It’s lost its centrality to the culture. Neil Postman diagnosed the main issue well in 1985. He wrote, “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.” The issue isn’t about whether books are being published or not. The issue is, in a word, about market share. Print lost the centrality over communication that it had had for several hundred years — first to television, then to short-form online exchange. Fundamentally, there’s no getting that back or putting that genie back in the bottle.
It has become entirely market-driven. The only chance for fiction in an era where its ‘market share’ is precipitously declining would have been to be taken on as some kind of a ward of the state — by the literary equivalent of the BBC or PBS, by kindly editor-driven publishing houses that bucked the tide of conglomeration (as Dan Sinykin documents, both Norton and FSG did this to some extent in the ‘90s and ‘00s), or by some benevolent monarch. Instead, fiction has almost entirely been the property of profit-driven conglomerates, which found in due course that they couldn’t make any money from literary fiction and are in the process of quietly phasing it out altogether. Everything else here follows from these underlying economic and structural problems.
It is far too slow and incapable of responding to current events. The turnaround time on a contemporary novel seems to be something like three years — a year to write; a year for the writer to agonize over notes from their agent; a year for the departments of the publishing company to argue with each other about how to put the book out to marginally increase its marginal impact. Novels used to be able to respond to current events and, in significant cases, shape them. Now the whole process is like getting an estimate for a home renovation project or being in an outlet store in the distant suburbs and waiting for the trends to reach you from the big city. In this environment, there is simply no way that fiction could drive anything like a political or cultural conversation.
It has made no attempt to respond to the online era. The world is getting faster and meaningful discourse is virtually all online. Fiction exists in an archaic paper-bound world, where the publishers can make their soft bets on novels, and with the pipeline to publication even more archaic — built around short story journals none of you have ever read and around the whispered recommendations of MFA professors. If there is good fiction being shared online, the power centers of the fiction world — the publishing companies, the rivulet of reviews — have no interest in it.
It became an adjunct to the university system. As Sinykin puts it, “writers became professors.” The university MFA programs became the one source of institutional largesse for fiction and have completely reoriented the fiction landscape. To be a successful ‘writer’ now means, basically, managing your career so that you can move between untenured but solid teaching gigs. The results are predictable. The career writers aren’t, ultimately, dependent on craft or even sales; what matters is their ability to keep their bread buttered within university and grant-world. And the fiction of the career writers becomes saturated with the aroma of mild failure in lower-middle-class university towns and with the suffocating dulness of their own classrooms. “More than realism or its rivals, the dominant literary style in America is careerism,” writes Christian Lorentzen.
It became vampirically obsessed with young people who don’t know anything. If the career writer, who lived in a city, had experiences, dreamed big, and collected their experiences into fiction has all but disappeared in favor of the cringing professor looking over their shoulder as they write their thin roman-à-clef, the publishing world has shifted its excitement to a few random young people, who get anointed every few years as ‘the voice of their generation’ or ‘one of the great minds.’ The main issue is that these people are, as Louis CK would put it, almost mathematically guaranteed to have no wisdom, no life experience, no real perspective, no carefully developed craft. They are chosen to speak to a scene or deliver a particular voice — and they generally do that and then are just as quickly forgotten and discarded.
It has very little interest in careers beyond a successful debut. One of the more perplexing developments of the last awful decades in fiction is the sudden-onset disappearance of lauded writers. Where are the Jonathan Safran Foers of yesteryear? The Nathan Englanders, Joshua Ferrises, Lisa Hallidays, Jennifer Egans, Jeffrey Eugenideses, Chad Harbachs? I don’t really understand the phenomenon. All possible industry attention and resources gets thrown to a particular writer for a little while and then, at the moment that fades out, that’s sort of the last we hear of the writer. I don’t know if this is about the chloroformic embrace of agents urging rewrites and lining up Hollywood deals that never get out of development; or if the writers themselves were never that serious and were just interested in the industry glow while it lasted; or if the whole experience of the industrialized publishing process is so demoralizing that it knocks the creativity entirely out of these writers. In any case, one of the oddities of a completely career-driven industry masquerading as a creative one is that it seems incapable of sustaining careers.
It became ideologically captured and lost the ability to evaluate work on its merits. This is a much chewed-over aspect of fiction’s loss of relevance. Basically, some personnel shifts within the publishing industry created a dynamic where the older white guys disappeared almost overnight, where women were dominant within the industry, and where there was a concerted belief that publishing had to drive a social revolution accompanied by a pronounced tendency towards virtue signaling. In that hothouse atmosphere, almost no one really had it in them to think about the merit of the texts themselves. What mattered was how you positioned yourself within the culture wars and then you fervently you supported whatever the industry chose to churn out. For more specifics on this phenomenon c.f. the movie American Fiction.
It lost the review ecosystem. Reviews were always the sport side of fiction, as well as a necessary check on publicity hype from publishers and reputation-inflation of writers. The breakdown in an honest structure of reviewing — which has to do with newspaper art sections losing their editorial independence and becoming part of the industry’s publicity waterfall — produces a nepotistic and cheerleading atmosphere where everything is praised to the skies and no one means a word of it.
It lost its ambition. We should give credit to the wokies for at least believing in something, but meanwhile the texts of ‘art for art’s sake’ literary productions kept getting smaller and smaller, blank space starting to take up ever more of the page. Joyce Carol Oates’ “wan little husks of autofiction” line really does serve as the most astute critical line of the era. There was a point in time when fiction really tried to be a kind of gesamtkuntswerk synthesizing all of the psychological, cultural, and political currents of an era. Think about the scale that something like Doctor Zhivago or U.S.A. or Adventures of Augie March are written on, as opposed to, like, Asymmetry, just to choose one lauded title of the last decade. Readers don’t have the attention span to read long, and publishers know it. If writers refuse to believe that and write ambitiously, they just simply get shut out of the market.
It became lifestyle-adjacent. The narrow path to success in fiction turned out to be being very focused on specific aspects of the dating market and city living — Sally Rooney has proved to be paradigmatic. In a recent post responding to Grace Byron, Jeffrey Lawrence puts it well. “Some of us are saying that we’d prefer a world in which how hard you network and how frequently you publish shouldn’t be the only criteria of literary access. It’s scary to me that that even needs to be said,” he writes. As far as any of us can tell, the highest ambition for a contemporary fiction writer is a tote bag.
And, meanwhile, what have we lost? When was the last time that a character from a novel has entered into popular discourse?1 When was the last time an idea from a novel shaped or even influenced a wider conversation? What is the book of our era? What are the books that even attempt to speak ambitiously to the truths of our era? The collapse of the stable reading public isn’t really an excuse. The publishing industry continues to insist on steering a sinking ship. Something or other has to happen if fiction — which really is supposed to be the queen of the arts, the way to access your own soul and the state of the world, and to do so on a human scale — is to survive this miserable era.