"When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, 'Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?' It seemed like a small and judgmental world. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable.... If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s...."
Writes David Brooks, in
"When Novels Mattered" (NYT).
Brooks goes on and ends up with the prediction that the literary novel will make a comeback, but I can't figure out what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. Why wouldn't they have done it already? They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication.
ADDED: Something I found myself saying to Grok: "One problem is women do most of the literary fiction reading and wom[e]n today don't take the kind of low-level misogyny that used to power man-written literature."
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57 comments:
“ If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s...."
Sounds like the NYT.
For most of the reading world, literature has gotten worse with both Greenwich Village and MFA programs. Both are very insular experiences. Great literature has an out and about the world quality, even if it is local to some distinct setting.
Writing is a craft one can and should learn. But writing draws from the inner life and insights of the writer. Narrow experiences even in self-vaunted places is restrictive.
meanwhile, two things are happening..
1) JK Rowlings is selling ANOTHER million books..
2) the establishment is DEMANDING that NO ONE ever read JK Rowlings!
there are books out there, people are writing them, people are reading them, just not the right (i mean left) people
Hemmingway went off and adventured in the world at large. J.K. Rowling didn't live the easiest life in her childhood and young adulthood. In comparison a lot of Gen-Xers and Millennials went through the planned and curated path before them. These should be the groups of people who are currently writing and should have written in the last ten or twenty years the great literary works. Gen Z has somewhat avoided the existing institutions (and been screwed over by them.) Maybe once they get a little bit older in the next few years we'll start seeing stuff from them.
They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication
Very nice…and I don't agree with the physics in the post title. Really, it was more people wanting to claim they have a talent for writing and campus capitalizing and creating another grift. It was better when all the writers fit around a table. More of a chemistry problem, really. Dilution…
"would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years."
Brooks got that part right.
Last night, I watched a movie from 2020 called, "My Salinger Year", about an aspiring writer in 1990's NYC. Sigourney Weaver was in it as a JD Salinger's literary agent. It's about the literary world that Brooks describes.
The writers in the movie didn't seem at all interesting.
Not reading comments yet, because I wanted to wait to see how many others snorted in derision at:
Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable...
Even MORE, David? Say it isn't so!
The old "write what you know" thing has apparently led to every chicklit novel's main character's working in publishing. It's SO BORING.
Doesn't a pen name solve this? Or are the authors egos so huge that a pen name is out of the question? I see this with people who attack anonymity on social media. The truth is it would kill them to post anonymously.
Not a novel, but remember when Woody Allen’s autobiography was “unpublished” by Hachette? Crazy crazy times.
"Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics" was credited to Anonymous, later revealed to be Joe Klein. We could use another one like that.
"...what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. ...They ...seem idiotically susceptible to domestication."
The 'social pressures' are the domestication.
It used to be that novelists were people that had something interesting to say, derived from their unique life experience. Nowadays, such people create Tik Tok videos. They've been brought up developing 5-minute attention spans, and all of their creative energy is channeled into the same format.
and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s....
Who's gonna tell him?
If David Brooks didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The publishing industry in the USA is dominated by libtard women who blacklist men and non-libtard women. So the quality and variety of American literature today is similar to the quality and variety of New York City mayoral candidates.
Brooks seems to ignore that Big Publishing - owned by a few media conglomerates - decides what gets published and what doesn't. Its not just "fellow novelists" "enforcing conformity".
Brooks could "write what he knows" and give us a novel about a Trump hating Political Columnist who inhabits NYC and DC and knows other Trump hating media types who inhabit NYC and DC. And how they get together and talk about how they hate Trump.
It'd be fascinating. Like his columns.
Given the quality of Brooks' prose, the idea of David Brooks Novelist seems a fantasy. But y'know - connections.
"there are books out there, people are writing them, people are reading them, just not the right (i mean left) people"
Yes, but these are not in the vaunted category called literary fiction. These are genre books, children's books, etc.
The Brooks column I link to does talk about the dominance of these other books. He's talking about elite literature, which used to sell very well and was talked about widely, even as recently as the 1960s and a bit in the 1970s.
I think the elite went deep into leftism and political correctness and race and gender and so forth and it cut off the air to those white male geniuses who used to reign at the top of the bestseller list — Heller, Roth, Nabokov.
As for the literary novel - its been on life support for a long, long time. Tom Wolfe tried to save it, but got nothing but grief for his trouble. To a certain extent its gone the way of Broadway. No one except women, gays, and lefties care.
BTW, I wonder how many black men have read Alice Walker or Toni Morrison.
The problem is you need 2nd rank novelists to have 1st Rank novelists. Lots of great novels were written by "1 hit wonders", or people who wrote a few mediocre books and then "found their voice". When you had great opera or great plays or great symphonies, you had a lot 2nd rank stuff too.
My question to Grok: "Who are the most successful white male writers of literary fiction to have emerged in the last 40 years?"
Answer here: https://x.com/i/grok/share/2IODsb28YWNwrG1axxzghioW9
Excerpt: "In the 1980s and 1990s, white male writers like Franzen, Wallace, and Chabon dominated literary fiction, often celebrated for “Great American Novel” ambitions.... Since the 2010s, data shows a sharp drop in white male millennials on notable fiction lists.... For instance, only 2 of 72 millennials on the NYT’s Notable Fiction list since 2021 were white American men. This reflects a publishing shift toward diversity, with women and writers of color gaining prominence.... Sources suggest cultural factors—like mockery of “litbro” ambition, fear of appropriation, and an “insular, female-dominated publishing world”—have chilled white male literary output. Many younger white men pivot to genre fiction, autofiction, or tech fables (e.g., Jordan Castro, Colin Winnette) to avoid scrutiny..."
My mother did a good thing when she encouraged me to read "adult books" and skip YA stuff. We did the same with our daughter. A lot of it is pure propaganda and badly written.
You're asking Grok the wrong question, Althouse. If anyone can break free of the leftist PC domestication, someone who self-identifies as MechaHitler would seem to fit the bill. Just ask Grok to write the Great American Novel.
I have no idea what makes a literary novel "great," or even what makes a novel "literary." However, I was under the impression that the so-called great novelists of 19th and 20th centuries were also very widely read; they weren't just "popular" with the elite gatekeepers within the publishing world itself. Who was the last "great" novelist who was also widely popular (i.e., sold a ton of books)?
Someone should ask Larry Correia about this.
Chick lit is a pox on civilization. The navel gazing, the therapeutic gobbledy gook, I just can’t . The number of women writers who deserve a spot in the pantheon of classsics can be counted on one hand: Jane Austen, George Eliot, George sand, Willa Cather, jhumpa lahiri. My parents had us read the classics growing up— no YA bs in our home. Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss family Robinson, two years before the mast, anything by Kipling. In my later years I continued to gravitate toward great adventure stories that manifest the universal hero’s journey, and learned a great deal from them. My favorite novel of all time— the one that has most informed my world view— is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Wallace Stegner’s angle of repose has also stayed with me.
The regnant literary scene will be dismissed as a dark age.
Maybe people with great and creative minds no longer want to write novels. Maybe they want to do stand-up comedy or be show runners for TV shows or create elaborate story lines on Tic Tock or You Tube.......The novel is, perhaps, no longer the best way to tell your story. Epic poetry is also in steep decline.
The internet happened. Write what you want to write, read what you want to read and to heck with whether or not it pleases anyone.
If David Brooks didn't exist, his non-presence would not create a vacuum, obviating the need to fill it.
Seconding Caroline's plug for Lahiri.
The dearth of novels is overdetermined. But one factor is that the short story is easy to "workshop," whereas the novel is not. Thousands of people graduate every year from the writing programs, and maybe a few of these people have developed the skill of producing a genre of writing that has virtually no paying market. Here come the advertising copywriters, the corporate spokespersons, the ghostwriters, and the whole subclass of "independent" writing instructors laboring in the shadow of the Ponzi scheme that is the MFA programs.
The Vault Dweller said...
Hemmingway went off and adventured in the world at large. J.K. Rowling didn't live the easiest life in her childhood and young adulthood. In comparison a lot of Gen-Xers and Millennials went through the planned and curated path before them.
The Critical Drinker makes that comment about movies today as well. They've all been coddled and given participation trophies their whole lives and know nothing about overcoming hardship, etc.
“ I think the elite went deep into leftism and political correctness and race and gender and so forth and it cut off the air to those white male geniuses who used to reign at the top of the bestseller list — Heller, Roth, Nabokov.”
And Updike—all those guys had to be shoved aside to make room for diworsity. But I think even the elite are feeling a bit stifled these days—I suspect the Nobel to Dylan was partly a poke in the eye to DEI.
woman today don't take the kind of low-level misogyny that used to power man-written literature.
That's too bad because it turns out it's low-level misogyny or nothing.
Dave Begley said..."Sounds like the NYT."
We could have ended the thread right there.
The 1960s-70s were the music golden age, but I'd wonder about his broader claims, some pretty wonderful/powerful novels out there!
As far back as my colleg3 days in the 70s I was describing modern writing (particularly poetry but since expanded to the novel) as mutual masturbation. And that was because of the Iowa Writers set up. A bunch of writers sitting around writing for each other rather than an audience.
"They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication."
They do exist -- in undomesticated form -- behind the cordons of small presses and print-on-demand publishing. Some of the most vital writing of the current century stems from this quiet (often pseudonymous) efflorescence that MFA-trained gatekeepers disdain to notice. Examples include works by New Juche, James Nulick, Delicious Tacos, ARX-Han, and Logo Daedalus.
How much elite lit was driven by those who actually did read the articles in Playboy? Jokes aside, wasn't that the primary means where someone living in Iowa could learn about Bellow or Wolfe?
Misogyny could be very "high level" in its intensity --- Hemingway, Mailer, Bellow, Roth -- but it wasn't a necessary component or the driving force behind men's writing. It was in part an imitation of Hemingway and in part a generational thing -- the assertion of a rising generation of men writers against the women they thought were keeping them down.
Much discussion of the end of the white male novel:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-writer/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/arts/straight-white-male-novelists.html
Writing is done by one or two people. (Rarely more.) The audience is individual readers. What lies between the two is increasingly software on Amazon or similar e-publishers. 'The publishing industry' was formerly the machinery for printing and distributing printed books between the writers and the readers. Now it is the predicament of a parasite that has lost its host.
...what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. Why wouldn't they have done it already?
Hysterically, "literary geniuses" were considered among the "intellectuals". As Murray Rothbard points out below, "intellectuals" are given sinecures for their contribution, the state. Or in reality, their faction in the political/cultural realm in a dueling democratic-elected government. And most of those sinecures have come under the allotment control of the Left. "Breaking free" would mean having to endure the cold discipline of the open market.
==============
For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.
It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.--Murray Rothbard, 'The Anatomy of the State'
Mechanically Filtered Artisan (MFA) programs are tres oxymoronic.
I think the solution is to have men write for men and women authors to write for whoever. I'll keep Hemingway, tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Tom Wolfe, Chandler, Hammett, etc. And women can read Toni Morrison, JK Rowlings, and Janet Evanovich.
Forcing male authors to constantly appeal to Female (often Lesbian) editors and readers is obviously producing crap.
It’s the same as Journalism. When you had to go to a $50kpy school instead of starting on the street at 16 and drinking yourself half to death in order to be a reporter, things died.
As a romance novelist, I can tell you my genre is doing just fine. Of course, I've never been a fan of literary fiction and have avoided it since school (many years ago.)
It was widely understood that one couldn't write (or live much) like Hemingway or Mailer or Roth or Updike. One can't make the same assumptions about men and women and sex that they did. David Foster Wallace cited a female colleague who called Updike "a penis with a thesaurus."
Male writers of Wallace's generation tried to write differently from Updike or Roth. Female writers, editors, publishers and readers learned the lesson differently -- male writers and male writing were over -- and as they came to dominate the book world, they made that even more of a reality than it otherwise would have been.
Flannery O’Connor was reputably asked if creative writing programs stifled aspiring writers. She allegedly replied that they didn’t stifle enough of them. Somehow , she survived the Iowa Writers Workshop,
"Low level misogyny" makes no more sense than anything else women write about, except as penis envy.
Louise B, your genre has always been dominated by women writers for women readers. What's happened to American literature is that AWFL's have taken complete control and blacklisted male writers and male readers. We don't get published and there is nothing of interest for us to read.
After years of technical writing I retired and enrolled in a writers workshop in order to Find My Voice. It didn't take long to figure out that Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules were a much better guide.
"One problem is women do most of the literary fiction reading . . ." and women today are as conformist as ever, exacerbating the progressive conformism problem, which exacerbates the future-of-the-novel problem, since spaces that men leave become low status.
Probably best example of Female takover is SF. Look at the Hugo awards. We've little gone from Starship Troopers, Farinheit 451, and Dune to novels about Transgenders and a Romance with a Dinosaur.
There are wonderful novels being written outside the US. Writers in Russia in the early 21st century - steeped in the Russian literary tradition and no longer restrained by the Communists, produced some great works.
Mark Helprin is another "should be great" writer. His "Soldier of the Great War" is on the Wolfean level, and certainly not chicklit He is an old man now however.
Mostly known for his Robicheaux / detective novels, James Lee Burke imho is one of the finest writers today. While I love the Dave Robicheaux series, so testosterone filled I have to read a romance novel to clear the violence from my soul, his earlier other novels are wonderful and award winning. Alas, it wasn't until the genre novels that he hit bank.
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