Perhaps People Are Cynical About Success in the Creative Arts for a Reason

I am not unaware of the fact that this is a completely thankless, pointless thing to write, a piece which will do nothing for me and will not even effectively promote the perspective I’m sharing here. The backlash is too obvious. In the very unlikely event that this post escapes my modest readership and into the broader conversation, it will inevitably redound to the benefit of Ms. Cash here, not harm her. I am setting myself up for the easiest critique in the world, claims of being a jealous white man who can’t stand to see a girlboss winning etc etc. Writing this post is stupid, I am doing it against my own better judgment, I’m dumb.

But, look: the massive rollout for Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a very good example of a coordinated media campaign that has been, to some degree and in some way, orchestrated from above. I don’t know the exact mechanism, but I can tell you for a fact that this level of immediate, simultaneous media penetration does not happen with literary fiction without people in positions of power making it happen. What you see above is positive coverage, running to fawning, in four of the ten-ish most important remaining legacy media publications in the world (Vulture, if you’re unaware, is a vertical of New York magazine) and the single most important and influential indie lit publication that’s still alive and kicking. The next Google result down, which I couldn’t fit in the screengrab, was from Vogue. (Do you want to take a guess at how much Vogue has covered literary fiction in the last decade?) Coverage of novels in legacy media, in general, is almost dead. This kind of coverage attends the publication of novels by maybe ten, maybe fifteen?, of the most celebrated writers of fiction in the world… and now the debut of Madeline Cash. And, for the record, the verbiage used in a lot of this coverage seems, well, implausibly similar. No, this is not a coincidence. This doesn’t just happen. An all-out blitz of this type, for a novel, is not an organic event. Somebody knows somebody. Her publisher is throwing their back behind this book to a massive degree, she’s hired a particularly powerful marketing firm, she’s the daughter of a billionaire, the right people owe her favors, some combination of those, whatever, idk. This coverage is not an accident.

TO BE CLEAR! None of this means that Lost Lambs is a bad novel. I haven’t read it, but I will, and I will read it with interest and with an open mind. It might very well deserve every inch of coverage and every eyeball that falls on that coverage. If I like it, I will shout my admiration to the skies. I don’t know, but I don’t doubt it. My entire point here is that the quality of the book is irrelevant to this kind of coverage. The book might be a masterpiece, and its readers might adore it, and also by the way, this level of coverage is proof of Astroturf, sorry, that’s just true. Nobody just falls into this coverage. That doesn’t happen. Someone with connections and influence sweated their way to ensure that this rollout happened.

My question to you all is… can we be adults about this? Can we not have a Bluesky meltdown about my post here? Can we not have Emily Gould ponderously putting on her scolding hat in her New York newsletter to discipline me? Can we hold two things in our minds at the same time? Those two things are, one, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs might genuinely be a very good debut novel that signals the arrival of a precocious young literary star, and also, this kind of conveniently-coordinated media blitz is never the product of a bunch of professional writers at big-deal publications just happening to pull the same debut novel off of the pile and saying, well golly!, by coincidence I’ll write about this today, oh everyone else is writing about it too???, small little world! No. Please. I ask you, wretch that I am: let’s be adults, here. Let’s be honest with each other. Let’s skip the faux outrage. Let’s just accept that this young writer has been the beneficiary of some sort of higher power that shapes book coverage, and then we can actually evaluate the book itself, and if it is deserving, no one will be happier to say so than me. But let’s be real. Say out loud the same thing you’d whisper to your friend in publishing. Let us be adults here.

We might contrast this remarkable media rollout with the recent success of Vincenzo Latronico’s remarkable Perfection. I was sent a galley of that book almost exactly a year ago, having heard nothing about it. After all, it was a slight, translated novel by a young Italian novelist, published by the influential-but-small publishing arm of The New York Review of Books. I read it and enjoyed it a great deal and assumed it would pass by without much fanfare. Instead, it became a classic example of a slow-rolling snowball of a literary sensation, a book that gradually won over individual readers, was passed down through word-of-mouth, and suddenly became an immense success, shortlisted for the Booker. That is the kind of publicity for a book by an ambitious young novelist that feels organic to me. That does not mean that Perfection is good and Lost Lambs is bad. Nothing of the sort. It doesn’t mean Cash is a fraud. It doesn’t mean that her novel is undeserving. It doesn’t mean that that novel, or her career, won’t endure. But I am a man who notices things, and this was hard not to notice. To be honest, I’m surprised that whoever was coordinating all of this didn’t have a little better grasp of OPSEC, didn’t do more to spread the love out a little bit, add more plausible deniability. Then again, all press is good press, right?

Inconveniently, Latronico is also a white man, and so the usual suspects will immediately chalk this up to my white male condescension and misogyny and blah blah blah. Like I said, it writes itself. Well, like I also said, I am withholding judgment until I read the book. It looks like fun! Because the important thing is the book itself, not my sinister motives for questioning its press. Right?

Way back when I was on Twitter, pre-scandal, I used to talk about the DM ratio. I have built a career out of saying out loud what a lot of people will only say privately. The DM ratio referred to the kind of affirming responses I got to a particular piece; the more that people said “Right on, I agree” in the DMs instead of on their public feeds, in the replies, the more it indicated a topic where there was a lot of secret approval and a lot of public disavowal. This post is a classic high DM ratio piece. Book world people and media professionals will have very little incentive to agree with it publicly, but they will tell me privately, because what I’m observing is real and because they trust me to keep their confidence, which I always do and always have. Pardon me for being self-aggrandizing. It’s just a very real aspect of my career and thus of this business of ours.

It is true that I published my first novel last October, with a tiny little independent press, and it is true that said novel will never receive as much press in its lifetime as Cash’s did in a single 48-hour period. I’m afraid for my haters, though, that The Mind Reels actually did quite well, both in terms of sales - relative to the size of the press and the size of my advance, certainly - and in terms of mainstream coverage, picking up positive mentions in The New Yorker and New York and sundry other places. Of course, I’m in the position almost every writer is with a book that enjoys any degree of success: that success has been more than I feared but less than I hoped for, I covet more more more attention, and I do still nurture a belief that there’s an audience that could discover it and love it. And, yes, I am of course jealous of someone like Cash, who has been allowed to cut the line. But my next book comes out in October and my next next book, my next novel, will soon be sold, and I am too successful to be operating out of pure jealousy, and even if I was, the observation I’m making here is correct and deserves to be made. Because the creative and artistic industries stubbornly portray themselves as meritocracies even when everyone knows that they’re anything but, and a healthier and fairer world is one in which we can at the very least be open and honest about the forces that constrain our opportunity and our success. It’s the progressive thing to do.

It’s confess that this snippet from Cash’s Vogue interview, shared by one of my Substack subscribers, does not fill me with confidence:

I love all the puns in this novel; did you have to kill any darlings in the editing process?

I was a copywriter, so wordplay is really something that I love. My editors did have me really tone down the humor and lean into sentimentality more, which I think felt a bit uncomfortable, but I’m glad that they did. They actually did cut a significant [part] of a character, which I also, at first, was reluctant to do. But I do think they’re right and are good at their jobs, and it ended up being for the best.

I would never, ever describe the outcome of my collaborations with editors (which have been many, and fruitful, and have made me a better writer) this way. There is nothing an editor did in my work. Editors have helped, they have advised, they have put their foot down, they have bargained, they have taught, they have shared, and I am immensely grateful for them. But no editor could ever, ever dictate to me how much humor or sentiment there will be in a piece I write; the idea is anathema to my basic conception of what writing is and is for. All of my work is mine. But maybe Cash is just a more humble writer than I am. Who can say!

This Substack note from the (very successful) freelance writer Teddy Brown gets at the broader reality here. You know how you sometimes see a profile of someone who seems to have an objectively small audience, limited public relevance, and not much in the way of news interest, and you wonder “Why in the hell did they profile that person?” Yeah, as Brown says, it’s usually just inside dealing. That really is a huge part of all of this. Media both has contracted and is contracting, and the influence of the mainstream media has never been weaker, and yet paradoxically (and perversely) that means that an individual writer’s efforts to showcase their buddies in a legacy publication has outsized important; after all, in a media landscape that has been so viciously winnowed, the number of profiles is necessarily reduced and the relative visibility of any individual profile rises. And far from representing some sort of objective or transcendent level of importance, being on the receiving end of media profiles often just means that you have the right friends, that you’re connected in some way, and that you’re convenient for a particular ideological reason. I’ve previously complained about the ludicrous amount of attention the legacy media is forever lavishing on Laura Delano, an antipsychiatry lunatic and (metaphorical) fraud who thinks that her unpleasant experience in tony private Club Meds-style psychiatric hospitals makes her an expert on what’s best for violent schizophrenics who shit themselves on the subway. That coverage, too, is not coincidental, not organic; her last name is, yes, the same Delano found in “Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” she’s a very wealthy and connected person, and as a bonus she tells exactly the story about mental illness that the Boerum Hill brownstone liberals who keep the New York Times in business want to hear. So she and her Vineyard Vines-clad husband have received an immense amount of coverage while social workers who labor to keep people with schizoaffective disorder and suicidal ideation alive receive exactly none. This is the reality of media and who it chooses to cover: no matter how cynical you are, you’re not cynical enough.

There is, in 2026, a perfectly rational basis for cynicism about “making it” in the creative arts, and it has nothing to do with sour grapes or declining standards and everything to do with political economy. Never before have networking, patronage, nepotism, and plain old rank corruption played such an outsized role in determining who gets seen, published, optioned, streamed, featured, or taken seriously at all. As legacy media contracts and the attention economy atomizes into a million mutually indifferent siloes, the old myth that the cream rises has been replaced by a newer, uglier truth: access rises. Who you know, whose child you are, which fortune bankrolls you, which brand can subsidize your “voice,” which institution can afford to float you through years of precarity - these things now matter vastly more than whether the work itself is good. In literature, film, television, music, pick your poison, the system increasingly functions as a transfer mechanism from social capital or literal capital to cultural capital, laundered through the rhetoric of diversity, hustle, and authenticity. If you lack connections, a family name, independent wealth, or the sponsorship of a corporate gatekeeper, you’re not paranoid to feel locked out; you are accurately perceiving the structure of the game. That this awareness often shades into basic jealousy is neither surprising nor especially damning. It’s simply what happens when a society insists, with a straight face, that merit still governs outcomes long after it has redesigned every institution to ensure that it does not.

And of course, chance also rules. I flatter myself that I’m someone who opened a Blogspot account in a public library with absolutely no media connections, clout, or access, and that I have clawed out a career for myself because I am uncommonly talented and pathologically tenacious. That’s all true. But it’s also true that Andrew Sullivan happened to notice one of my first dozen blog posts, liked it, linked to it, and suddenly my readership increased by a factor of twelve. If that hadn’t happened, there is a very good chance that I would have sweated away in obscurity for awhile before giving up. I’m very good, but good itself has never walked the dog, and I will never not understand, appreciate, and admit to the various forms of privilege and good fortune that have allowed me to do this for a living. And what I would like is if the people who participated in this media blitz were similarly honest. Why not just say, if you’re one of the writers who blessed Ms. Cash with their spotlight, “Yeah, so the publicist who pitched was particularly aggressive, oh and also I owed her a favor, and yeah this has already been optioned to Netflix,” or whatever? Why not just pull back the curtain? Because I will say again, with utter sincerity, none of these machinations mean that Cash is not a good writer or that she didn’t write a good novel. They just mean that the game is rigged, and that many who labor away within it never had a chance, and out of sheer compassion for them, we should be real about all of this.

You are thinking that perhaps all of this really is just a coincidence, that publications that might discuss five or six novels a year are suddenly coalescing around this debut from a particularly media-savvy and photogenic young woman who seems to have received an unusual amount of media training. Well… maybe!