David Brooks has just opined on the state of the literary world in a a piece called When Novels Mattered. I stumbled upon it in my facebook feed and responded there. I copied that post here so I could expand a bit on my thoughts.
First of all, David Brooks is a nice man I’m sure, but he’s a columnist at a major newspaper which means he needs to crank out a couple thousand words a week to pay the rent. He’s also a conservative, which means he has a few axes to grind, which he will reliably pull out in almost every column.
In this one we learn literary fiction has taken a blow, in part due technology, and in part due to Liberal groupthink. All of this is pure horseshit. David is a nice guy, but he’s not paid to think far outside of his few check boxes, and it shows. He’s not alone. A lot of people are like this, taking in the world as it appears, and not asking themselves if any of the things they are told are true.
The past month or so I have been digging into the literary world more than normal. Mind you, I’m trying to turn a side hustle-writing fiction-into a low key cash flow, so I have a few cards on the table. One of things I discovered was a bit of the lamenting in the literary world over the loss of the male writer. There is even a shop in the U.K. talking about publishing only male authors. There in fact used to be big bold men, who also happened to be literary darlings, and their voices drove a lot of interest and/or book sales. Their cultural value was indeed immense, but they also existed in a much different literary market, one that was much smaller, and also male focused.
But dig me now, EVERYTHING used to be like that.
There used to be more gate keepers, and less novels. This is a fact. Our culture had fewer voices to aggragate around, and most of them were male. Genre fiction was relegated to a much small piece of the book publishing pie, and woman writers were rare. Popular women writers were very rare. This also happened to be the same time that we had only four television networks, with only a few slowly expanding cable channels as competition. Culture was constrained back then, not by desire but by technology. There simply was no easy way to find books outside of the ones pushed by publishers. You got what they sold you, and what they sold you was bold male voices.
I know we like to think of our favorite cultural amusements as being significant, but in a capitalist society like ours, every cultural item you find is actually a commodity packaged and sold just as much as the food in your grocery cart. Books, television, movies, computers games, all of them are products which are packaged and sold.
What the internet has done was flip the script in terms of selling products. In today’s world you can actually seek out books that appeal to you. They are not just handed down from the big publishers. This means more voices are being published, over more genres than ever before. More books are being published as well, not just by the big five publishers, but by a huge amount of self-publishers. Among other things, this means that the current market is much more reflective of the choices of the buying public, and much less reflective of what book publishers want to sell.
Books are not the only art form affected by the internet. Music has radically shifted (there are many more bands selling much more music, in expanding genres, with the average income dropping, and fewer rich musicians), so has movies, television, and video games. That is to say the medium in which we consume art has made the process far more individualized and idiosyncratic. It used to be you were stuck with Norman Mailer because that was all everyone was talking about. Now if you roam the literary web for long you are going to be bombarded by hundreds of voices, each of them telling you how great their favorite books are, and each of their picks will be different.
For years there have been more women readers than men. Now there are also more women writers than men. There are reasons for both of these trends, but they are facts. This is the current market. My reading of the room is that woman’s voices appeal to women readers. They don’t need literary bad boys, telling them about themselves and the world. They need voices more like their own, with solutions more like what they know works. Hence the trend towards mixed genres like Romantasy, cozy mysteries, and solar punk. All of them are essentially taking a page from romance and woman’s books, by removing much of the gunpowder and violence, and replacing it with complicated and “community” solutions into their plots.
I stumbled upon this when I began the process of trying to find a literary agent. Since the beginning of the year I have read hundreds of different agents “wish lists” trying to find one who might be interested in my work. This is a very bizarre lens with which to view the literary world, but it does offer some perspective. I can tell you that literary agents are almost exclusively women. The ratio is at least 10 to 1, but probably higher. To a woman, they are looking for strong literary voices that jump off the page. I’ve read variations on that phrase so often that I can recite it in my sleep. The people who make a living selling authors to publishers all want to back a horse that can win the literary tripple crown. If there are writers like that out there, you can be assured they will find them. This tells me that the actual people who can who can write in a bold new voice are exceedingly rare, but also I think the value for such a voices are much lower.
Look at the books that are selling. Look at the genres that are expanding. This is where readers tastes are going. These are the books that readers are reading. Reading still has a huge cultural value, literature is still hugely paramount. There are things that cannot be said in long form fiction outside of a novel. Right now that means more books are being written about the black experience, the lgbtq+ experience, and largest of all, the female experience. This is what is selling, and it’s leaving a mark on our culture.
If you’re a man, and used to having white, CIS male, voices being centered in your culture, you’re going to see the world like David Brooks does. It will feel like a loss, even though white CIS male writers still dominate the cash flow. If you’re interested in hearing marginalized voices finally getting their say, then you’re in luck, because for the first time in recorded history that is happening right now. Regardless of what you think about the merits of these voices, it is a marvelous thing that it can happen.
From my experience, I would say that we’re in the middle of a renaissance in literature. There has never been a bigger table with more flavors. There are just less big platters, and more smaller bowls. You can still only eat so much, only now there are far more choices.
