Sinykin’s Big Fiction tracks the conglomeration of publishing and how editors went from talking jazz and pouring drinks with their writers in the 1950s to poring over profit-and-loss statements and how these shifts were caused by the buying up of independent, often family-owned, publishing houses by companies like RCA and other large corporations, and how the consolidation of these multinational corporations led to a risk-averse model with no room for low-demand commodities. What this means practically is both a refusal to publish books that do not mimic other recent, financially-successful books and the death of the long-range model wherein an editor like Albert Erskine could continue to publish an author like Cormac McCarthy whose pre-Border Trilogy novels never sold more than 2,500 copies each. (...)
I began to be obsessed with risk and art because I felt like it had become so difficult to find new (recently published) books that were utterly unique; in recent years, fewer publications review books at all, and the ones that do tend to prioritize the same few, already well-publicized titles. The books in the windows of stores I pass are all some version of the same trend, and social media repeats the same names on a shrill loop. I am of course far from the only person to note this tendency and even my complaining about a lack of uniqueness is in no way unique. In 2022, there arose a spate of thought pieces on cultural boredom. Literary critic Christian Lorentzen posted to Substack that “boredom is pervasive,” then went on to lay the fault at the feet of the “cult of marketing,” which has led to a scenario where:
. . .books and movies shilled by corporations have started to become indistinguishable from their own marketing campaigns. Indeed, it’s been argued that pop songs are merely advertisements for tours now that albums are dead, movies are advertisements for their sequels, and books are applications for their authors’ teaching gigs or else merely bloated streaming-TV treatments.Three months later, in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg complained not only about her own boredom but also about Lorentzen’s boredom and his supposedly misdirected conclusion about the source of his boredom. Goldberg didn’t like that Lorentzen blamed marketing, complaining that the “risk aversion of cultural conglomerates can’t explain why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up.” I wonder how Goldberg thinks that anything “bubbles up” without marketing of some sort, but the point of her op-ed was really to hail W. David Marx’s Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Marx himself responded to Goldberg (and the 1,200 or so comments on her piece) by underscoring the role of the internet in Goldberg’s boredom:
In the last few decades, mass culture successfully neutralized the constant aesthetic challenge of indie avant-garde experimentation, either by delegitimizing it as pretentious or quickly absorbing and defusing its innovations. The internet meanwhile promised to be weirder, more niche, and more interesting, and yet the zeitgeist is anchored to mega-moments, rehashed reboots, and lowest common denominator viral content . . . . [The] explanation for this is that (1) status value was always key to the appeal of avant-garde and indie culture, and (2) the internet conspires against providing such content with status value. In the ensuing vacuum, the mass media and elite consumers spend their energy engaging with mass culture, which is more likely than niche content to be conventional.Goldberg laments the lack of the “truly cool” by complaining about music in coffee shops but what she is, almost inadvertently, pointing out is a trend that threatens not just to deny us groovy café vibes but to remake the ways in which we receive and metabolize all new art. I try not to be too alarmist, but I think this is a time for alarm.
It is not unique to blame the internet. Many others have written about the impacts of the digital age including Lorentzen who, in his 2019 article for Harper’s, outlined the shift in his role as a literary critic, saying that he was “put on notice” that he was now a simple link in capitalist food chain, a purveyor of products to fill the feeds of those who “believe in the algorithm” and to comfort them by demonstrating that “everyone else is watching, reading, listening to the same things.” Blaming the internet for artistic uniformity is nothing new but in reading Big Fiction and “The New Seriality,” I began to conceptualize the overlap between conglomeration and algorithmicity as the perfect storm in the true crime death of the availability of idiosyncratic literature. I am not complaining that distinctive books do not exist, but rather that we are rapidly losing the means of accessing them. (...)
Comparison or “comp” titles are not an entirely new phenomenon, but their importance has risen meteorically as conglomeration and serialization have become the new norms. Comp titles are now often printed right on the cover of new books along with the phrase “for readers of . . . ” and their importance throughout the acquisition process is unparalleled, or as one Big Five editor recently told researcher Laura McGrath, “Comps are king in this business.” McGrath has done extensive research on the impacts of comp titles and the ways in which they reinforce whiteness and other conservative trends in publishing. In her 2021 article for American Literary History, she quoted an agent as saying:
If [editors] can’t find a book that [a potential acquisition] is like [i.e. a comp title] — if it’s really, really original — then they can’t buy it. Which is crazy! Because the whole point is that people should want to read something that they’ve never read before! That’s what publishers were asking for a couple years ago. They said, “We want something new and fresh and different!” So I would say, “Here! Read this! Here you go! On a platter! New, fresh, different!” And they’d say, “But we can’t find the comps!”McGrath demonstrates that while comp titles have always served a supposedly instructive role (“this book is like that book”), in recent years they “have become prescriptive (‘this book should be like that book’) and restrictive (‘ . . . or we can’t publish it’).” (...)
The term “”literary” has been debated for years. It is not a very useful term at all and I for one would like to see it replaced, although I’m not sure what to replace it with (maybe we should just borrow from Lynch and call them “down deep books”). For me, the word literary is only useful as a way to denote books that are meant to be read on their own, with focus and deliberateness, where the experience of each word and sentence is foregrounded. I don’t want “genre” books to not exist, I just don’t think that anyone benefits from a blurring of the difference between “genre” and “Down Deep.” We do not need to talk about these kinds of books hierarchically, but it is ridiculous and harmful to everyone if we pretend that there are no differences between highly-serialized books and books intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality. I purposely say “intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality” and not “created outside of the seriality” because it is no longer possible to entirely create something outside of algorithmized seriality. As Denson says, our very lives are serialized. There do, however, still exist works of music, art, and books that are intended to be interacted with individually and in a foregrounded way. The problem is, how do we find them? With so much of our lives being lived online and so much of book promotion happening on social media, this is becoming a real problem.
by Mesha Maren, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: Rene Magritte, The Beautiful Relations, 1967
[ed. See also: no one told me about proust (Personal Canon).]
