Back in the early 1980s, I bought Jim Carroll's heroin-soaked and decidedly NYC arts world memoir, The Basketball Diaries, from one of those spinning paperback racks at a grocery store in Spokane, Washington.
I enjoyed the original piece (by Owen Yingling on the cultural decline of literary fiction) and this counterpoint! So much to respond to, but just wanted to say that I couldn't agree more that "Publishers, and the literary world in general—from professional critics to literary Substackers—could do more to promote good books in the backlist. The literary world tends to drop books after publication, but…readers do not care about when a book was published."
It's still mystifying to me that book reviews have to be pitched well in advance of a publication date…and if someone reads the book a month later and wants to review it, there are very few places where they can do so. But they can talk about it on BookTok. They can write about it on Substack. A novel represents years of a writer's time and it feels incredibly tragic that a debut can just sort of…land in silence…and disappear.
I feel very, very strongly that better conversations about books can lead to a better literary culture. When it comes to the Substack versus traditional media question, I'm really resistant to pick a side—and it's also not necessary, imo!—but I think that social media/blogs/newsletters/podcasts can talk about books in a different way, and can accomplish certain things more successfully. The less professionalized and institutionalized forms really excel in spotlighting older books, and they excel in explaining what it feels like to actually read the book. Many reviews use the book as a starting point for some discourse-y topic, which isn't inherently bad…but it sometimes does the book a disservice, and it's not always how readers experience a book! It's nice sometimes to have someone explain, very clearly, what the book is about and whether it was fun.
All this to say that I believe very strongly in the project of writing more about backlist books, and I think places like Substack are especially good for this.
On the topic of grocery store books: I met a bartender last year who’d grown up in rural Michigan and was working in Ann Arbor. She was probably about 30. She saw me reading “It” and said she’d read some Stephen King because she bought whatever seemed good at the local grocery store. “But not romance,” she said, “I’m not into that.” Safe to say low-end retail shelves are still shaping reading habits
Oh yeah definitely. But the influence is diminished today when Amazon dominates sales. Though I think Amazon's algorithm probably pushes similar books.
Sorry to be so late to the party here! Hasn’t the mass market distribution system also pretty much collapsed? Publishers have gotten very good at selling 15 hardcovers in Walmart but no longer a few dozen mass market paperbacks on a some revolving wire shelves in the drugstore: seems like one more strike against diversity of options and for bestsellers.
When I wrote about romance a couple of years ago I talked to agents who groused that major publishers had abandoned mass market and that writers and readers had migrated to self-publishing; now majors are grabbing the successful writers back and trying to capitalize off the networks and direct-to-customer practices these writers have built up for themselves. I’d be interested to know whether contemporary e-book sales for other genres are comparable to what mass market used to be. Do you see much direct-to-ebook in the genres from major publishers? E-book sales have probably replaced mass market for someone like Steven King, but how about writers who don’t have a hardcover audience? Sorry, this is in the weeds!
I was thinking about It when Lincoln was mentioning buying in bulk, because that's literally how it came to be my first Stephen King novel. I was 11, I was very interested in horror and felt like it was time to get into King, and all of his books were relatively the same price in paperback, between $5 for the smallest ones and $7 for the largest ones. I only had $7. I needed that money to last. So I bought, and read, my first 1000+ page book. Read it twice, in fact. That $7 stretched, let me tell ya.
This is a great piece that, along with the Yingling, tackled every argument that I would have made myself initially.
Me, I was leaning toward the advent of Bookscan around 2001, which likely showed for the first time that lit wasn't really selling anywhere while revealing what was working--just as Dad Rock ended in May 1991 when Soundscan (Bookscan's precursor for the record industry) revealed that Dad Rock wasn't selling as much as the music companies thought and rap and country were selling way better and in places no one imagined. The difference between the Billboard charts for 1992 and 1991 are as striking as those between PW/Times lists of this year and 1980. Thus what lit is published nowadays is really a luxury good. You sell a million James Paterson or Sarah Maas novels so you can afford to put out that little novel everyone in-house loves and that makes you all feel good as a publisher, even though you know it'll only sell 500 copies.
And that made me realize what might be the actual cause for the decline in the publication of contemporary lit.
In the great book THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors, by Al Silverman, it becomes very clear very quickly that the people who published literature pre-1985 weren't just interested in publishing that literature. They also wanted, maybe even primarily wanted, to brag about the authors they'd collected to publish and show them off in their society like art objects, especially if they were some hidden gem discovered in Europe. And damn the cost.
So contemporary literature didn't die. These publishers did, and their houses were then sold to other houses. The resulting corporate consolidation, which started in the mid-80s, then made cost today's publishers' primary concern. Without their champions not just at the top of the houses, but as their owners, imho literary writers have far less chance today.
I am VERY GLAD you have shifted the focus here from the genre itself to the market conditions within which the genre operates. It makes no sense to talk about the "decline of literary fiction" without talking about the economics of publishing literary fiction. My main problem with such analyses as OY’s piece “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” is that they treat a genrefied market as if it has always existed and as if changes over the decades are indeed comparable. But nobody called anything "literary fiction" until other genre tags arose against which "literary fiction" could be defined. (I am thinking of Dan Sinykin's claim in that Nation article that "literary fiction" only became a term of art in publishing in the late 1970s, arising in part in reaction to the success of other newly christened genre tags like "fantasy", "horror", or "romance", genre tags that the industry embraced right smack in the middle of the corporatisation of the field, no doubt because they were so eminently marketable.) Literary fiction is by definition "fiction which defines itself as not belonging to any other genre" and also "fiction which is not classified as commercial" which sounds to me like HARD SELL INCARNATE and also does not really accurately identify pre-1970s fiction which has been grandfathered in to the "literary" fold. (Imagine considering Dickens "not commercial"! But Dickens gets roped into the "literary" pantheon.) If "literary fiction" as a marketing category (which is how I am defining "genre") came into being in the late 1970s, then it would appear that literary fiction sales have been declining steadily ever since the category came into being. What else has happened during that time? A proliferation of many, many other genre/marketing categories for literary fiction to compete with, and the inexorable march of corporatisation within publishing. We all know that capital flees not only from unprofitable to profitable enterprises, but also from less profitable to more profitable enterprises. As publishing comes to be ever more dominated by a corporate mindset which cares nothing at all about literature and only looks at numbers on a spreadsheet, the eggs are all going to be put into the most profitable baskets. What about the possibility that most readers don't buy literary fiction because they haven't heard about it? Is literary fiction getting the same marketing spend as romantasy? If a literary fiction author knows the only ad spend they will get is any fumes left over after all the more commercial fiction gets the lion's share, so that one of their only real chances of getting publicity is to win an award, then is it any wonder that they might gear their work more toward delighting the literari on awards panels? And zooming way back into uber-general woo-woo theory-of-everything territory, but what if the triumph of genre over literary fiction has merely been a triumph of discoverability? And if we calculate discoverability as a function of marketing spend, then maybe what killed literary fiction was the numbers-uber-alles corporation???
The progenitors of a genre don't create the genre, do they? If you write a sui generis novel, and nobody imitates it, you've not founded a genre. It was the Tolkien imitators who created Tolkienesque fantasy fiction as a genre.
Yes, but a lot of people have a conception of genres as almost eternal Platonic forms and will argue that, say, Jane Austen was writing Romance by another name or debate whether an older author “counts” as fantasy or science fiction or literary before the invention of any of those. It seems to be something particular to literature too. In music, people will talk about proto-punk bands or progenitors of surf rock or whatever by you don’t—or I haven’t at least—see people fight about whether a 1960s band gets to “count” for team punk rock or team heavy metal
That's an interesting point about music. I agree there's not so much retroactive genre assignment in discussions of musical history. I do think, though, of how rigid genre definitions might indicate anxieties of some kind. For example, in music, once rock & roll has come to be culturally coded as "white music", do Prince or Sly Stone or Ice Cube "count" as rock stars? Such questions are the sort a certain kind of (white, American) music geek might agonise over—and this agonising might be read as indicating deeper unprocessed anxiety over wanting to enjoy American music without confronting the racial legacy behind the music. Can we speculate what anxieties might be indicated by an insistence on treating literary genre as a Platonic form? It might be as simple as an unarticulated resistance to the notion that one's tastes have been moulded by commercial concerns…? I tend to think along these lines because I find it increasingly impossible to see fictional "genres" as anything more than a marketing tool.
Thoughtful article. I agree people need to not lose sleep over this hysteria. Keep writing and getting better. Now for my shameless promotion. You may like some of my stories. You may not. Check them out and see. Thank you.
I like the picture of Black Mask magazine: I recently ordered 8 back issues (now in Ellery Queen) to help me get in the frame of mind for my next novel. As to pretentious twaddle that is over-hyped, I've been disappointed with much written in the last 5 years, so put me down as one of the people going back to classics.
A) this is well-argued and persuasive and my god I wish substack writers would just shut up about this now, especially the Substack Boyz who still think they can't get published because of all those bit-- I mean, wimmin holding them back; B) I recently noted this elsewhere but this is actually the right Myers, so I want to say again that he was one of the most pestilential cancres on American criticism, what a fucking philistine and maroon. I remember that stupid article coming out just as I had discovered DeLillo, and reading it with growing disbelief. My dad, always the establishment voice, pushed buttons and we kept arguing, until finally I just made him go read some Proulx. He was forced to concede. Myers was a moron, and a terrible, just terrible critic who was totally inarticulate and crude about every attempt at analysis, and man I love to take the chance to shit on his stupid opinions, so sorry about doing that here; C) I read Lethem from his very first book, and I LOVED the way he mixed genre with literary sensibility and I was fucking STOKED when Motherless Brooklyn made it big, and then the Fortress of Solitude. But part of me loves Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon, and Gun, with Occasional Music more than the famous ones, for being just gloriously weird and out there and not trying to be anyone Lethem wasn't even as they were definitely trying to work in a whole lot of styles and ideas he hadn't created; D) when I read Gravity's Rainbow last year I occasionally did so in public places, and inevitably the people who talked to me about it were excited to see "science fiction" out in the world, and had come to it from that direction. Which was totally hilarious and also totally logical, especially because it's much more coherent (to the extent it ever is) if read that way. What a terrible book to be so beloved.
To be fair to BR Myers, there is a big difference in the "accessibility" of Cormac's pre-90's novels (particularly Suttree and Blood Meridian) than post 2000s The Road and No Country for Old Men. Granted, the readers I've failed to turn onto McCarthy bemoan his eschewing of quotation marks as pretentious, and that was consistent throughout his career.
100% and I prefer the earlier southern Gothic stuff myself, but it's dense for sure. Your timeline is a little off though. McCarthy shifted his style in the early 90s and was already a bestseller after All the Pretty Horses, long before Myers essay.
For sure. I intentionally left out that period with the Border Trilogy because 1. I wasn’t sure when BR Myers wrote the document you mentioned, and 2. even the Border Trilogy was less accessible than his Pulitzer/Oprah-era works, if for no other reason than that he left the work of translating the Spanish dialogue to his readers.
I think your grocery store section is really onto something. The paperback racks are a feature of “Horseman, Pass By”, and I even have a mass market paperback of LIBRA of all novels. But as local control disappeared so did bespoke curation of titles. Clear Channel for books took over.
I am Young, so you'll have to help me with this. I feel as though "media phenomena" are much more niche and missable these days than they ever were in my youth. For example, I am (blessedly) not on TikTok, so every once in a while, my friends will talk about something that's been completely inescapable to them and it's something I've completely never heard of. Similarly, as someone who reads a lot of fantasy books, I am overwhelmingly aware of Fourth Wing, but most of the people in my life outside those circles (even ones who like romance and fantasy books!) either haven't heard of it or don't know the first thing about it. Contrast that to something like the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games of my youth, where it seemed like every couple of years we got this Big Inescapable Thing that everyone at least knew enough about to carry a conversation. I wonder if this is due to algorithms? The robot finds out what you like and blasts you with it until relatively niche things feel like cultural phenomena? I try not to use algorithm-driven social media that often, so I really can't say.
That being said, I also feel like publishing companies don't have much patience for "growers" like Song of Achilles or Time War (both of which I actually read before they went viral, which proves what kinds of circles I run in). Chappell Roan has a pretty ordinary story of struggling to find a label after her first EP under-performed and they dropped her. I wonder how many Chappells Roan we have in the literary world, and whether they're given the proper support by their publishers.
Side note: I was absolutely thrown into the stratosphere upon realising that you were the Body Scout guy. You should mention that more!
And yes I think you're absolutely right that algorithms play a big role. If you're liking certain content on social media, you get more and more of that whether it's booktok discussions of epic fantasy books or youtubes about horror movies or whatever. And in general the internet makes it a lot easier to find more stuff about a niche interest.
But also there just was....less stuff before. Or less access to it, really. Not saying this in a nostalgia way. It wasn't better or worse as much as different. For example, when I was a young kid the only channel that came in clearly was NBC. So, if I wanted to watch TV the options were literally whatever was on NBC between school and bed. (It was a big deal some of my friends got Fox because then I could watch The Simpsons when I was over.) Even if you got all the networks, that wasn't THAT many shows to choose from. And even when you got cable, it still wasn't all that many options since most cable channels were showing sports, news, shopping infomercials, etc. Radically different in the modern streaming era when you have a million options and they are all on demand. It simply wasn't possible to "binge" a TV show in the old days, unless you bought all the seasons on VHS (and then DVD). And that was very expensive so you'd only do that for your absolute favorite shows.
Same thing is kind of true of most artforms. If you weren't living in a major city like NYC or SF or something, then you only had access to whatever movies were in a few theaters (or what was rentable at Blockbuster). You could only buy whatever books were in stock at the local bookstore and library if you were lucky or just at grocery stores and such if you were in a more rural area. If you were at the dentist's office, you could either bring a book/magazine you owned or read the handful of free ones kept in waiting rooms. You couldn't just read/watch whatever you wanted on your phone.
Again, not better per se but a very different environment.
Well done and gracious counterpoint. I have been glad to read both this and Yingling's piece prior. There's an excellent book-length economic and sociological study of these publishing industry issues in the eras considered here: Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson. I've gifted multiple copies to friends who sent me articles like these!
Wonderful article. I do think that the problem of concentrating on “bestsellers” has been prevalent for a long time, certainly in the music business. I was playing in bands in the late 70s, and the record companies were picking and choosing people they thought would be big, and promoting the hell out of the ones who succeeded. There was no other real pathway to success back then in most places — maybe larger cities in the US and Europe had more of a thriving live music scene, but hitting the big time, there was only one way — you became a chosen one.
Back in the early 1980s, I bought Jim Carroll's heroin-soaked and decidedly NYC arts world memoir, The Basketball Diaries, from one of those spinning paperback racks at a grocery store in Spokane, Washington.
I enjoyed the original piece (by Owen Yingling on the cultural decline of literary fiction) and this counterpoint! So much to respond to, but just wanted to say that I couldn't agree more that "Publishers, and the literary world in general—from professional critics to literary Substackers—could do more to promote good books in the backlist. The literary world tends to drop books after publication, but…readers do not care about when a book was published."
It's still mystifying to me that book reviews have to be pitched well in advance of a publication date…and if someone reads the book a month later and wants to review it, there are very few places where they can do so. But they can talk about it on BookTok. They can write about it on Substack. A novel represents years of a writer's time and it feels incredibly tragic that a debut can just sort of…land in silence…and disappear.
I feel very, very strongly that better conversations about books can lead to a better literary culture. When it comes to the Substack versus traditional media question, I'm really resistant to pick a side—and it's also not necessary, imo!—but I think that social media/blogs/newsletters/podcasts can talk about books in a different way, and can accomplish certain things more successfully. The less professionalized and institutionalized forms really excel in spotlighting older books, and they excel in explaining what it feels like to actually read the book. Many reviews use the book as a starting point for some discourse-y topic, which isn't inherently bad…but it sometimes does the book a disservice, and it's not always how readers experience a book! It's nice sometimes to have someone explain, very clearly, what the book is about and whether it was fun.
All this to say that I believe very strongly in the project of writing more about backlist books, and I think places like Substack are especially good for this.
On the topic of grocery store books: I met a bartender last year who’d grown up in rural Michigan and was working in Ann Arbor. She was probably about 30. She saw me reading “It” and said she’d read some Stephen King because she bought whatever seemed good at the local grocery store. “But not romance,” she said, “I’m not into that.” Safe to say low-end retail shelves are still shaping reading habits
Oh yeah definitely. But the influence is diminished today when Amazon dominates sales. Though I think Amazon's algorithm probably pushes similar books.
Sorry to be so late to the party here! Hasn’t the mass market distribution system also pretty much collapsed? Publishers have gotten very good at selling 15 hardcovers in Walmart but no longer a few dozen mass market paperbacks on a some revolving wire shelves in the drugstore: seems like one more strike against diversity of options and for bestsellers.
Yeah my impression is that mass market paperbacks were largely replaced with ebook sales?
When I wrote about romance a couple of years ago I talked to agents who groused that major publishers had abandoned mass market and that writers and readers had migrated to self-publishing; now majors are grabbing the successful writers back and trying to capitalize off the networks and direct-to-customer practices these writers have built up for themselves. I’d be interested to know whether contemporary e-book sales for other genres are comparable to what mass market used to be. Do you see much direct-to-ebook in the genres from major publishers? E-book sales have probably replaced mass market for someone like Steven King, but how about writers who don’t have a hardcover audience? Sorry, this is in the weeds!
I was thinking about It when Lincoln was mentioning buying in bulk, because that's literally how it came to be my first Stephen King novel. I was 11, I was very interested in horror and felt like it was time to get into King, and all of his books were relatively the same price in paperback, between $5 for the smallest ones and $7 for the largest ones. I only had $7. I needed that money to last. So I bought, and read, my first 1000+ page book. Read it twice, in fact. That $7 stretched, let me tell ya.
This is a great piece that, along with the Yingling, tackled every argument that I would have made myself initially.
Me, I was leaning toward the advent of Bookscan around 2001, which likely showed for the first time that lit wasn't really selling anywhere while revealing what was working--just as Dad Rock ended in May 1991 when Soundscan (Bookscan's precursor for the record industry) revealed that Dad Rock wasn't selling as much as the music companies thought and rap and country were selling way better and in places no one imagined. The difference between the Billboard charts for 1992 and 1991 are as striking as those between PW/Times lists of this year and 1980. Thus what lit is published nowadays is really a luxury good. You sell a million James Paterson or Sarah Maas novels so you can afford to put out that little novel everyone in-house loves and that makes you all feel good as a publisher, even though you know it'll only sell 500 copies.
And that made me realize what might be the actual cause for the decline in the publication of contemporary lit.
In the great book THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors, by Al Silverman, it becomes very clear very quickly that the people who published literature pre-1985 weren't just interested in publishing that literature. They also wanted, maybe even primarily wanted, to brag about the authors they'd collected to publish and show them off in their society like art objects, especially if they were some hidden gem discovered in Europe. And damn the cost.
So contemporary literature didn't die. These publishers did, and their houses were then sold to other houses. The resulting corporate consolidation, which started in the mid-80s, then made cost today's publishers' primary concern. Without their champions not just at the top of the houses, but as their owners, imho literary writers have far less chance today.
Big Data was a mistake. Humans made better decisions when they didn't, actually, know what the fuck other humans were doing.
Theater’s always dying too, BTW.
I am VERY GLAD you have shifted the focus here from the genre itself to the market conditions within which the genre operates. It makes no sense to talk about the "decline of literary fiction" without talking about the economics of publishing literary fiction. My main problem with such analyses as OY’s piece “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” is that they treat a genrefied market as if it has always existed and as if changes over the decades are indeed comparable. But nobody called anything "literary fiction" until other genre tags arose against which "literary fiction" could be defined. (I am thinking of Dan Sinykin's claim in that Nation article that "literary fiction" only became a term of art in publishing in the late 1970s, arising in part in reaction to the success of other newly christened genre tags like "fantasy", "horror", or "romance", genre tags that the industry embraced right smack in the middle of the corporatisation of the field, no doubt because they were so eminently marketable.) Literary fiction is by definition "fiction which defines itself as not belonging to any other genre" and also "fiction which is not classified as commercial" which sounds to me like HARD SELL INCARNATE and also does not really accurately identify pre-1970s fiction which has been grandfathered in to the "literary" fold. (Imagine considering Dickens "not commercial"! But Dickens gets roped into the "literary" pantheon.) If "literary fiction" as a marketing category (which is how I am defining "genre") came into being in the late 1970s, then it would appear that literary fiction sales have been declining steadily ever since the category came into being. What else has happened during that time? A proliferation of many, many other genre/marketing categories for literary fiction to compete with, and the inexorable march of corporatisation within publishing. We all know that capital flees not only from unprofitable to profitable enterprises, but also from less profitable to more profitable enterprises. As publishing comes to be ever more dominated by a corporate mindset which cares nothing at all about literature and only looks at numbers on a spreadsheet, the eggs are all going to be put into the most profitable baskets. What about the possibility that most readers don't buy literary fiction because they haven't heard about it? Is literary fiction getting the same marketing spend as romantasy? If a literary fiction author knows the only ad spend they will get is any fumes left over after all the more commercial fiction gets the lion's share, so that one of their only real chances of getting publicity is to win an award, then is it any wonder that they might gear their work more toward delighting the literari on awards panels? And zooming way back into uber-general woo-woo theory-of-everything territory, but what if the triumph of genre over literary fiction has merely been a triumph of discoverability? And if we calculate discoverability as a function of marketing spend, then maybe what killed literary fiction was the numbers-uber-alles corporation???
Very much so, although I'd say the same is true of every genre. A lot of retroactive genre claiming in science fiction, romance, etc. too
The progenitors of a genre don't create the genre, do they? If you write a sui generis novel, and nobody imitates it, you've not founded a genre. It was the Tolkien imitators who created Tolkienesque fantasy fiction as a genre.
Yes, but a lot of people have a conception of genres as almost eternal Platonic forms and will argue that, say, Jane Austen was writing Romance by another name or debate whether an older author “counts” as fantasy or science fiction or literary before the invention of any of those. It seems to be something particular to literature too. In music, people will talk about proto-punk bands or progenitors of surf rock or whatever by you don’t—or I haven’t at least—see people fight about whether a 1960s band gets to “count” for team punk rock or team heavy metal
That's an interesting point about music. I agree there's not so much retroactive genre assignment in discussions of musical history. I do think, though, of how rigid genre definitions might indicate anxieties of some kind. For example, in music, once rock & roll has come to be culturally coded as "white music", do Prince or Sly Stone or Ice Cube "count" as rock stars? Such questions are the sort a certain kind of (white, American) music geek might agonise over—and this agonising might be read as indicating deeper unprocessed anxiety over wanting to enjoy American music without confronting the racial legacy behind the music. Can we speculate what anxieties might be indicated by an insistence on treating literary genre as a Platonic form? It might be as simple as an unarticulated resistance to the notion that one's tastes have been moulded by commercial concerns…? I tend to think along these lines because I find it increasingly impossible to see fictional "genres" as anything more than a marketing tool.
Thoughtful article. I agree people need to not lose sleep over this hysteria. Keep writing and getting better. Now for my shameless promotion. You may like some of my stories. You may not. Check them out and see. Thank you.
https://substack.com/@ladavis87?r=1zp5m9&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
I like the picture of Black Mask magazine: I recently ordered 8 back issues (now in Ellery Queen) to help me get in the frame of mind for my next novel. As to pretentious twaddle that is over-hyped, I've been disappointed with much written in the last 5 years, so put me down as one of the people going back to classics.
Fascinating analysis, Lincoln, thank you!
A) this is well-argued and persuasive and my god I wish substack writers would just shut up about this now, especially the Substack Boyz who still think they can't get published because of all those bit-- I mean, wimmin holding them back; B) I recently noted this elsewhere but this is actually the right Myers, so I want to say again that he was one of the most pestilential cancres on American criticism, what a fucking philistine and maroon. I remember that stupid article coming out just as I had discovered DeLillo, and reading it with growing disbelief. My dad, always the establishment voice, pushed buttons and we kept arguing, until finally I just made him go read some Proulx. He was forced to concede. Myers was a moron, and a terrible, just terrible critic who was totally inarticulate and crude about every attempt at analysis, and man I love to take the chance to shit on his stupid opinions, so sorry about doing that here; C) I read Lethem from his very first book, and I LOVED the way he mixed genre with literary sensibility and I was fucking STOKED when Motherless Brooklyn made it big, and then the Fortress of Solitude. But part of me loves Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon, and Gun, with Occasional Music more than the famous ones, for being just gloriously weird and out there and not trying to be anyone Lethem wasn't even as they were definitely trying to work in a whole lot of styles and ideas he hadn't created; D) when I read Gravity's Rainbow last year I occasionally did so in public places, and inevitably the people who talked to me about it were excited to see "science fiction" out in the world, and had come to it from that direction. Which was totally hilarious and also totally logical, especially because it's much more coherent (to the extent it ever is) if read that way. What a terrible book to be so beloved.
To be fair to BR Myers, there is a big difference in the "accessibility" of Cormac's pre-90's novels (particularly Suttree and Blood Meridian) than post 2000s The Road and No Country for Old Men. Granted, the readers I've failed to turn onto McCarthy bemoan his eschewing of quotation marks as pretentious, and that was consistent throughout his career.
100% and I prefer the earlier southern Gothic stuff myself, but it's dense for sure. Your timeline is a little off though. McCarthy shifted his style in the early 90s and was already a bestseller after All the Pretty Horses, long before Myers essay.
For sure. I intentionally left out that period with the Border Trilogy because 1. I wasn’t sure when BR Myers wrote the document you mentioned, and 2. even the Border Trilogy was less accessible than his Pulitzer/Oprah-era works, if for no other reason than that he left the work of translating the Spanish dialogue to his readers.
Anyway, really enjoyed the article!
Great piece.!
I think your grocery store section is really onto something. The paperback racks are a feature of “Horseman, Pass By”, and I even have a mass market paperback of LIBRA of all novels. But as local control disappeared so did bespoke curation of titles. Clear Channel for books took over.
I am Young, so you'll have to help me with this. I feel as though "media phenomena" are much more niche and missable these days than they ever were in my youth. For example, I am (blessedly) not on TikTok, so every once in a while, my friends will talk about something that's been completely inescapable to them and it's something I've completely never heard of. Similarly, as someone who reads a lot of fantasy books, I am overwhelmingly aware of Fourth Wing, but most of the people in my life outside those circles (even ones who like romance and fantasy books!) either haven't heard of it or don't know the first thing about it. Contrast that to something like the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games of my youth, where it seemed like every couple of years we got this Big Inescapable Thing that everyone at least knew enough about to carry a conversation. I wonder if this is due to algorithms? The robot finds out what you like and blasts you with it until relatively niche things feel like cultural phenomena? I try not to use algorithm-driven social media that often, so I really can't say.
That being said, I also feel like publishing companies don't have much patience for "growers" like Song of Achilles or Time War (both of which I actually read before they went viral, which proves what kinds of circles I run in). Chappell Roan has a pretty ordinary story of struggling to find a label after her first EP under-performed and they dropped her. I wonder how many Chappells Roan we have in the literary world, and whether they're given the proper support by their publishers.
Side note: I was absolutely thrown into the stratosphere upon realising that you were the Body Scout guy. You should mention that more!
Thank you, re: The Body Scout!
And yes I think you're absolutely right that algorithms play a big role. If you're liking certain content on social media, you get more and more of that whether it's booktok discussions of epic fantasy books or youtubes about horror movies or whatever. And in general the internet makes it a lot easier to find more stuff about a niche interest.
But also there just was....less stuff before. Or less access to it, really. Not saying this in a nostalgia way. It wasn't better or worse as much as different. For example, when I was a young kid the only channel that came in clearly was NBC. So, if I wanted to watch TV the options were literally whatever was on NBC between school and bed. (It was a big deal some of my friends got Fox because then I could watch The Simpsons when I was over.) Even if you got all the networks, that wasn't THAT many shows to choose from. And even when you got cable, it still wasn't all that many options since most cable channels were showing sports, news, shopping infomercials, etc. Radically different in the modern streaming era when you have a million options and they are all on demand. It simply wasn't possible to "binge" a TV show in the old days, unless you bought all the seasons on VHS (and then DVD). And that was very expensive so you'd only do that for your absolute favorite shows.
Same thing is kind of true of most artforms. If you weren't living in a major city like NYC or SF or something, then you only had access to whatever movies were in a few theaters (or what was rentable at Blockbuster). You could only buy whatever books were in stock at the local bookstore and library if you were lucky or just at grocery stores and such if you were in a more rural area. If you were at the dentist's office, you could either bring a book/magazine you owned or read the handful of free ones kept in waiting rooms. You couldn't just read/watch whatever you wanted on your phone.
Again, not better per se but a very different environment.
Well done and gracious counterpoint. I have been glad to read both this and Yingling's piece prior. There's an excellent book-length economic and sociological study of these publishing industry issues in the eras considered here: Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson. I've gifted multiple copies to friends who sent me articles like these!
Wonderful article. I do think that the problem of concentrating on “bestsellers” has been prevalent for a long time, certainly in the music business. I was playing in bands in the late 70s, and the record companies were picking and choosing people they thought would be big, and promoting the hell out of the ones who succeeded. There was no other real pathway to success back then in most places — maybe larger cities in the US and Europe had more of a thriving live music scene, but hitting the big time, there was only one way — you became a chosen one.