Curator

Three Depressing Posts on Reading

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing ‘Curator.’ This is an every-six-weeks-or-so roundup of literary/intellectual writing from around the web.

Best,

Sam

IS THE NOVEL DEAD YET?

Literary fiction has been declining in the culture for a long time, but it takes David Brooks of The New York Times to come along and pronounce it for it truly to be deemed dead. “I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life and that this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture,” Brooks writes.

The piece prompted a frenzy of Brooks-hating on Substack, but really only because haters are gonna hate, hate, hate. The only real question in the cultural demise of literary fiction is the diagnosis. In the great loop that is cultural discourse now, Brooks is responding to a Substack piece by Owen Yingling who pins the decline to the 1970s when the literary top-shelf and commercial fiction parted ways, and, for reasons having to do with their own narcissism and a surfeit of French theory, “literary authors were willing to optimize for critical praise at the expense of sales to a degree they had not been before.” Brooks largely accepts Yingling’s timeline but gives a different narrative, that “there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years.” That’s a kind of abundance-adjacent argument (c.f. Marc Dunkelman) about the inward, nimbyish turn of American culture starting in that time, with literature in particular losing its spirit when, as Brooks puts it, “the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses.”

Both Yingling and Brooks are joined in trying to extend the timeline for this decline beyond what ARX-Han and Alex Perez propose — these conversations do get recursive! — which is basically all about wokeism, or let’s say the pre-woke groundwork, when the largely female editors at publishing houses began to select for identity over quality and, as ARX-Han puts it, “competed with one another on the axis of moral status.”

In a terminal case like this one, many diagnoses are valid, but I’m with Yingling and Brooks in looking back to the ‘70s as the decisive moment as opposed to dealing with an ancillary issue like wokeism. I suspect that both Yingling and Brooks, though, are overanalyzing slightly, Yingling in tracing the fatal turn to an intramural dynamic between writers and critics and Brooks in moving everything onto a plane of moral abstraction. Really, what happened was television. Television simply took over everybody’s individual leisure time and imaginative life. If this seemed for a while like a manageable problem because television was low-status and so obviously lousy, its effects were actually more pernicious than even its critics tended to realize. As Neil Postman wrote in 1985, describing the pre-television landscape, “The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly.” Print mattered when it was the only game in town. Once the rival showed up, the social utility of being a reader began to steadily, and irreversibly, diminish.

The dynamic was held in suspension for a couple of decades between a ‘high-brow sensibility,’ which was marked by being a reader, and relied on the image of college as a bucolic and media-free setting where print was still predominant, and then being ‘with the people,’ which meant consuming a lot of television and having one’s conversation be dominated almost exclusively by pop culture references. By the 2000s, the bobo consensus, in Brooks’ coinage (see how it all loops around!), had unequivocally won out, the way to be high-status in America no longer connected to a Bourdieuian snobbishness of ever-more refined taste but to being at once materialist-minded and counterculture-sympathetic i.e. watching Dawson’s Creek and listening to The Eagles, and with cultural attainment, which was the traditional contribution of reading, falling out of the equation. At my prep school, for instance — a place famous for all the great writers it had turned out — it was, without question, a social liability at this time to have read too much. The route to being socially successful mandated an almost encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, and the kids who wanted to fit in, all of them perfectly intelligent, knew reams of television shows and pop songs and ad spots. Reading, if it was done at all, was done on the sly.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that there was some lost golden age of reading. Probably at every moment in reading’s history, reading has been to a great extent the preserve of nerds and eggheads — it’s, almost by definition, what you do when you’re off on your own, when you don’t have anybody who at that moment wants to hang out with you. But when the options for solitary time were severely limited, reading enjoyed an unassailable appeal. Once that monopoly ended, reading was only ever going to be the domain of specialists — of real weirdos who were bitten by a bug of some kind.

Given those overall technological developments, there’s not all that much to blame individual writers or publishers for. “Knowing that the fate of literature is still in the hands of writers, I’m optimistic,” Yingling concludes, but that optimism is misplaced. Writers and publishers are driven to a very small share of the market and, in this period of decline, what they have mostly been doing is frantically trying to adapt. Kathleen Schmidt — who is the Substack-whisperer of the publishing industry — makes the anti-Brooks point that, actually, the publishing industry has been optimizing pretty well, thank you very much. It’s genre and commercial fiction that largely keeps the lights on, and then it turns out that ‘wokey’ literature, of the identitarian ilk decried by Han and Perez, sells pretty well. Yes, as Yingling puts it, “the pool is shrinking….and authors and discourse-makers have fallen into malaise bickering about how its resources should be divided up,” but it’s less than clear how else the industry really should have adapted.

If there’s not a lot of room for optimism anywhere in this discourse, there is, weirdly enough, in the domain of technology. If it was television that killed reading, television has in turn been killed off. The internet has balkanized attention spans in ways that were unimaginable even a few decades ago, but the internet evolves as well. What a platform like this one shows is that people do read — and read a lot. They still don’t read long books — and why would they? the social utility is very low, you go away for weeks to read something only to find that you can’t talk to anybody else about what you’ve read because they haven’t read it either, and you’re out of the discourse for all that time, and the entire time you’re trying to concentrate on the book your poor attention span is being pounded at by all the other distractions on your phone — but some kind of other space is opening up, which is based on individual expression. As Brooks points out, what matters isn’t really the books themselves, but the capacity that books represent for individuality and independence, removed from strict market forces or social conformity. If, given the current technological configuration, books don’t really provide that, well, that’s not the worst thing in the world. There is more room for writers — for intellectuals and, to some extent, for non-conformists. The monopoly of print isn’t coming back, but in the competitive landscape of the evolving internet, the independent-minded have more tools with which to fight. Keep producing quality work, keep up the good fight, and, slowly, slowly, they may be able to earn back the longer attention spans that are needed to sustain novels.

IF THE NOVEL IS DEAD, BLAME OCEAN VUONG

If in the post above, we were very generous to the publishing industry — crediting them for ‘optimizing’ themselves given the losing hand they had, above all by switching over to an identitarian sensibility that did, on the whole, move inventory — let’s deal with the other side of that, that they also, with a straight face, peddled horribly, abysmally bad books. That is nowhere more the case than with Ocean Vuong and his Emperor of Gladness, which you can sort of evaluate just from the title. Tom Crewe, in the London Review of Books, puts it through a colonoscopy of a review, which also indicts pretty much the entire literary industry alongside it. Like in some kind of prosecutor’s brief, the laudatory blurbs of Vuong’s writing — Ben Lerner saying it “expands our sense of what literature can make visible” and Max Porter calling it “a huge gift to the world” — are set alongside the damning evidence of what’s actually in Vuong’s books (“the most useful thing you can do with empty hands is to hold on,” “the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me,” “I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season”), and the enablers just as much as Vuong himself are called to account for the fraud that’s going on here. The gimmick was neatly exposed in American Fiction where somebody who has the right kind of identitarian credentials — Vuong also has the neat trick of bursting into tears within hugging distance of a reporter — gets to a place of invulnerability within the matrices of liberal guilt and then anything they write, no matter how preposterous, is “rewriting what fiction is supposed to be” or else doing something as impervious to criticism as “representing the great fact of ‘stasis’ in working class life.”

But karma’s a bitch and the reckoning is (somewhat) here. Honest criticism has a real place in the literary world, and if it’s been somewhat in abeyance recently, Crewe shows why it’s necessary. People like Lerner and Porter (also Marlon James, Daisy Johnson, Michael Cunningham) knew better than to praise Vuong’s work in the way they praised it, but they’re part of the protection racket of the literary cabal and figured that if they tithe in with blurbs like they give to Vuong’s novels, that will rebound to their benefit. A review like Crewe’s helps expose the sham and somewhat clears the field again for, like, actual writing with actual stories that’s held to account by actual honest critics and without all being part of the identitarian grift.

Let’s let Crewe speak for himself:

I groaned my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life. This is because, while it is bad in all the ways that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was bad, it is also bad in new and unexpected ways. For one, it is a more traditional, peopled novel, spends much more time with its characters and has a much higher proportion of dialogue, for which Vuong has no talent. It tries, and fails, to be funny.

But Vuong is so much worse than being a bad writer. What he really is doing is essentializing the very people he claims to represent. As Crewe puts it:

Vuong’s sincerity is self-conscious and willed — he is constantly stoking it by shovelling on more and more words. It is why, despite his close identification with his characters and their class situation, he turns them into parodies (and their enemies into grotesques). He doesn’t imaginatively enter these lives, but stands outside them, waving for our attention so he can tell us what they mean.

This is the same point that is made in American Fiction and what it can be boiled down to is: a little complexity please! Or, as Monk puts it in the film, “I just think we’re more than this.” If something like The Emperor of Gladness is — as Kathleen Schmidt implies — what the publishing industry needs to stay afloat, then maybe we’re better off without the publishing industry. Serious writers write on their own, probably without making any money from it, certainly without pandering, and figure out their own methods of distribution and their own separate ways of making a living.

These dynamics all fit together. The literary novel really did collapse as a cultural touchstone. The publishing industry figured out a way to hang on for dear life by elevating morally stentorian shlock and having a captive audience of blurbers and reviewers to jointly pretend that it’s ‘literary fiction.’ I’d like to think that a review like Crewe’s can be the kind of thing that breaks the spell but it’ll take more than that. The more realistic way to think about it is that the publishing industry just is what it is. People who care about writing are, increasingly, going to have to find ways of working outside of it.

THE YOUTH ARE LOST TO US

If the decline of the literary novel and the collapse of standards in the publishing industry are — at a stretch — manageable problems, what is not is the existential crisis of young people giving up on reading entirely. The dynamics I talked about with television apply — that, at some point, reading lost almost all of its social utility — but that seems accelerated with A.I. Hua Hsu has a deeply depressing New Yorker piece in which he chats with a couple of NYU students and they cheerily explain that they they use AI for just about everything. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” one says.

The stories are consistent from everybody. There are some loopholes through the AI detectors. Teachers aren’t really going to switch back to handwritten assignments and oral exams, however much they might fantasize about it. And students find that the ease of A.I. is just irresistible. “Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether,” Hsu writes. Writing in Persuasion, Dartmouth undergraduate Elan Kluger confirms that “these reports are true.”

It’s definitely a bad scene out there, and it seems to require a few cognitive adjustments from everybody. With my own students, I’ve switched from topic essays to more personal assignments, which are harder to fake and which the students seem to like better — and that’s been a reasonable fix but won’t work for every class. What students will have to realize, to some extent, is how stupid they’re being in relying on A.I. Higher education is all about giving you competitive advantages and students are forgoing any kind of competitive advantage they can get when, as Hsu notes, “the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.” But of course it’s not at all easy to convince 20-year-olds that they are being stupid. So. What to do? Well, professors really do have to tighten up and adapt — just do everything they can think of to A.I.-proof their assignments and to impose real consequences if students are caught cheating. And then the real reckoning will come a few years down the road. The revelation is gradually going to sink in that A.I. is just an assortment of industry magic tricks, not real intelligence at all, and anybody who has over-relied on it will pay a price in terms of sacrificing their own originality and autonomy. That may not be particularly a social problem, if an entire generation has collectively let their minds turn to mush, but there will be a moment where it’s not cool, and if the social justice shlock of the 2010s stands conspicuously exposed as not-cool at the moment, A.I. over-dependence may well, to the next micro-generation, seem the height of lameness. All of this is bad news for the survival of a reading public, but A.I. dependence is so obviously self-sabotage that I can’t help imagining that the worst of it will cancel itself out.