What the Book Section Likes

No matter the truth, some people always believe that publishing is dying. At present this seems to be quite far from the reality. But whatever the case may be for the publishing industry itself, media is sadly still contracting, and book coverage is a part of media that the penny pinchers tend to see as inessential. Which sucks! I love book reviews. I like big-think New Yorker pieces about the The Way We Write Novels Now, I like podcasts about books, I like YouTube videos where passionate YA fans talk about which books got them horny recently. I like all of it. Reading and writing are my only interests; I have no other hobbies, really. And while there will always be some people writing for money about books and literature and the industry, traditional media about books and publishing is threatened, particularly at publications that can devote real resources to reporting, reviewing, and commenting on them. So it feels churlish to complain about the books media we have, knowing how precarious it is.

But I also deeply dislike the implicit value system of the book media; I hate how narrow and status-obsessed their interests are. I hate how books are celebrated for conforming to trend and then, later in the cycle, dismissed as being part of a trend instead of reviewed on their own merits. Yes, I do hate the way that contemporary progressive politics influence what books are allowed to receive a fair and unbiased evaluation, for self-defensive reasons. Whatever the reasons, what’s celebrated in book media is always so samey. (Not that this is not restricted to books; every damn Best Podcasts list draws from the same fifteen or so shows, in a vast medium.) I read year-end lists and I can’t believe the conformity and lack of adventure I’m seeing. It seems senseless for so much coverage to be dedicated to such a tiny sliver of published titles, and it makes me sympathetic to the many people who self-publish or publish at little independent presses who hold such deep resentment towards the literary establishment. Often, their specific complaints are misguided. But it’s hard not to share their overarching distrust of the whole edifice.

Why is there so much conventionality in what the book media celebrates? Well….

For one thing, books take a long time to read and review, much longer than a movie or album. This means that people within book reviewing circles often feel pressure to devote their limited reading time to the same small number of titles each year. (In 2016, you definitely wanted to have read A Little Life if you wanted to follow the conversation, and that book is more than 800 pages long.) The books that receive a great deal of attention often do so because the publishing company has decided to invest enough resources and effort into willing that outcome into being. Most critics follow the crowd when it comes to their opinion on a given book, and when they embrace their inner contrarian they tend to do so in predictable ways. (Some people love to be the one lonely voice in the wilderness, calling out a beloved book as a fraud, but if you’re motivated to be that voice rather than by your organic feelings about a book, then you’re still beholden to the crowd, still captive to other people’s tastes.) Books are celebrated for being provocative, but the readers being provoked are almost never people who belong to the same social and political tribe as the reviewer. (Please direct your provocations only towards those the reviewer would like to see provoked, thank you.) Certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of stories are privileged, and much more than that, certain kinds of writers. There are many, many rules, too many to list; for example, you may be a good writer, and you may have gotten an MFA, may even have become much better because of your experience there, but you must avoid like the plague the title of MFA Writer. It’s all very tiresome.

Though there are many exceptions to all of these guidelines, book media is most likely to give positive reviews to fiction that’s

• Of moderate length (400-600 pages), as short books signal a lack of seriousness and truly long books annoy; a good hefty 500 pager to carry around on the subway flatters the critic, makes them feel like they’re a serious reader who reads serious books

• “““Realist””” according to the conventional sclerotic definition of “““realism””” - concerning characters that could actually exist doing things that could actually happen in a world that’s recognizably ours; matching the mundanity of the described world with a mundanity of style and voice; expressed without any experimentation, formal intricacy, or metatheatrics; relaying all information in sentences that never fool, trick, deceive, engage in play, engage in double entendre, engage in deliberate obscurity, or otherwise strain the reader’s attention at all; are based on the assumption that the only path to transcendence is through steady and responsible accumulation, not the transformative moment; and which generally operate according to Jonathan Franzen’s commandment that for literature to survive, readers must never be challenged in any way they don’t wish to be challenged

• Or, otherwise, magic realist, a quasi-genre which has by now collapsed into its own cramped rules and tired conventions - books that operate under the same definitions as conventional realist fiction when it comes to a novel’s purpose, the role of the author, and the responsibilities of a narrator, only here the protagonist, like, has an enchanted pocket watch that lets him commune with the spirit of Ulysses S. Grant, or maybe climbs into the land of dashed hopes and forgotten dreams through a hole in his grandma’s credenza, or whatever; the magic is limited to a particular character, object, event, or ritual, the rest of the world typically rendered in as drab a palette as possible, to secure the “realism” part; the plot has been written in such a way as to ensure that critics will use words like “tasteful” and “restrained” in their reviews, again in the service of appearing magical in a “serious” manner rather than in any enthusiastic way; we are meant to be very impressed by the whimsical lightness of the novel’s fantastical elements, whimsical and yet, somehow, pregnant with deep thematic meaning, probably, idk

• In both cases, the stories are about families or about social groups that substitute as surrogate families or about personal pathologies that can ultimately be ascribed to the protagonist’s dysfunctional relationship with their family; there’s talk, talk, talk; an unnecessary number of characters wander into the plot and have mumbling and strained conversations with our protagonist, for the sole purpose of underlining some fraught characteristic of said protagonist that contributes to the author’s boring math; the fundamental dramatic work is the agonizingly slow revelation of minute details that (we are to believe) make up the summative psychological realities of our lives; the novel’s problems are inevitably revealed to be the product of some dark event in the past, almost certainly involving the first time the protagonist perceived the weakness of their parents and, in so doing, finding the world suddenly a grim and disenchanted place; somebody cheated on somebody or other; THE REAL ANTAGONIST IS REPRESSION

• Compliant with the current political and cultural mores of sophisticated urbanite liberals in plot and characters but also concerning which authors are allowed to write about what.

To be clear, there are a lot of good books that fulfill all of those criteria. You could follow these rules and produce a great novel, if you’re particularly talented, and some have. But every year, publishing houses churn out such books by the dozen, most of them exactly as clichéd and tired as you’d expect, and they do so because those are the kinds of novels that the book press loves to reward. Some of the book world’s most (self) important critics reward only novels that follow this narrow script. And that conformity of tastes is a real drag.

Though there are many exceptions to all of these guidelines, book media is most likely to give positive reviews to nonfiction that

• Explores a big sweeping vision of history through some individual person, event, social movement, or technology, with a title and marketing materials that attach truly unrealistic importance to said person, event, movement, or technology; that the macro can only be explained through the micro is an assumed and unexamined intellectual foundation; think subtitles like How the Color Mauve Built the Modern World or Why Ms. Pacman Was the True Leader of the Reaganite Order

• History, in the sense of the assemblage of discrete bits of information that constitute a broad understanding about a particular time period, is a secondary or tertiary concern compared to the justification of the central thesis; indeed, a good gloss on this kind of book is a version of history in which facts are subservient to ideas

• Views the past in a way that suggests that the study of history is the act of assembling anecdotes that underline the book’s big-think message, the one usually expressed in the subtitle; history arranges itself into this convenient format at suspiciously high frequencies

• Omitting inconvenient details and examples that do not fit the described trend is the single most important task in composing the text

• The incompleteness of the central narrative that’s implied is not understood to be a challenging but necessary consequence of the nature of human understanding, of the fact that there is always more to learn and know and that all of our stories are permanently incomplete, but rather a facet of the author choosing to withhold more of their wisdom or simply running out of space; in other words, the blanks in our history are not a statement of our inevitable human limitation but instead an implication of sequel potential.

I guess the same caveats apply as above; I’m sure there are good nonfiction books that satisfy these criteria and which manage to be useful and entertaining. But there’s mountains of bad nonfiction that works, fundamentally, by overfitting history to a central idea or motif, which is convenient for marketing a book. “Why the Loom was an Important Technology” is a harder sell than “How the Loom Weaved the Threads of the American Dream,” despite the fact that history obviously has a billion architects and a trillion influences. I have no desire to list books that I think fail in this regard. Maybe that’s out of a sense of solidarity, maybe it’s careerism on my part, I don’t know. But you know what I’m referring to.

I will note that there are books that I think are good and also overpraised, in a way that speaks to everything I’m talking about in terms of the book media and what it values. Let me be very clear in saying that I think Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is indeed quite a good book. The trouble, for me, is that Say Nothing has not been treated as quite a good book but as a uniquely, transcendently great one; it’s received every award you can imagine and has been adapted into a buzzy limited series on FX. Since its publication, Radden Keefe’s 2018 exploration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the story of a single family - the macro only from the micro, always - has been feted to an extent that’s rare for any book of this era. It was, for example, listed at number nineteen on that comprehensively tiresome New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Nineteen! For comparison, Denis Johnson’s magisterial Vietnam story Tree of Smoke sits some eighty or so spots below Say Nothing. Perhaps it’s apples and oranges, but then the book people at the Times made the decision to make that list, and the list’s existence demands that I really ask whether Radden Keefe’s competent and engaging story of the Troubles is really ninety spots better than Denis Johnson’s ethereal exercise in blank-prose brutality. Again, I think Say Nothing is a strong work of narrative nonfiction, readable and compelling. That it has received praise is unsurprising. That is has enjoyed as many hosannahs as it has, though, speaks to the prejudices of our book media.

The reality is that widespread celebration of a book these days tends to be indicative of a current malaise in our hyper-competent, risk-averse upper-middlebrow culture. For example, Say Nothing embraces a strategic ambiguity about the Troubles and the larger conflict concerning Irish Republicanism, a kind of fretful both-sidesism that many cultured liberals of our era mistake for moral maturity. I ultimately didn’t mind that much, but I do mind that those implicit values are so central to success in a publishing world where books are doing OK but where authors can see careers bloom or die thanks to whether the right industry mavens give a book their blessing, whether the screaming online Young Adult fan crowd has decided to take another writer’s head as a trophy, and whether Dwight Garner had indigestion the day he sat down to write a review. Too much is riding on opinions that reflect convention, bias, and the preeminent need to appeal to one’s peers. As someone who writes books, and who has a few coming out in the next several years, is this in part a self-interested complaint? Sure. I say all of this as both a writer of books and a fan of books. As both a writer and as a fan, I’m bored to tears by the lack of true diversity of opinion.

There was almost a specific day, in the late 2010s, where every liberal journalist suddenly purported to be a fan of James Baldwin, to have always read James Baldwin. In adopting this deferential position they drained Baldwin of all of the fractious life that makes his work so beguiling, the way it rejects summary and invites complication; few writers would ever be so uncomfortable at being universally celebrated. More recently, Haruki Murakami has gone from being a novelist that everyone professed to like to being a novelist that everyone professes to hate, seemingly overnight, readers and critics moving in lockstep as the perceived public taste has changed. (This sudden conformity of negative opinion was blessed by LitHub, the ultimate arbiter of safe middlebrow front-of-class-kid soggy identity liberal literary taste; they did so by quoting from a review by Alex Preston, a minor novelist who wrote a wounded takedown, as is the habit of minor novelists.) I hate this shit, when everybody suddenly blesses or damns the same writers. I hate it. There is nothing I hate more than a soft landing, and that’s what all of this conformity incentivizes - soft landings for writers who write books and soft landings for the writers who review them. So many books get published every year. So few of them get the accounting they deserve. Why not let a thousand flowers bloom, before the moneymen uproot the garden?