I’m tempted to say it’s because they don’t read my novels but self-pity is no substitute for analysis, although it’s often a starting point. My real belief is that the widespread study of literature in academia planted the seeds of its decline in a variety of ways, culturally and in the marketplace.
My first sentence isn’t clear—I’m hurrying. A beautifully written work that has no story isn’t a successful literary work and for a long time now they have been hailed as such.
I think the impact on the gatekeepers and readers is more significant. People believe for a novel to be serious it shouldn’t have a plot, the language should be a struggle to read easily, and it should refer to other literary works, blow up genres and so on. They are challenging to read in every way but emotionally, and unlikely to sell. So yes literary writers can avoid academic approaches to writing by writing for TV and movies but that doesn’t help the novel thrive as a dramatic form that engages the reader with their own lives in a serious way.
I can’t go into detail at the moment because I’m traveling but the main issue for me has been the separation of a belief in story from elegance of language. And also a lack of awareness that’s there’s a distinction between plot and story that is crucial to understanding what once made literary fiction popular, apart from the obvious lack of competition.
One number I never tire of quoting is that, according to the British Publishers Association, in 2023 the *median* first-year sell through rate for literary fiction in the UK was just 241 copies.
I’m no insider but I do know a little about the Canadian publishing business. I think it is telling that, a couple of years ago, Ontario dropped the requirement for companies to print at least 500 copies of a book in order to qualify for the provincial tax credit that keeps many small publishers afloat. I take this to mean that book sales in general are so poor that shifting 500 copies is unrealistic for most titles.
Is there a connection here to the decline in broadly popular new public architecture and classical music? Those are also fields where contemporary creators have been plausibly accused of optimizing for in-group critical acclaim instead of lasting cultural esteem.
"Classical music" is a just an audio museum for the most part. If Beethoven and Mozart were alive today they would be writing film scores and blockbuster multimedia pieces for the Sphere in Los Vegas.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Modernism had a similar effect and the authors who became anti-modernist (Larkin, Betjeman, Housman, etc etc) sold well by brining the common reader back into things. But it's not like the modernists weren't popular! I think that the rise of television has to be an equally significant factor.
The real problem is in the editing process. Great fiction is unique in voice and style but every book that is published nowadays is published by committee. Don’t imagine why one person totally committed to an artistic pursuit is no longer capable of creating good art. Imagine they have and now they have to get that art past the five to six people who need to love a book for it to even have a shot at being successful and that each of those people are going to inject themselves into the finished product. Literary fiction is a hive mind product now. You’re reading a meshing of several different psyches on the page. The result is just stale slop. We have an editing crisis first and foremost and even if we dealt with that you have an authenticity crisis among writers themselves. They just won’t tell the truth. They’re too afraid.
Approximately ten years ago, I was in the office of a well-known editor who'd published one of the most talked-about, well-reviewed, and award-winning literary novels of that year. And I was shocked to learn that it has sold less than 10,000 copies. I cussed in disbelief. And the editor said. "Sherman, those are good numbers."
I can't tell if you're claiming the initial authors (ex: Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis) were themselves "optimizing" for critical acclaim, or if their critical (but not commercial) success caused later writers to follow this trend.
I'm also not sure how you're modeling the distinction between "the general reader" and "critics". It seems like you consider them completely alien to each other. To the extent that "real aesthetic merit" exists, do you think that critics are particularly bad at recognizing it?
I'm not a critic or English major, and I deeply love Gaddis (probably my favorite author) / Pynchon. There's this unjustified notion that the postmodernists wrote the way they did out of hate or obscurantism, and not because it resulted in better books. I'm pretty sure these authors would have been delighted if the public enjoyed them more (but they weren't willing to make the books worse in order to cause that to happen). IMO those authors just wrote very good books, modern writers liked them a lot and are trying to also write good books in the same style. I feel like your explanation is uncharitable.
Gaddis, for example, trashed critics relentlessly in all of his works. In his first, you can see a deep hope / desire that quality and beauty will "shine through and be recognized" by everyone. It completely flopped, both commercially and critically (when it was released, critics actually hated it and he needed to get a job as a technical writer). In his follow up book he has a partial self-insert character (technical writer who wrote a big ambitious novel that failed horribly) constantly upset at the notion that he "must have known he wasn't writing for the general audience"
Ex:
—But you must have known when you were writing it, you must have known you were writing it for a very small audience, I …
—Small audience! his feet dropped,
—do you think I would have worked on it for seven years just for, do you know what my last royalty check was Mister…
—Gall, I …
—Mister Gall? Fifty-three dollars and fifty-two cents, the publisher dropped it cold the day it came out he must think I wrote it for a very small audience too
—Yes I know I …
—I get letters from college kids who have it assigned in their courses, they must be passing one copy around.
I love The Recognitions. I probably should have clarified: I don't think the initial post-modern authors were optimizing for critical acclaim at all — you're completely right about Gaddis and The Recognition's critical reception e.g. Jack Green's 'Fire The Bastards.' And audiences definitely have the capacity to enjoy these sorts of books: 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' for example.
I think the distinction between the critic and the general audience is that while the critics have an incentive to praise books that are good, they also have an incentive to differentiate themselves from other critics. Before the post-modernists you had the heyday of well-written middle-class American fiction (Cheever, early Roth, Updike, etc). When this was fashionable the critics shunned Gaddis (though they did like early less avante-gardish Gass). In a decade when this trend had run its course, they could embrace Gaddis and the ilk.
But this incentive to differentiate, combined with the authorial incentive to seek status over sales, has sent literary fiction in a direction away from popular (not necessarily bad) taste. Which is why authors has moved away from the post-modernist style — James Wood skewered 'White Teeth' as 'hysterical realism' and now you don't see many of these kinds of works from newer authors (at least domestically).
One trivial data point in favor of the author's case about the financial prospects of literary fiction. I have a distant personal connection to one of the most recent bestseller literary authors named in the article, and the author was most certainly not writing out of financial need. I don't say that to diminish his talent, but to point out that a secured inherited income is very useful when it comes to writing multi-year novels with little financial certainty. Would-be authors without that certainty should look elsewhere.
too long, didn't read. But I grew up in the 50s, so I do remember John O'Hara et.al. , Saturday Review, etc. etc. And I read those books, at least when they appeared in paperback.
I'd offer one factoid: the Fairfax county Library system provides a weekly list of new additions to the system. I don't know how they choose the ones to publicize, but from that data it seems today's readers are into self-help books, romances, etc., not literary fiction. I assume the library system is data-driven: books which are read are kept, those that aren't read are tossed and new books are judged by similiarity to the current ones which are read. That sort of seems the pattern with streaming works. Indeed, age has moved me into being a watcher, not a reader.
Any discussion on the historical decline of literary fiction in America needs to include at least a mention of B. R. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" from 2001. Even if you dispute his particular critiques of the various authors and books within it, his general thesis is that literary fiction declined for many of the reasons you listed: That the literary world had become more insular and detached from the general readership, and in turn grew more pretentious and opaque. He's less interested in diagnosing the whys and more concerned with demonstrating the shift that occurred. He doesn't go so far as to name a particular decade when this started, but I bet that he would have named the 70s or 80s.
Another essay worth considering is "Dysfunctional Narratives, or 'Mistakes were Made'" by Charles Baxter. Baxter identified a growing trend in literary fiction to produce "pre-moralized" stories about passive, error-free protagonists, and storylines seemingly designed to avoid any interpretation beyond the author's. It sounds like another dreary complaint about woke lit, but he penned the essay in 1997. It's clear from it and his other essays that he's no reactionary. (In fact, Baxter taught in a Midwestern MFA program, and some of his examples come from his students.)
As with Myers, even if you don't fully buy Baxter's diagnosis, it's hard to argue that *something* shifted in American literary fiction away from full-bodied novels with faulty but sympathetic main characters toward books heavy on stylistic tics, "big ideas," sweeping generalizations, obscurantism, flattened emotions, and moralizing. The identitarianism of the last ten to fifteen years simply found a welcome home in this new framework.
I'm curious about one piece of data - how many copies do "best sellers" sell in different eras?
If different genres sold more today, that could push literary works off the list without a reduction in popularity.
For example, if the top 5 sellers in 1962 sold 10K, 9K, 8K, 7K and 6K copies (totally made up numbers), but the top 5 sellers in 2023 sold 30K, 29K, 28K, 27K, 26K, a book that just as popular as the 1962 ones wouldn't show up at all.
More recently I've been working my way through Alan Furst's Night Soldier novels and John LeCarre. Those are technically genre fiction, but both are incredible writers, as good as anyone I've read. I also think Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the best novel so far this century.
In sci fi, the Expanse series is also top notch writing. Very rich characters in challenge situations.
I think you are right. I'm more than willing to believe that literary fiction vanished because there was so much navel gazing that the entire genre crawled into its own navel. Michael Chabon wrote a good introduction to the 2003 McSweeney's Thrilling Tales anthology. Literary fiction had become a genre, and it had written itself into a corner. He was introducing a collection of old fashioned adventure stories and felt it necessary to justify it as an opportunity for literary authors to write something in a genre. Chabon used an interesting analogy. He described a world where the highest form of fiction was the nurse novel and imagined that an acclaimed author who had just written yet another successful nurse novel had then started wondering was that all literature was, nurse novels.
Chabon had a point. Surely there had to be more than nurse novels.
Magazine fiction was dying even before the 2000s. The pulps barely survived World War II. Maybe men had had enough adventure in the war. A lot of magazines were drifting into irrelevance, many of them closing. Women's magazines still ran fiction. I used to love the three hanky Christmas sob stories. But, even then literary fiction was drifting apart from mainstream interests. Updike, the joke went, was all about oral sex in the suburbs. It was difficult for the next generation to take this stuff seriously especially when it seemed to be so isolated from what was happening in the way people lived.
Could it have been technology? Maybe it was television or cheap paperback books. It could even have been the way book sales were counted. This change paralleled the rise of the big box book store, ISBN bar codes with the computerized book inventory system. When record stores started counting actual sales, country music, which had long been dismissed, was revealed to be almost half of all sales. It was a genre but too big a genre to deprecate. How accurate and representative was the book store sampling used to compile best seller lists into the 1980s? Perhaps literary fiction was never as popular as once thought.
there are not even any famous poets (much less geniuses) in the US under the age of 100. Had they not burned all the rhyming dictionaries to keep warm during the great depression, there would still be a new Emily Dickinson every year
The Couric list is pretty brutal. Almost everything is assigned reading at a sub-10th grade level, and what's left is fantasy/romance/true crime dreck. The demand side is the problem. If people were buying serious books and subscriptions, more talented people would devote their lives to the craft, starting a virtuous cycle. That's how it was when serious short stories could earn median wage for even the country's 50th best-paid writer. The reason why demand has collapsed is because discovery and criticism have been hijacked for political ends. You would get an armed rebellion if you forced adults to read the books children are subjected to today. Schools monotonically assign more dreck every year. The only people who come out of school still enjoying reading have bad taste. Those with good taste buy one or two $26 contemporary books from the local bookstore which exists by and for 70-year old women and correctly gauge that it's not worth the effort. Some adults do eventually discover Moby dick or Middlemarch and realize what they were deprived of, but they have no frictionless way to nourish talented young writers in the way that subscribing to a literary magazine used to do.
I’m tempted to say it’s because they don’t read my novels but self-pity is no substitute for analysis, although it’s often a starting point. My real belief is that the widespread study of literature in academia planted the seeds of its decline in a variety of ways, culturally and in the marketplace.
My first sentence isn’t clear—I’m hurrying. A beautifully written work that has no story isn’t a successful literary work and for a long time now they have been hailed as such.
I agree with all of this but it ought to be possible for it to survive outside academic study. Lots of writers didn't study Eng Lit.
I think the impact on the gatekeepers and readers is more significant. People believe for a novel to be serious it shouldn’t have a plot, the language should be a struggle to read easily, and it should refer to other literary works, blow up genres and so on. They are challenging to read in every way but emotionally, and unlikely to sell. So yes literary writers can avoid academic approaches to writing by writing for TV and movies but that doesn’t help the novel thrive as a dramatic form that engages the reader with their own lives in a serious way.
I do agree about gatekeepers. There is a lot of bad taste in the establishment.
I can’t go into detail at the moment because I’m traveling but the main issue for me has been the separation of a belief in story from elegance of language. And also a lack of awareness that’s there’s a distinction between plot and story that is crucial to understanding what once made literary fiction popular, apart from the obvious lack of competition.
can you say more?
One number I never tire of quoting is that, according to the British Publishers Association, in 2023 the *median* first-year sell through rate for literary fiction in the UK was just 241 copies.
I’m no insider but I do know a little about the Canadian publishing business. I think it is telling that, a couple of years ago, Ontario dropped the requirement for companies to print at least 500 copies of a book in order to qualify for the provincial tax credit that keeps many small publishers afloat. I take this to mean that book sales in general are so poor that shifting 500 copies is unrealistic for most titles.
Is there a connection here to the decline in broadly popular new public architecture and classical music? Those are also fields where contemporary creators have been plausibly accused of optimizing for in-group critical acclaim instead of lasting cultural esteem.
"Classical music" is a just an audio museum for the most part. If Beethoven and Mozart were alive today they would be writing film scores and blockbuster multimedia pieces for the Sphere in Los Vegas.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Modernism had a similar effect and the authors who became anti-modernist (Larkin, Betjeman, Housman, etc etc) sold well by brining the common reader back into things. But it's not like the modernists weren't popular! I think that the rise of television has to be an equally significant factor.
The real problem is in the editing process. Great fiction is unique in voice and style but every book that is published nowadays is published by committee. Don’t imagine why one person totally committed to an artistic pursuit is no longer capable of creating good art. Imagine they have and now they have to get that art past the five to six people who need to love a book for it to even have a shot at being successful and that each of those people are going to inject themselves into the finished product. Literary fiction is a hive mind product now. You’re reading a meshing of several different psyches on the page. The result is just stale slop. We have an editing crisis first and foremost and even if we dealt with that you have an authenticity crisis among writers themselves. They just won’t tell the truth. They’re too afraid.
Approximately ten years ago, I was in the office of a well-known editor who'd published one of the most talked-about, well-reviewed, and award-winning literary novels of that year. And I was shocked to learn that it has sold less than 10,000 copies. I cussed in disbelief. And the editor said. "Sherman, those are good numbers."
I can't tell if you're claiming the initial authors (ex: Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis) were themselves "optimizing" for critical acclaim, or if their critical (but not commercial) success caused later writers to follow this trend.
I'm also not sure how you're modeling the distinction between "the general reader" and "critics". It seems like you consider them completely alien to each other. To the extent that "real aesthetic merit" exists, do you think that critics are particularly bad at recognizing it?
I'm not a critic or English major, and I deeply love Gaddis (probably my favorite author) / Pynchon. There's this unjustified notion that the postmodernists wrote the way they did out of hate or obscurantism, and not because it resulted in better books. I'm pretty sure these authors would have been delighted if the public enjoyed them more (but they weren't willing to make the books worse in order to cause that to happen). IMO those authors just wrote very good books, modern writers liked them a lot and are trying to also write good books in the same style. I feel like your explanation is uncharitable.
Gaddis, for example, trashed critics relentlessly in all of his works. In his first, you can see a deep hope / desire that quality and beauty will "shine through and be recognized" by everyone. It completely flopped, both commercially and critically (when it was released, critics actually hated it and he needed to get a job as a technical writer). In his follow up book he has a partial self-insert character (technical writer who wrote a big ambitious novel that failed horribly) constantly upset at the notion that he "must have known he wasn't writing for the general audience"
Ex:
—But you must have known when you were writing it, you must have known you were writing it for a very small audience, I …
—Small audience! his feet dropped,
—do you think I would have worked on it for seven years just for, do you know what my last royalty check was Mister…
—Gall, I …
—Mister Gall? Fifty-three dollars and fifty-two cents, the publisher dropped it cold the day it came out he must think I wrote it for a very small audience too
—Yes I know I …
—I get letters from college kids who have it assigned in their courses, they must be passing one copy around.
I love The Recognitions. I probably should have clarified: I don't think the initial post-modern authors were optimizing for critical acclaim at all — you're completely right about Gaddis and The Recognition's critical reception e.g. Jack Green's 'Fire The Bastards.' And audiences definitely have the capacity to enjoy these sorts of books: 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' for example.
I think the distinction between the critic and the general audience is that while the critics have an incentive to praise books that are good, they also have an incentive to differentiate themselves from other critics. Before the post-modernists you had the heyday of well-written middle-class American fiction (Cheever, early Roth, Updike, etc). When this was fashionable the critics shunned Gaddis (though they did like early less avante-gardish Gass). In a decade when this trend had run its course, they could embrace Gaddis and the ilk.
But this incentive to differentiate, combined with the authorial incentive to seek status over sales, has sent literary fiction in a direction away from popular (not necessarily bad) taste. Which is why authors has moved away from the post-modernist style — James Wood skewered 'White Teeth' as 'hysterical realism' and now you don't see many of these kinds of works from newer authors (at least domestically).
One trivial data point in favor of the author's case about the financial prospects of literary fiction. I have a distant personal connection to one of the most recent bestseller literary authors named in the article, and the author was most certainly not writing out of financial need. I don't say that to diminish his talent, but to point out that a secured inherited income is very useful when it comes to writing multi-year novels with little financial certainty. Would-be authors without that certainty should look elsewhere.
Wasn't having enough money to not need to work the old definition of liberal as in liberal arts?
too long, didn't read. But I grew up in the 50s, so I do remember John O'Hara et.al. , Saturday Review, etc. etc. And I read those books, at least when they appeared in paperback.
I'd offer one factoid: the Fairfax county Library system provides a weekly list of new additions to the system. I don't know how they choose the ones to publicize, but from that data it seems today's readers are into self-help books, romances, etc., not literary fiction. I assume the library system is data-driven: books which are read are kept, those that aren't read are tossed and new books are judged by similiarity to the current ones which are read. That sort of seems the pattern with streaming works. Indeed, age has moved me into being a watcher, not a reader.
commenting "too long, didn't read" on an essay (partially) about the decline of reading literary texts is honestly hilarious
Any discussion on the historical decline of literary fiction in America needs to include at least a mention of B. R. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" from 2001. Even if you dispute his particular critiques of the various authors and books within it, his general thesis is that literary fiction declined for many of the reasons you listed: That the literary world had become more insular and detached from the general readership, and in turn grew more pretentious and opaque. He's less interested in diagnosing the whys and more concerned with demonstrating the shift that occurred. He doesn't go so far as to name a particular decade when this started, but I bet that he would have named the 70s or 80s.
Another essay worth considering is "Dysfunctional Narratives, or 'Mistakes were Made'" by Charles Baxter. Baxter identified a growing trend in literary fiction to produce "pre-moralized" stories about passive, error-free protagonists, and storylines seemingly designed to avoid any interpretation beyond the author's. It sounds like another dreary complaint about woke lit, but he penned the essay in 1997. It's clear from it and his other essays that he's no reactionary. (In fact, Baxter taught in a Midwestern MFA program, and some of his examples come from his students.)
As with Myers, even if you don't fully buy Baxter's diagnosis, it's hard to argue that *something* shifted in American literary fiction away from full-bodied novels with faulty but sympathetic main characters toward books heavy on stylistic tics, "big ideas," sweeping generalizations, obscurantism, flattened emotions, and moralizing. The identitarianism of the last ten to fifteen years simply found a welcome home in this new framework.
Your note about literary fiction getting more postmodern in the 70s reminded me of J. G. Keely arguing in favor of M. John Harrison's relatively postmodern approach against R. Scott Bakker, in which he derided Tolkien and similar "genre" fantasy writers for writing "as if the entire post-modern philosophical revolution had never happened" https://starsbeetlesandfools.blogspot.com/2015/06/worldbuilding-bakker-vs-harrison.html?showComment=1458955283269#c4652106653130330971
I'm curious about one piece of data - how many copies do "best sellers" sell in different eras?
If different genres sold more today, that could push literary works off the list without a reduction in popularity.
For example, if the top 5 sellers in 1962 sold 10K, 9K, 8K, 7K and 6K copies (totally made up numbers), but the top 5 sellers in 2023 sold 30K, 29K, 28K, 27K, 26K, a book that just as popular as the 1962 ones wouldn't show up at all.
I do remember liking Cat Person, even before it became the current thing
More recently I've been working my way through Alan Furst's Night Soldier novels and John LeCarre. Those are technically genre fiction, but both are incredible writers, as good as anyone I've read. I also think Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the best novel so far this century.
In sci fi, the Expanse series is also top notch writing. Very rich characters in challenge situations.
I think you are right. I'm more than willing to believe that literary fiction vanished because there was so much navel gazing that the entire genre crawled into its own navel. Michael Chabon wrote a good introduction to the 2003 McSweeney's Thrilling Tales anthology. Literary fiction had become a genre, and it had written itself into a corner. He was introducing a collection of old fashioned adventure stories and felt it necessary to justify it as an opportunity for literary authors to write something in a genre. Chabon used an interesting analogy. He described a world where the highest form of fiction was the nurse novel and imagined that an acclaimed author who had just written yet another successful nurse novel had then started wondering was that all literature was, nurse novels.
Chabon had a point. Surely there had to be more than nurse novels.
Magazine fiction was dying even before the 2000s. The pulps barely survived World War II. Maybe men had had enough adventure in the war. A lot of magazines were drifting into irrelevance, many of them closing. Women's magazines still ran fiction. I used to love the three hanky Christmas sob stories. But, even then literary fiction was drifting apart from mainstream interests. Updike, the joke went, was all about oral sex in the suburbs. It was difficult for the next generation to take this stuff seriously especially when it seemed to be so isolated from what was happening in the way people lived.
Could it have been technology? Maybe it was television or cheap paperback books. It could even have been the way book sales were counted. This change paralleled the rise of the big box book store, ISBN bar codes with the computerized book inventory system. When record stores started counting actual sales, country music, which had long been dismissed, was revealed to be almost half of all sales. It was a genre but too big a genre to deprecate. How accurate and representative was the book store sampling used to compile best seller lists into the 1980s? Perhaps literary fiction was never as popular as once thought.
there are not even any famous poets (much less geniuses) in the US under the age of 100. Had they not burned all the rhyming dictionaries to keep warm during the great depression, there would still be a new Emily Dickinson every year
The Couric list is pretty brutal. Almost everything is assigned reading at a sub-10th grade level, and what's left is fantasy/romance/true crime dreck. The demand side is the problem. If people were buying serious books and subscriptions, more talented people would devote their lives to the craft, starting a virtuous cycle. That's how it was when serious short stories could earn median wage for even the country's 50th best-paid writer. The reason why demand has collapsed is because discovery and criticism have been hijacked for political ends. You would get an armed rebellion if you forced adults to read the books children are subjected to today. Schools monotonically assign more dreck every year. The only people who come out of school still enjoying reading have bad taste. Those with good taste buy one or two $26 contemporary books from the local bookstore which exists by and for 70-year old women and correctly gauge that it's not worth the effort. Some adults do eventually discover Moby dick or Middlemarch and realize what they were deprived of, but they have no frictionless way to nourish talented young writers in the way that subscribing to a literary magazine used to do.