The Troll School of Literature

New(ish) Books

Dear Friends,

I am sharing a screed. I have a piece up in Persuasion on a pair of recent Supreme Court rulings.

Best,

Sam

THE TROLL SCHOOL OF LITERATURE

In retrospect, I think I really took it easy in my review the other week of Honor Levy’s My First Book and I’ve been kicking myself about that since then.

I reviewed My First Book kind of the way I would review anybody else’s book — as a good faith attempt at art that didn’t really work out. But, as I was posting and reading through some of the other reviews of Levy (I read reviews only after I’ve written my own text), I started to get a more canny understanding of what was really going on. This piece in The Face has most of the grisly story and some of the rest of it is figure-out-able from this much-reviled profile in New York Magazine.

Levy, you see, isn’t really a writer. What she is is a publicist’s creation. When she was 19, she connected with Kaitlin Phillips, a sort of gonzo publicist of no particular credentials or accomplishments, who saw her at a party, liked her attitude, and immediately set her up with an editor. Through Phillips, she had her path into publishing without having written anything — or, as it turned out, being capable of writing anything. Levy had a piece accepted to the New Yorker when she was 21, and the piece was ok — what you might expect of a smart student, showing some talent, but more important hitting the right lifestyle mark, as a coolish young woman espousing reactionary views.

From there, Levy already had her book deal in place, but there was the small problem that she couldn’t do it. She had no life experience — outside of the interesting experience of the guys on the roof that made up her New Yorker story — nothing to say and no capacity whatsoever to exist in fictional landscapes. No matter. She took some Adderall, opened her laptop, wrote My First Book on the title page — a plea to any future reviewers to take it easy on her — and started typing.

I have no problem with writing that’s spontaneous and uninhibited, but somewhere in there it does have to be good. That’s very clearly not the case with My First Book, but, once again — and here’s the real point — that does not matter. What matters is to create something that for whatever reason has buzz. In this case, the buzz comes from Levy’s youth, from her slightly reactionary sensibility, from the premise that the book is a glimpse into the pixelated soul of Gen Z, but most of all the buzz is just a self-fulfilling loop. Once an off-kilter profile appears in New York Magazine — “Honor is one of the great minds” — then that becomes the discourse, something that everybody is talking about even if, or especially if, they hate the book. And then here’s the other critical point, and what makes this the Troll School of Literature: the hatred isn’t a problem, the fact that it’s a bad book isn’t a problem and is actually a benefit. The hatred for the book helps to stir the pot — it gets people talking, and in the end that contributes to sales, and for the publishing industry sales are the only thing that matters.

The parallel to Trump is obvious — the idea that your only task in the public sphere is to generate attention and then that attention becomes its loop that propels you forward and which you can also react to if that suits you tactically — but, recently, I’ve been reading about 19th century Mormonism and something about that made the penny drop. What’s so effective about what the Troll School of Literature is up to is that — as with religion — they are operating in a sphere in which good intentions are genuinely assumed, in which it’s hard to imagine people dedicating their entire careers simply to stirring up mischief, and in which therefore everyone is that much easier to dupe. What would have stopped something like My First Book from wreaking the degree of havoc that it has is if reputable reviewers had put their foot down and called the book out for what it obviously is. That actually worked with Lauren Oyler, a somewhat similar figure to Levy who became a past master of the Troll School. In a review in Book Forum, Ann Manov wrote what anybody who read Oyler’s No Judgment had to be thinking — that these were extraordinary insubstantial cutesy, scene-y pieces dressed up as if they were somehow viable cultural criticism. Book Forum, tellingly enough, tried to bury Manov’s essay — the most searing piece of writing they’ve had in memory — but it got through anyway and deservedly became what people will remember when they’ve long forgotten Oyler’s book. But, more often than not, the reviewers miss the moment — as was the case with the suspicious but nonetheless somewhat reverential treatment of My First Book. The truth is that newspaper reviewing is downstream from the publishing industry — they take it as a given that the publishing industry knows what it’s doing and that permits the practical joke of something like My First Book: even very reputable reviewers can’t help but view it as a genuine harbinger of whatever the Next Thing is.

In thinking about this, I find myself being more and more like an Old Testament prophet hurling down denunciations on some fairly random people. But here’s the thing. I actually — like a lot of people on this platform — view writing and literature as a sacred activity. Sacred in the sense that when done well or even just done honestly it represents the attempt of the soul to access itself — and, by sharing that effort, it aims to ennoble the public discourse, to make people better than they are or at the very least to feel a little less alone. I regard that as a far more holy and immediate activity than whatever most churches are supposed to do.

But the calculation of the Troll School of Literature is very different. It’s that, fundamentally, no one likes to read — and so putting in the energy to actually be good, which usually means developing emotional maturity, reading very widely, putting in one’s 10,000 hours, etc, is as much a sucker’s game, from the perspective of the Troll School, as genuine religious devotion is from that of the grifter’s. It’s far easier to just generate a soap bubble of buzz, have that be the discourse, and then laugh all the way to the bank. And, since reading is tedious, and writing torturous, and shortcuts like these abound, the Troll School gets its way with credulous readers and supine reviewers. To stop it, those who know better have to speak up.