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.
I'm with you on this, Sam, but I have my typical gadfly question: does the market owe artists anything? I too find myself feeling curmudgeonly before my time (well, I'm almost 50, maybe it is my time). Speaking truth to the market has its place, but is there any reasonable expectation for it to change or to come to view literature as that sacred activity?
You really ought to read Willa Cather's "The Kingdom of Art." She viewed art and religion as interchangeable. And she was fortunate to come of age as an artist in a time when Alfred Knopf was just starting out. Knopf believed you could sell craft, and it was a happy partnership. But she did not get on well with Houghton Mifflin and was so repulsed by her brush with Hollywood (Warner Bros wanted to cut the whole second half of her novel "A Lost Lady" from the film because it was "too depressing") that she forbade any of her other novels from ever being adapted to the screen.
Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere in 1896 about a very similar irritation to the one you describe. Only she was responding to a philistine from Nebraska named Thomas Wing:
"As to T. Wing's words, Heavens how much or how little did I tell you on that night of much morphine and little Morpheus? The less I care about T. Wing and his "words" the better, thast thats one reason I was so awfully glad to get away from Lincoln. I am going to quit writing to that gentleman pretty soon and then forget all about that conversation. Only yesterday I wrote him that I had never forgiven it and never could. He has one creed and I another. They are creeds that never meet in this world. There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; thats my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be. Its not an affectation, its my whole sle self, not that I think I can do anything myself, but the worship of it. That is about all that life has given me: it is enough. I dont ask anything more. I think I get as much good out of it as most people do out of their religions. I love it well enough to be a failure in it myself, well enough to be unhappy."
Isn't that kind of the pact we must make with our art? To love it well enough to be a failure, well enough to be unhappy when the market or the public does not love us back in the way that we'd like?
This is a great column, but I think disagree with most of it. Buzz and publishing advances and money centers overwhelmingly around books that don't even pretend to be the sort of literature you hold sacred: genre fiction and young adult novels or tacky sentimental pseudo-literature like All the Light We Cannot See. If you can think of a way to speak up against this stuff, more power to you!
Levy (like Oyler and Patricia Lockwood) is trying to write a novel about the experience of being online all the time. I think that that's a worthy goal, all of our brains are constantly marinating in online nonsense so somebody should write literature about it this fact. I remember being impressed by Oyler early on because she wrote in the ubiquitous, to-me-annoying style of online feminist journalism but was nevertheless able to say something. I thought that Oyler's novel was so-so and I take everyone's word that Levy's is worse; you can only read so much of this stuff. I agree with everybody on this platform that @arxhan's internet novel is better than the ones that get written about in the traditional press.
I do think it is perfectly natural, a healthy and old-fashioned cultural phenomenon, that there should be scenes known for being provocative like the LES/Dimes Square situation. All the pieces by journalists who clearly wanted to join the set or at least understand it but were snubbed by their subjects were hilarious. If what emerges from the scene is mediocre, the best thing to do is ignore it. Denunciation feeds the buzz.