Are Books Finished?

Writing Life

Dear Friends,

We are COUNTING DOWN THE SECONDS to sharing the first pieces for

The Republic of Letters

(172,800 seconds as a matter of fact).

I’m really overwhelmed by the response, which, among others, contradicts some of the more churlish things said about writing in the post below and also puts me a bit at a loss for how to properly judge submissions. I deeply appreciate how many people wrote in. (And btw, for anybody I owe an e-mail to for the debate series, I’m just behind on correspondence and will write to you tomorrow.)

Best,

Sam

ARE BOOKS FINISHED?

Fairly regularly, I read political science-type books looking for something to excerpt and, again and again, I have the same reaction: that whatever it is I’m reading is an article stretched out to a book.

That would seem to be a particular indictment of political science as a profession, but, unfortunately, I find myself very often having the same reaction when I read fiction: that the writer has some kind of concept, which is being stretched out to novel-length.

And, more and more — even as I obsess over books and novels in particular — I have the sense of dealing with a technology that’s finished, that’s out of keeping with the times, by which I don’t mean only the short form video proliferation of our era but that, even within writing, books aren’t really in line with the specific requirements of the digital age.

Before going further, it’s important to specify what we mean by a ‘book.’ A book is, essentially, a technology. It’s long-form writing that is designed to suit bindings and to be conducive for hand-held reading. The utility of books is fairly obvious in the period from let’s call it the invention of the printing press to the World Wide Web. But at that moment, the book runs into an existential challenge. The book itself is clunky compared to a gadget. It is clearly cost-ineffective — the phone, and internet, stores almost infinite text, most of it free, while an individual book costs money as well as significant logistical encumbrances before a reader can access it. Then, a book takes a long time to produce — rendering it out of step with the quick response-time of the digital era. Then, the kind of sustained concentration needed to read a book does not align with the quick-twitch behaviors of web engagement (articles don’t have nearly the same problem).

And books have responded to the digital age….not very well. In an era of mass access and engagement, the publishing industry has, if anything, raised its drawbridge even higher — access runs through a bewilderingly opaque network of agents and editors, the vast majority of whom are full-up and not particularly looking for new clients. In terms of content, the books tend to be a very pale facsimile of what’s going on on the web. As Joyce Carol Oates astutely noticed, “[It’s] strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’ with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer.” The amount of blank space in prize-winning books has become striking and a sign of how much books are trying to pretend that they’re blogs — taking some light social issue, trying to connect to the ‘vibes’ or the ‘discourse’ as much as possible, and then being just long enough to fit inside a binding without intimidating the customers who are looking at all the other items on the table. What the industry hasn’t done is to respond to the timetable of the web era. The process for submission and publication remains agonizingly slow: books are often published well after their cultural moment has already passed. And it’s hard to interpret the slowness of the industry as being anything other than willful — they like the idea of being a museum, of being slightly atavistic or out-of-step with what’s going on: that creates the possibility of people feeling very good about themselves anytime they, or their book club, manage to finish a book.

This is not to say that print is necessarily finished in the digital era. We do seem to have a dawning, and not-to-be-underestimated problem, that younger generations are moving into a post-literate space — and there is no particular reason we will ever recover from that. This has been articulated in various hand-wringing pieces about the decline of the English major and then the difficulty that college students at even elite universities have finishing a book, but that’s vastly missing the scale of the problem — which is that, as

Hilarius Bookbinder

wrote in a boundlessly-depressing-and-almost-certainly-accurate piece, “college students are functionally illiterate.” The culprit is, of course, the phones, which have completely chewed up their attention spans and at the same time moved them into an image-based communication modality as opposed to a word-based one. But, at the same time that everybody under about 25 seems to be headed into a TikTok-induced Dark Age, we actually — as I’ve said before and I’m sure will say again — are in a writing renaissance. This has a great deal to do with this very platform, but also with an abundance of small, smart journals that would have been unimaginable at the time the newspaper industry collapsed circa 2008 or even during the early round of click-addled digital ‘journalism’ of the 2010s. The real point is that our engagement with the web has stabilized to the point where it’s possible — in pockets — to have adult conversations. We’re learning that being online doesn’t necessarily mean having to communicate in 280-character conniptions, and after having had our attention spans turned into Swiss cheese in the 2010s we’re all sort of learning to ride the wave and regain some ability to focus. And actually, as it turns out, print has every right to have a seat at the table in the digital era — for one thing, it’s cheaper to produce print than video and words have just as much capacity to travel down the brain stem as visual media.

But if print can survive the flood — through articles, short-form writing, etc — books may still find themselves a casualty. In part, what the doomsaying articles are saying about students is not necessarily that they can’t read but that they can’t read long-form work. And to some extent the kids may have a point. It is a crowded marketplace out there; the more time you spend with one person means time taken away from others. And, by the same token, if so many people are so adept at saying what they have to say in short-form writing, why the need for a doorstop? Part of what the kids may be intuiting is that a book needs to be of a certain length in order to justify the cost of the binding — and writers writing books tend, even at the conceptual level, to pad out, trying in their minds to be worthy of the majesty in the implicit idea of a book. But readers’ behavior in the digital era is very different. They are not looking to fill out a train ride or long winter’s evening with a book. They are reading looking for an idea, for something interesting, and what that implies is that writers can use readers’ attention spans, rather than the imagined length of a book, in order to give shape to their ideas. A text should be as long as it takes to express the idea.

What I would expect that means in the realm of serious writing is, over the next years, a good deal of structural innovation in text. Even in a domain like biography or history, where the book seems especially sturdy as a form, I notice writers chafing under its inherent limits. Why should biographers have to devote the precious real estate at the beginning of their book to discussing their subject’s grandparents while the subject’s main accomplishments often come somewhere towards the end when reader and writer are both exhausted? The ‘archipelago’ may be a more simpatico structure for history than the straight line. One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project. In fiction, I would imagine writers gravitating towards the novella (an excellent form that fell into disuse because it didn’t quite fit the exigencies of the publishing industry) and maybe on the more innovative, ambitious side we can imagine writers using the resources of the web to produce sprawling fictive worlds that don’t necessarily have to be connected by a throughline.

Just start at the end, Bob

But if writers go in this direction — assume that books are basically perishable and the digital universe, in some form or other is here to stay (which is a direction actually that I think writers should embrace) — it won’t be without existential cost. I’ve been spending the last couple of years learning how to write a novel — and, really, there’s nothing else like it. There’s a sense with a novel (and I think this goes for anything book-length) of starting an ocean voyage with no guarantee whatsoever that you will make it to the other side. To put it another way, you change so much over the course of writing a novel that the work captures not just who you are at a moment in time, but something about yourself as you move through time, which is to say that it gets at something really essential about you, what it is that stitches together the different components of yourself across that gulf. If that sounds mystical that’s because it is. But what I would say the intelligent thing to do here is is to try to change up our values system for the digital age. Good writing can be done in short chunks — articles, short stories, novellas, whatever — just as good running can be done at any length. Novels should probably be treated as what they are — something like a marathon, a sort of circus freak event for those who for some reason or other are determined to pursue that — as opposed to what they are now, which is like a badge of entry for writing. In other words, novels seem singularly unsuited to the digital era. That’s unfortunate but should be clarifying for those who write novels: that they are doing it more as a spiritual exercise than to reach an audience.

Where the demise of the book really is deeply worrying, and in a way that I don’t have an answer for, is in the continuity across time. What a book has been for about 2,500 years is a stable repository of civilizational worth. We are able to look at a book — everybody sort of feels this — and to say that this is something we have chosen to invest a great deal of significance in; that this is where our wisdom is to be found; and this is the conversation that we wish to have both with the past and future. Anybody who has been to a synagogue can’t help, I think, but be deeply moved when the Torah is taken out of the Ark, wearing its crown and breastplate, and is paraded across the synagogue with the worshippers touching their prayer books and tallit to the Torah and then kissing them. For the vast majority of Judaism’s history, a great many adherents understood not a word of the text they were venerating, but that didn’t matter. What was being celebrated was, in some sense, the fact of literacy itself — and with that literacy the sense of continuity all the way back to the Genesis, to the very dawn of creation. On the far side of that literacy is — as is generally understood — ignorance. The archeologists are now telling us that civilization goes back much further than anyone really suspected, and that the people who were building Göbekli Tepe and that sort of thing really were very impressive, but we just don’t know — and David Graeber and David Wengrow are free to make up whatever they like about them (namely, that they all seem to have been living in Anarcho-Syndicalist Communes) because we really have no idea: they are beyond the continuity of literacy.

Our ancestors in their Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune

That is the real existential dread of our age, that the stable value of the book is breaking down and the continuity between eras is dependent largely on whether Apple chooses to keep updating the Cloud or whether posterity is able to play an mp3. For people who are serious writers or creators, that’s really the question at the moment — who are they writing for or trying to transmit to? — since the assumption, a safe assumption for a couple of thousand years, that the people of the future would be readers, is no longer so reliable. I certainly don’t have the answer to that break in continuity, but my suspicion is that doubling down on the book isn’t the best bet. The book — certainly the soft-core middle-brow stuff that peppers The Table at your indy bookstore — is no longer much of a guide to the inner life of our era. The work for intellectual types is not only to express that inner life (finding the appropriate medium for doing so) but figuring out how to preserve it.