Raise Your Standards

A qualified manifesto

It has become standard practice to open a piece like this with the claim that contemporary literature is in trouble. Why is everything so samey, so bland, so—boring? Well, how much time have you got? Just recently, we’ve learned that there are too many women, and too few white men; that publishing is too woke; that people read too many challenging books, but not enough new ones; that men read wimpy books to impress women, when they should be reading macho books to impress men. And of course, the anxiety at the base of everything: that no one is reading books, and they’re certainly not buying them.

So now it’s my turn. Yes, I find even many acclaimed books to be deeply boring. Yes, I think we over-emphasize the content and especially the premise of any given book, at the expense of how well it is conceived and executed. And yes, it seems inarguable that bad taste reigns supreme. You can blame any number of contingent and structural causes: the internet, MFAs, whole language learning. Yet it seems inarguable to me that literature’s marginalization has bred a conservatism of low expectations, rewarding ready-summary and ease-of-consumption at the expense of anything worth reading or remembering.

There was a time when the reading and writing of real books existed somewhere close to the center of mainstream culture. A century ago, a genre writer like HG Wells could legitimately claim to be a populist radical, pushing a critique of contemporary society on a huge, willing audience. Ulysses, Naked Lunch, Lolita and Howl all occasioned major public controversies and landmark court cases. Even into the 1960s, a major work like Mary McCarthy’s The Group could spend years on the best-seller lists.

We’re a long way from that now. The past fifty years have been a period of relentless conglomeration and centralization in the publishing industry, collapsing a variety of publishing houses into a handful of mega-conglomerates centralized in a few cities. This trend goes for the books too: sixty percent of Penguin Random House’s 2023 profits came from just four percent of its titles. While Lincoln Michel might be right to claim this as a self-serving number, it is not necessarily an inaccurate one. You would be shocked to learn the sales figures for books which received huge advances and were promoted, reviewed, and sold in bookstores everywhere—I’m talking less than one thousand copies here, numbers which would embarrass a regional emo band.

This consolidation and the ongoing readership shrinkage has made everyone in publishing not only cautious, but actively conservative. Publishers will not pick up debuts unless they can be adequately compared to previous best-sellers, a process that leads to mimicry and group think and a parade of interchangeable books. “One success,” writes Break-Down editor John Merrick, “is followed by a string of imitators,” leading to a market dominated by “sterile, trend-following middlebrow fiction, and identikit and insipid nonfiction.” I have been told by agents that publishers are unwilling to take on new novels which cannot reasonably be picked up by a celebrity book club or adapted into a TV show. There is an active fear of books which do not immediately reveal themselves to the reader, for fear that, upon encountering even the most basic formal or linguistic challenge, the average person will put the book down, and go back to their phone.

Some years ago I read an interview with Lauren Oyler where the critic and novelist argued that publishers upsell readers, pretending that easy-to-read middlebrow books are in fact works of great literature. This approach gets readers to buy the book, yet, Oyler claimed, the result is often disappointment: is this really all there is? Their expectations lowered and yet still not met, these readers turn away from new books entirely, sticking to the classics if they read at all.

The result is a crisis of lowered expectations. Contemporary fiction must obey the rhythms, the logic, and the attention spans of people drowning in endless distraction. They must have simple premises and clear stakes, and they can’t be too long, too complex, too ironic or ambivalent or ambiguous, for fear of confusing or distressing a half-attentive reader or vindictive Goodreads reviewer. Deluged by denuded culture like prestige television and IP cinema, authors increasingly write their books to read like film scripts, all dialogue and basic exposition, easing their adaptation into more seamlessly consumed media. Whatever formal possibilities have been opened up by online life, their expression among the recent generation of ‘internet novels’ has largely been confined to forcing very loud, ‘very online’ prose into easily-consumable text blocks, disconnected from any larger narrative or formal project, and ready-made for sharing on social media—essentially, as memes. In effect, this is a literature of planned obsolescence; this is how pre-TV dreck like Fleishman is In Trouble ends up longlisted for the National Book Award, and entirely eclipsed by its miniseries adaptation. Inept, irrelevant, and massively insecure, these are books written and sold from a position of fear.

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Yet literature’s increasing marginalization can be a call to arms—an opportunity. The conglomeration era has led to a flourishing of independent presses, willing to publish what the majors won’t. A number of these have come into being specifically to plug gaps in the publishing landscape: contemporary avant-gardists, women authors, translated literature.

The last of these has always formed a minor part of the American book market, covered largely by indie and nonprofit presses. Yet in recent years the majors have largely been caught with their pants down when it comes to major international prize winners, allowing indies to reap the rewards of Nobel Prizes for Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, and Patrick Modiano. Three of the New York Times’ top ten books of the 21^st century were originally published in languages other than English, and all from authors who had first emerged on independent presses.

This has created an opening for genuinely challenging literature which mainstream American publishers have shown no interest in filling. In 2018, the National Book Awards reintroduced a translated literature prize, and its longlists are consistently more exciting (and deserving) than most books nominated for the main fiction prize. It is as impossible to imagine the mainstream NBA rewarding a book written as a single 500 page sentence, as it is to picture a mediocrity like Anthony Doerr nominated alongside Solvej Balle or Samanta Schweblin.

Arriving with the imprimatur of previous publication, often from authors with standing in their home regions, translated books emerge into English with a reputation. Speaking as a book reviewer, it would almost certainly be easier to get an editor to care about, say, a Japanese author of sadomasochistic stories, than a similar book written in English. It’s hard to imagine such a thing even being published. I’m not arguing that these books have an easy time of it; far from it. Publishers are still conservative, and incurious readers never even consider books from other countries. Yet it seems inarguable that masters of the epic ranting sentence like Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Thomas Bernhard win awards and get reissued by Vintage, while their inheritors publish on micro-presses and fall quickly out of print.

Take a novel like Jen Craig’s Wall. Craig’s narrator has returned home to Australia after years abroad. Her father, a hoarder, has died, and the daughter, an artist, wants to assemble his accreted junk into a massive installation. Yet once back in her home, the artist’s thoughts spin mercilessly around her father’s illness, tunneling down until they reach her own, a bulimia which ties her, on an even deeper level, to a group of former friends, all artists, all with eating disorders, with whom she had lived during a disastrous and near-deadly period of her life.

In subject, this does not sound so different from other recent novels, in which a past trauma is resurfaced and unpacked. Yet Craig structures Wall as a series of exceptionally long sentences which loop, recursively, back to key details, until what the narrator has taken to be settled is revealed to be truly, surprisingly alive. The form might be experimental, but it is not in the least decorative: Craig’s sentences not only mimic but enact the structure of disordered thought, interweaving the narrator’s thoughts with your own, until the gap between reader and text has collapsed.

I could list so many recent books which I guarantee would have received more attention had they originally been published in a language other than English: American Abductions, Praiseworthy, The Longcut, and Lesser Ruins all spring to mind. These books all take up subjects of immediate philosophical and political urgency, but with the deep formal consideration and stylistic excitement which makes them, well, literature. Abductions, with its near-future narrative of a United States which has purged and denaturalized all foreign-born residents and citizens, is coming to seem less like parable than prophecy. Yet the book’s deep formal imagination got it shunted away from FSG, and its British publisher reneged on an already-signed contract.

I say all this not to tell off agents or editors or readers or even other writers. Literature isn’t an abstract concept, a token to be shunted around by digital strivers and substack culture warriors. It is an active thing, something that must be done by people who care about it. All problems of fiction are solved by writing fiction; all problems of reading by reading; etc etc. I have had profound experiences reading books and writing them—they have enriched my life immensely. Like a miracle, they are a thing which does not need to exist, until, suddenly, it does.

Return back to the top paragraph: when placed beside The Waves or The Savage Detectives, does any of this even matter? Well, yes, in that we can only read books which have been published, and the realities of publishing determine what can be written. This, I think, is why critics and readers have always wasted so much time arguing over ‘the state of literature.’ Yet in order for writers to take those necessary risks, we as readers need to actually read them. For those of us who want something more than boring, superficial, transient books, we have to demand more, to argue for the literature we like—to raise our standards, and stop settling for less.