, I would’ve followed him anywhere. I have struggled with feeling engaged by new releases for years, most of the time I find myself in a reading slump. But Demon Copperhead was a book I was hungry to return to before bed, a rare feeling for me these days
really great and insightful article. i actually hadn't realized before reading this that it was this common for new releases to be flopping. to add a really lighthearted reason for my personal disinterest in new releases is i abhor hardcover books LMAO so i always wait a year or so until they get released in paperback. not sure if i'm the only one, but i personally haven't really been engaging with new releases, so it's interesting to read about all the various reasons new releases haven't been flying off the shelves.
I'd like to read more contemporary novels but it's a self perpetuating issue - because the audience is so small the motivation is so low. I literally work in the publishing industry and it doesn't feel like it matters! (not at a big 5 or in nyc but still) I imagine there was a time you might feel like you were missing out if you hadn't read Herzog or Rabbit Run when they came out. But as it is (probably also due to quality/rigor of mass education declining), the list of classics I haven't read stretches out so long that it just becomes a value proposition - am I going to get more out of reading Ben Lerner or Patricia Lockwood, which will probably be frustrating and twee in various ways, or John Milton?
And maybe the reason to read contemporary stuff is for insights into "the way we live now" but that mostly feels like they're telling me things I already know. The last ultra-new release I read was the Madeline Cash book and she definitely has some talent as a writer but it's also like, wow, modern society and the internet makes us numb and disaffected? You're telling me now for the first time.
I find that with a good contemporary novel I just tend to experience more pleasure when reading it than I would with a novel of the same caliber that's a bit older! I mean, a good contemporary novel doesn't need to be genius for me to enjoy it. Like...it's a pleasure to read something where the barrier to entry isn't as high as it would be for, say, Milton.
I actually quite liked several books mentioned here (but I fall easily for purple prose). I thought both All This Could be Different and Milk & Honey had something to *say* in between all the metaphors -- certainly the former, at least. On the other hand, I could barely get through When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill (maybe just Canada-hype-machined) because it felt like I was being cudgeled to death by metaphors for the sake of a half-baked story.
I'm far outside the book making, buying and marketing world, so I'm not seeing the hype machine in action or it failing to work. Maybe there's a distinction to be made in the hype machine's efficacy for debut vs established writers -- thinking of James by Percival Everett and All Fours by Miranda July which feel everywhere, two successful writers whose recent books seem to be everywhere more than their previous books. I've only read All Fours and certainly think it's enjoyably weird and specific enough to deserve the attention. But I'm a layperson with a Lit BA reading books alongside my tech job.
i was nodding along vigorously with your description and discussion of a certain mode of prose writing i think of as We Get It, You Have An MFA (although of course you don’t need an MFA to do it and many with MFAs do not), because it matched so exactly the thoughts and feelings i’ve been having about the book i’ve been reading, especially the sense that you start to feel like the point of the book is to deliver these lines rather than to tell the story it’s ostensibly about… and then i laughed when you mentioned the book in question (exhibit) as a more recent example of the phenomenon. i’m prone to second guessing my judgment when i’m told something is Good, so i found it very validating to read someone sharing my sentiments.
(for what it’s worth - there are things i have really liked in the book, elements or moments of characterization or observation that felt painful or relatable or funny or just sharp and true - enough such that i find myself wishing the book would relax a little and let me just feel them.)
LOL, so many people have written me about that book! I think your judgement verges on being the majority one! Just feels rude to tear something down, so folks are silent instead. I haven't read (much) of it though so really cannot comment.
What's funny is many MFA professors really push back on that kind of line-level overwriting (although I do agree that it's rampant amongst MFA students)--it's really the publishing Industry that rewards and demands it. Professors are generally much more careful readers than editors are =]
The Maniac was indeed an excellent read, though I think I liked it's predecessor more (When We Cease To Understand the World). Really interested to see where Labatut takes his fiction next.
What I found interesting about the Oyler book, which I both read and went to hear her talk about, was that it wasn't very much about books. There's a long trend now of literary people wanting to be extra-literary critics, which is probably fine, but does seem to be part of the situation you are describing. Like Oyler, I think Mating is excellent. I wish she'd written an essay abut that instead of one of the others. All of the debates Oyler started and wrote about are relatively dull in artistic terms. In the nineteenth century George Eliot was obsessed with the work of Charles Darwin. We have this! Little wonder books have lost a good deal of their cultural cache perhaps...
Yes, everyone wants to be a cultural critic! I think it's just hard to read books and have thoughts about them. I honestly have to constantly remind myself to make sure at least half my posts are, like, about books I've read, instead of about cultural phenomenon that don't necessarily require me to have read any books! The title of my blog, Woman of Letters, is a reminder to myself to write about books instead of just general cultural and political phenomena.
The fact that The Maniac made it all the way to an airport bookstore made me hopeful about literature for a while. Same with seeing your book just sitting on a shelf, front cover forward, at a physical (and very popular) bookstore in New Orleans. I’m fine with the mainstream hype machine stalling out if there’s at least some way quality literature can still be produced and read even if by a small audience.
Wow! That's incredible. Both of those things are incredible.
Yes to be honest now that I've put the idea of being anointed behind me, it's a lot easier to be dispassionate about the contemporary scene. There is a lot of good stuff actually. There are small presses out there where every single book they publish is pretty good! Like at one point I just read a bunch of Dzanc books without knowing anything about them besides that they were published by Dzanc. All were pretty worthy of my time, without the tics and quirks that mark much big 5 lit fic. It was so fascinating
This was really good, and I don't say this because I was mentioned. This has been on my mind as well. One can't really resent the "hype machine" because it simply doesn't work. I think it began failing, for a variety of reasons, when we hit the 2020s. Even old novels that were considered flops by the standards of how much they were hyped were, by today's standards, quite successful - I am thinking of Garth Risk Hallberg's "City on Fire" which was a good but not great book and never made back its advance *but* was elevated enough to be discussed and debated in the fall of 2015. Tom Wolfe reviewed it in the Times. Lorentzen panned it. For a few months, it unquestionably "mattered."
I am increasingly distrusting of mainstream critics, and look to word-of-mouth and even Substack for new novel recommendations. Honor Levy's book was actually not panned as much as people think - Garner offered qualified praise, and most tried to "understand" what a young person might be up to. The true pan came from Sam Kahn, via Substack. I still have not read Levy and I don't really plan to; I have too much else to read. I *did* read a novel Garner very much hyped, "Headshot," which got longlisted for a Booker and made Obama's reading list. "Headshot'" convinced me I couldn't trust mainstream opinion much anymore. It's a good but not great book, vignettes strung together to make a novel, and it's a rather strange and deracinated portrayal of youth boxing.
Anyway! One thing I will say, as an aging hyper-ambitious but once young person is that the collapse of the hype machine has had something of a liberatory effect. I have a lot less anxiety today. I don't feel I'm in competition anymore, and I can just write and read about the things I care about. It must have been excruciating to be a novelist in the 20th century or even the 2000s who wanted to be anointed but was not. To have been at the same parties as Franzen or Lethem, but to have toiled in their shadow, despite sharing a generation, a race, a gender ... a bit like being the Jewish writers who couldn't quite make it like Roth or Bellow in the 60s.
Re your last paragraph, I feel something similar. I do often think, "Maybe my work is good and maybe it's bad, but is there anyone capable of saying it's bad who hasn't already hopelessly compromised themselves by overpraising terrible stuff?"
Great article about a world––the literary hype machine–– I don't know very much about. although perhaps I'm influenced by hype more that I know.
I liked Help Wanted quite a bit. But I remembered liking Adele Waldman's first novel so I was going to buy and try her second no matter what.
Ross, I'm going to give "Winner" a try because of your recommendation. I'm coming off a magical reading experience of "Custom Of The Country," which became my favorite Wharton so the comparative bar is quite high!
There seems to be an analogue in the art world according to art world people I know who confirm the themes in this NYT article about the crash of young artists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/arts/design/young-artists-auctions-collectors.html?searchResultPosition=8
The time factor can’t be overstated. Books are such an investment (I mean this in the best possible sense. They require the most of you but can also provide the greatest possible reward), and I’ve found myself gravitating towards books whose quality have been vetted by time. I’m intentionally trying to change that though and just picked up Incel and My First Book. Will be on the lookout for others and am open to suggestions!
My favorite literary fiction of this year is Say Hello to My Little Friend, which hasn’t been talked about very much that I’ve seen. Maybe bc it’s not written in that cutesy-lyrical voice you describe, but rather a kind of 19th century omniscience that also feels very contemporary? It’s a great trick, highly recommend!
Yay! That's a good rec. If I see it mentioned a few more times maybe I'll read it =] See...we're doing it. Making new consensus
We're the 21st century Algonquin Club basically
The last truly great “novel” written & traditionally published by a native-born American was Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy (which was actually a single novel in three parts released inside one year by FSG in 2014).
Every book I’ve enjoyed since then has been from non-traditional publishing, non-American authors, or by authors who don’t write in English (Labatut, of course, along with Han Kang, Ryō Asai, Knausgaard, and many other European-language/East Asian authors).
It seems like a tired (dead?) horse to beat, I know, but ever since Trump descended that golden escalator in June 2015, the attention of the entire culture was warped by circus journalism to pay more attention to real-life clowns over any conjured by authors in books or fiction more generally.
(The real test of this theory would be to closely examine industry-wide book sales over the course of 2015 to see if the warping effect was as sharp in real time as it has become in retrospect.)
Once Trump left office and the media was forced to report on events beyond his Twitter feed again, the entire information landscape had shifted to video, which simultaneously rendered a whole lot of legacy publication journalists obsolete while also changing the entire incentive structure for which topics get talked about/go viral. Thus the only books to have become “popular” since then are smut/smut-coded chick lit (CoHo, SJM, etc.). A bunch of lowest-common-denominator tripe from TikTok being pushed at us in the supermarket book sections (if they even have one anymore!) or “message pieces” DIEing on the shelves of Barnes & Noble despite rave reviews in the times and the like because no one wants to read “Grievance Studies, the Novel” for the 100 billionth time this decade alone.
The primary problem with publishing & books journalism more generally is that both have been captured by women to such an overwhelming + obvious degree that the average straight man doesn’t even consider reading fiction to be an option for how to spend his free time anymore (Sad!)
This, of course, is due to ever increasing income inequality as the underlying cause … but that’s a topic I’ll save for another time…
To wit: no amount of “hype” can save a bad book from itself!
Thank you for sharing what is happening in the literary world right now. I wonder where books can be promoted anymore. Social media has been changing so much. I'm newer to Substack, which is full of writers, so this is very relevant!
Feel like all the hype these days comes from TikTok rather than the lit machine - Colleen Hoover and Sarah Maas and so on. And I think publishers have started to catch on and are trying to get into the tiktok scene but ultimately they don't have control there.
The Maniac looks stunning. What's your favorite Sinclair Lewis novel?
Oh I went through a big Sinclair Lewis phase a few years back. Main Street is his best. It's about this librarian who marries a doctor and moves to his small town home and decides it's her mission to educate and civilize the small minded inhabitants! They are indeed small minded, but obviously they do not care for her efforts, and she finds herself depressed and distraught. I thought it was just so thoughtful and humane in how it treated everyone involved. I think of the book often! Lewis got steadily less humane as he wrote. Babbit still has traces of that quality, but is mostly judgement, and Elmer Gantry is just all judgement.
btw - big fan of this newsletter. Since subscribing a couple months ago I read every post and they're all different and interesting and I agree with a lot but disagree with some things and I like that.
Yeah, agreed, and bookstagrammers. That's where I get most of my book recs these days, having found a few folks whose taste is similar to mine.
"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." I wonder when we will get free of algorithms. Increasingly, we serve them and not the other way around.
I'm trying to remember books that I heard buzz about as new releases, say 10 years ago, and whether there was really a time when serious attention amounted to more than a "hype machine." Certainly anything new by Louise Erdrich generated a certain excitement because of her reputation. Debut bestsellers like "The Kite Runner" generated attention in part because of their topical interest, but also largely because of craft. My assumption now is often a curmudgeonly one, namely, that if a book is hyped, it must be literary drek. "Lincoln in the Bardo" is an exception to that, but even that book feels like a partially completed thought experiment.
Curious about your thoughts on "Demon Copperhead"? I think that one has been fairly hyped by now. I started it and put it back on my shelf. I've been wondering if I ought to return to it.
I feel about all this much as Sturgill Simpson feels about the music scene. I suppose the only good choice is always to spend less energy grumbling about the systemic flaws and more energy on my own personal craft. But it is disconcerting that it's hard to find new work that I truly admire or that feels groundbreaking stylistically.
Knausgaard and Ferrante got so much hype. It wasn't machine hype bc they were published by small presses, but people got so excited by their work and it was very well merited! Rachel Cusk was another import that did, I think, get a big US release, and the hype machine was definitely right about that one. This year Labatut has a lot of hype and it's also very merited.
I have never read any Kingsolver ever! Should I?
Demon Copperhead read like a good middle grade book to me and could have had at least 100 pages cut. But I didn’t finish it so don’t take my non recommendation.
To be clear I love middle grade fiction.
I liked Poisonwood Bible, but did not like Prodigal Summer. Flight Behavior taught well some years ago. I've heard good things about Unsheltered, but haven't read it. The book she cowrote with Stephen Hopp, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," is quite good if you are interested in sustainability and local food.
loved Poisonwood Bible but Pigs in Heavan and Bean Trees were meh (and that food book was worse: my quick & dirty review:
read this when it first came out and eating local was all the rage. this second turn was for bookclub. my assessment hasn't really changed: aside from the hilarity of her turkeys' sex life, this material is a waste of Kingsolver's talents as a writer and the magazine-like interruptions from her husband lecturing the reader to 'do' (as opposed to our voluntary task: read) were equally unwelcome. but if roping him into the project was an attempt to stay connected and married, it worked. this edition is the 10th anniversary and they are still together, although it may have also cost her name-recognition support of a restaurant he proposed.)
interestingly, she noted in the acknowledgement portion of Poisonwood that this was a book she didn't feel equipped to write, but persevered due to her husband's encouragement. I'm hoping this same tenacity gave us Demon Copperhead b/c I plan to read that one soon
Popping into say I LOVED Demon Copperhead!! And it’s not at all what I’d normally gravitate towards. I can’t comment on whether it’s overhyped, but what I love about it is that it’s a literary novel that, for me, has the propulsive plot of a thriller, it confront a number of hard subjects but the narrator had such a caustic sense of humor and gripping voice, I would’ve followed him anywhere. I have struggled with feeling engaged by new releases for years, most of the time I find myself in a reading slump. But Demon Copperhead was a book I was hungry to return to before bed, a rare feeling for me these days
Here's to the average reader who pick up the new ben lerner when they spot it in store
really great and insightful article. i actually hadn't realized before reading this that it was this common for new releases to be flopping. to add a really lighthearted reason for my personal disinterest in new releases is i abhor hardcover books LMAO so i always wait a year or so until they get released in paperback. not sure if i'm the only one, but i personally haven't really been engaging with new releases, so it's interesting to read about all the various reasons new releases haven't been flying off the shelves.
I'd like to read more contemporary novels but it's a self perpetuating issue - because the audience is so small the motivation is so low. I literally work in the publishing industry and it doesn't feel like it matters! (not at a big 5 or in nyc but still) I imagine there was a time you might feel like you were missing out if you hadn't read Herzog or Rabbit Run when they came out. But as it is (probably also due to quality/rigor of mass education declining), the list of classics I haven't read stretches out so long that it just becomes a value proposition - am I going to get more out of reading Ben Lerner or Patricia Lockwood, which will probably be frustrating and twee in various ways, or John Milton?
And maybe the reason to read contemporary stuff is for insights into "the way we live now" but that mostly feels like they're telling me things I already know. The last ultra-new release I read was the Madeline Cash book and she definitely has some talent as a writer but it's also like, wow, modern society and the internet makes us numb and disaffected? You're telling me now for the first time.
I find that with a good contemporary novel I just tend to experience more pleasure when reading it than I would with a novel of the same caliber that's a bit older! I mean, a good contemporary novel doesn't need to be genius for me to enjoy it. Like...it's a pleasure to read something where the barrier to entry isn't as high as it would be for, say, Milton.
That's when I turn to the midcentury american novel!
I actually quite liked several books mentioned here (but I fall easily for purple prose). I thought both All This Could be Different and Milk & Honey had something to *say* in between all the metaphors -- certainly the former, at least. On the other hand, I could barely get through When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill (maybe just Canada-hype-machined) because it felt like I was being cudgeled to death by metaphors for the sake of a half-baked story.
I'm far outside the book making, buying and marketing world, so I'm not seeing the hype machine in action or it failing to work. Maybe there's a distinction to be made in the hype machine's efficacy for debut vs established writers -- thinking of James by Percival Everett and All Fours by Miranda July which feel everywhere, two successful writers whose recent books seem to be everywhere more than their previous books. I've only read All Fours and certainly think it's enjoyably weird and specific enough to deserve the attention. But I'm a layperson with a Lit BA reading books alongside my tech job.
i was nodding along vigorously with your description and discussion of a certain mode of prose writing i think of as We Get It, You Have An MFA (although of course you don’t need an MFA to do it and many with MFAs do not), because it matched so exactly the thoughts and feelings i’ve been having about the book i’ve been reading, especially the sense that you start to feel like the point of the book is to deliver these lines rather than to tell the story it’s ostensibly about… and then i laughed when you mentioned the book in question (exhibit) as a more recent example of the phenomenon. i’m prone to second guessing my judgment when i’m told something is Good, so i found it very validating to read someone sharing my sentiments.
(for what it’s worth - there are things i have really liked in the book, elements or moments of characterization or observation that felt painful or relatable or funny or just sharp and true - enough such that i find myself wishing the book would relax a little and let me just feel them.)
LOL, so many people have written me about that book! I think your judgement verges on being the majority one! Just feels rude to tear something down, so folks are silent instead. I haven't read (much) of it though so really cannot comment.
What's funny is many MFA professors really push back on that kind of line-level overwriting (although I do agree that it's rampant amongst MFA students)--it's really the publishing Industry that rewards and demands it. Professors are generally much more careful readers than editors are =]
The Maniac was indeed an excellent read, though I think I liked it's predecessor more (When We Cease To Understand the World). Really interested to see where Labatut takes his fiction next.
What I found interesting about the Oyler book, which I both read and went to hear her talk about, was that it wasn't very much about books. There's a long trend now of literary people wanting to be extra-literary critics, which is probably fine, but does seem to be part of the situation you are describing. Like Oyler, I think Mating is excellent. I wish she'd written an essay abut that instead of one of the others. All of the debates Oyler started and wrote about are relatively dull in artistic terms. In the nineteenth century George Eliot was obsessed with the work of Charles Darwin. We have this! Little wonder books have lost a good deal of their cultural cache perhaps...
Yes, everyone wants to be a cultural critic! I think it's just hard to read books and have thoughts about them. I honestly have to constantly remind myself to make sure at least half my posts are, like, about books I've read, instead of about cultural phenomenon that don't necessarily require me to have read any books! The title of my blog, Woman of Letters, is a reminder to myself to write about books instead of just general cultural and political phenomena.
I think you do a good job of that. I feel like I live under a cultural rock and am always looking for ways to be less detached from what's going on.
The fact that The Maniac made it all the way to an airport bookstore made me hopeful about literature for a while. Same with seeing your book just sitting on a shelf, front cover forward, at a physical (and very popular) bookstore in New Orleans. I’m fine with the mainstream hype machine stalling out if there’s at least some way quality literature can still be produced and read even if by a small audience.
Wow! That's incredible. Both of those things are incredible.
Yes to be honest now that I've put the idea of being anointed behind me, it's a lot easier to be dispassionate about the contemporary scene. There is a lot of good stuff actually. There are small presses out there where every single book they publish is pretty good! Like at one point I just read a bunch of Dzanc books without knowing anything about them besides that they were published by Dzanc. All were pretty worthy of my time, without the tics and quirks that mark much big 5 lit fic. It was so fascinating
Increasingly, I think, contemporary novels will struggle to achieve the aesthetics of classic 20th century novels, which is what they all wish to be.