Readers of books from the New York publisher Knopf will be familiar with the leaping dog that appears on their spines. In 1915, when Alfred Knopf started the firm, his wife Blanche was ‘crazy about borzois’, and she suggested the animal as the publisher’s colophon. Though the logo lingers more than a century on, Blanche’s enthusiasm for the breed was brief. ‘I bought a couple of them later,’ she told the New Yorker writer Geoffrey T. Hellman in 1948, ‘and grew to despise them. They were cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity, and they kept running away. One died, and I gave the other to a kennel.’ Hellman relates the story of a weekend in the country when Joseph Hergesheimer, a Knopf bestseller and one of the most critically lauded American novelists of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, came down to breakfast on Sunday morning complaining that the ‘moans and whimpers of the surviving borzoi’ had kept him up all night. ‘I bet Charles Scribner has no such goddam dog,’ he said. ‘The Knopfs exchanged glances,’ Hellman writes, ‘and Mrs Knopf went in for Yorkshire terriers.’
It’s an amusing anecdote and telling in a few ways. The Borzoi logo remains, and is one of the most recognizable symbols in corporate publishing. But its original meaning was erased, at least in the mind of the publisher and his wife, who as vice president, director and part owner of Knopf, took a strong hand in bringing in new authors. An advertisement from the 1920s reads: ‘Take home a Borzoi Book and spend a pleasant evening . . . It is obvious by their nature that books can never be uniform in quality of contents. But they must conform to certain well-defined standards of excellence to achieve the imprint of BORZOI . . . Look for the Borzoi label and then buy the book!’ Marketing of this kind has long been out of style. The image of the borzoi was immediately vestigial, and so, forty years after Alfred’s death, is the name Knopf itself.
Blanche’s line about her pets – ‘They were cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity, and they kept running away’ – you can imagine publishers saying it of authors or authors saying it of publishers. I have heard versions from both sides, though mostly from authors. The metaphor of the story, surely not lost on Hellman, is the irritation caused to the talent by the living representatives of management. The talent jokes about leaving for other management. It’s a chummy arrangement, an author weekending with his publishers in the country, but they’re still all actors in a marketplace.
Then there is the presence of Joseph Hergesheimer. I thought that I’d never heard his name until a couple of years ago when I first read Hellman’s profile of Alfred, but he is mentioned a few times by Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds. Like the culture at large, I forgot about Hergesheimer. Kazin groups him among the ‘Exquisites’ championed by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan after the First World War, along with James Branch Cabell, Thomas Beer, and Elinor Wylie. ‘The vogue of the new decadence was to seem shabby and vain soon enough,’ Kazin writes, ‘but it is easy to see now that it had its origin as a protest against the narrowness and poverty of even the most ambitious writing of the day.’ In place of ‘the evangelical note that had crept into pre-war modernism’ and ‘grubby provincialism and romanticism’ – think of Jack London and Theodore Dreiser – the Exquisites delivered glossy prose styles and glorified wealth as aristocratic amateurs. Kazin writes that Hergesheimer, ‘the slavish celebrant of the new rich, intoxicated’ the public ‘with endless visions of silver and brocade, introduced them to the very best people, and tittered verbosely on a veritable Cook’s tour of colonial America, nineteenth-century Cuba, and the feudal South’.
Hergesheimer’s third book, The Three Black Pennys, was the first original American novel that Knopf, whose initial specialty was bringing out translations of European works of modernism, published, in 1917. Into the 1920s, he was their bestseller, until his fortunes waned with the rest of the Exquisites. During the Depression, encomia to industrialists and contempt for the canaille were less in demand, and the style of the day turned in the direction of Hemingway. (Kazin remarks that Hergesheimer and Wylie inverted Hemingway’s aphorism, ‘Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.’) Clifton Fadiman later remarked that Hergesheimer’s novels were ‘deficient in mere brain-power’, but in 1962, when asked which American novels he cherished, Samuel Beckett said: ‘one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer’s Java Head ’. Hergesheimer published his last book of fiction in 1934.
In the autumn of 1948, H.L. Mencken visited Hergesheimer at his home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, between Atlantic City and Cape May. He found his friend drinking mug after mug of beer, suffering from an eye infection, and full of complaints about Knopf, which had let his books go out of print. ‘In theory, he has been at work on his autobiography, but in fact he has done nothing,’ Mencken wrote in his diary. ‘He has written nothing fit to print in more than ten years. It is a dreadful finish indeed.’ Hergesheimer died in 1954, and was buried on the South Jersey Shore. A friend of mine who hails from nearby and read a couple of Hergesheimer’s novels after coming across his name in one of Mencken’s books assures me that there’s a plaque by the beach, on a pleasant street with an ice-cream parlor and a mini-golf course, that bears the name of Hergesheimer. Such is the nature of most American literary immortality.
We could say that Knopf abandoned Hergesheimer or that history left him behind, that he failed to change with the times, or that the success, including eight film adaptations, that followed years of toil in obscurity in Pittsburgh, robbed him of the hunger that is crucial to an artist. We could, like Kazin, look at him dialectically, as a casualty in an unforgiving turn in the saga of American literary style. Certainly a glance at a few chapters of Java Head leaves the impression of a prose that Hemingway was born to demolish. Kazin’s quip about interior decoration holds: the novel opens with an eleven-year-old looking at all the fancy chairs in her family’s house. (There is some charm to the passage: it is the girl’s birthday and whereas all the different chairs enchanted her the night before – she sees one as a dragon, others as deacons and dwarfs – now as a big girl she sees them just as someplace to sit: omens of her author’s fall from grace.) But Hergesheimer’s story as we would tell it today is a story of the market.
Among publishers, editors, scholars, critics, and even writers themselves, the stories we tell about literature are more and more stories of the economy of prestige, of one generation’s preferences righteously overturning those of its predecessors. Inside the academy, professors attribute great power to the publishing industry and to creative-writing programs. The syllabi of university courses in literature are yielded to student preferences, redefining the objects of literary study as matters of consumer choice rather than recognizable aesthetic criteria. Outside the academy, critics begin to stake their worth on the size and devotion of their audiences. And in the journalistic sphere, two opposing modes have emerged: that of therapeutic literary careerism, on the one hand, as writers make public confessions about their struggles to survive in comfort as authors; and that of accusatory literary consumerism, on the other, as critics express dissatisfaction not with books themselves but with the ways books are marketed, usually to somebody else, somebody they don’t like very much, such as a stepparent or a person they kissed a few too many times and would rather forget.
These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.
One critic who has made a stalwart case for reading literature sociologically is the Stanford professor Mark McGurl. Across three books he has charted a descending and demystifying course across the brows, from high to middle to low, and from pre-war modernism to post-war boom to the digital present, from salon to AWP Conference to algorithm. In his first book, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (2001), he recast novel writing, on the one hand, as a matter of ‘product differentiation’, appealing to ‘status-conscious’ readers that, on the other hand, resisted the crudities of mass production and offered at least the illusion of aesthetic resistance. His most recent book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021), largely examined mass-market, often self-published genre fiction, from traditional romance and adventure to diaper-inflected fetish porn, with readings that exposed the books’ plots as allegories for Amazon itself, fictional erotic partners performing customer service or other exploitative labor for each other, also an allegory for reader–author relations, of course. For all its cleverness, Everything and Less faced two disadvantages: the readers of these genre-fiction books don’t read literary criticism, and the readers of literary criticism don’t care about these books.
In between came McGurl’s 2009 study The Program Era: Post-war Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. It ends with an ode to the ‘unprecedented’ ‘systematic excellence’ of the fiction produced under the regime of university creative-writing programs: all the new graduate students being taught the craft of fiction writing led to ‘a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the post-war period’. A side effect of all this excellence has been an overproduction of creative writing students from America’s more than 350 graduate writing programs, who are statistically more likely to become holders of day jobs than published authors (or writing professors) but also constitute an audience for the ever-burgeoning genre on how to make it (or not) as a writer.
Against ‘tedious prejudices’ such as the ‘conservative modernism of T.S. Eliot and his ilk’ that ‘has ingrained in us the notion that art never improves’, McGurl arrives at his conclusion of excellence by an insouciant method: ‘to crudely convert historical materialism into a mode of aesthetic judgment, putting literary production in line with other human enterprises, such as technology and sports, where few would deny that systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance’. Crude indeed, in that having only one pair of eyes, each of us tends to read one book at a time and to make particular aesthetic judgments rather than judgments of scale. A golden age of abundance: whether or not art has improved, there is more of it.
McGurl writes that ‘there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic’. What he means can be grasped in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism. Taking the long view, Guillory tells the story of the emergence of literary criticism as a discipline embedded in the university after a long history of competing practices dating back to the eighteenth century and before: philology, belles-lettres, and scholarly literary history. He presents a picture of a discipline that was consolidated on campuses in the middle of the twentieth century on a par with the sciences at the cost of giving up its public role in the shaping of society, a task literary critics had long assumed as an adjunct to their popular expressions of judgment and taste.
Recent decades have seen the discipline enter a crisis on multiple fronts: overproduction of qualified doctoral students for too few jobs, resulting in a semi-autonomous professional sphere of underemployed would-be professors; dwindling enrollment of undergraduates in literary studies; pressure from those students who do enroll to see curricula shaped according to their preferences for diversity and relatability, leading to a shift toward works written after the Second World War and an erosion of attention to the past; and within scholarly production an emphasis on methodology over interpretation, which long ago surpassed judgment as the academic literary critic’s main task. Guillory predicts a split in the English major along two tracks: a retrospective program treating works from the age of modernism and before, akin in its historical outlook to the study of the classics; and a track focused on the contemporary, satisfying students’ current desires. He has described a situation where the ‘subfields’ of literary study ‘dominate over the fields’ (traditionally historical periods and the broad genres of poetry and fiction), and called for a ‘recentering of literature’ in academic literary study.
It is strange to hear of a subject needing to be restored to the discipline that claims to study it. But it’s characteristic of an age when literary discourse is in flight from the literary, in favor of the personal, the political, or, more often, the consumerist and careerist, in favor of thinking about systems instead of individuals, which is to say writers. At the conjuncture of these tendencies is another set of institutions perpetually said to be in crisis – because of the public’s failure to read enough books; because of questionable business decisions; because of the threat of new technologies to books themselves; or simply because of the rising costs of paper – that is, the publishing industry.
Petri dish of digital commerce, zone of many a reader’s most sentimental memories of shopping, scapegoat for the grievances of unloved and under-compensated authors: the book business has never lacked for eager explainers ready to unspool its secret workings to the public. With latent writers at every level from corner office to cash register, the investigations of an outsider would seem superfluous. But the turn to political economy in the academy and the intellectual press after the financial crisis of 2007–08 created a sense that every sector of society was in need of materialist analysis: surely publishing would not be exempt. Adopting something like the combined sociological and literary approach McGurl and Guillory have applied to creative-writing programs and English departments, Dan Sinykin, a professor at Emory University, arrived last autumn to teach us what it means, as he told an interviewer, for ‘books to be recognized for what they are: industrial products’.
Sinykin’s book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature is a thorough and occasionally diverting history of recent trends in book packaging, marketing, and sales. Around 1960, when the consolidation of the independent publishers in New York began through a series of mergers and acquisitions that continue to this day, commercial and literary fiction were sold in mass-market paperback editions that you could purchase at a pharmacy, a gas station, or anywhere with a wire book rack. By the 1970s, blockbuster genre writers like Danielle Steel and Stephen King started to command big advances for hardcover and paperback editions of their prolifically released novels. Publishers adopted a series model for fantasy and science-fiction books that were big sellers at mall chain stores. Literary fiction was sold in trade paperback editions, with less trashy cover designs, to appeal to pretentious readers who liked to get a latte on their trip to Barnes & Noble or Borders. Over the last few decades, independent and nonprofit publishers were founded and staked their identities in opposition to the Big Five, championing marginalized voices, poetry, and, occasionally, difficult (or not obviously marketable) writing.
Students of old-time publicity strategies, obsolete retail models, and fundraising from the government, the Ford Foundation, and miscellaneous charitable entities and persons will find much fascinating material in these pages. There’s ample trivia about publishing poobahs whose names you’ve never heard and will soon enough forget. They wrote catalog copy, filled out profit-and-loss forms, paid out advances, and even at times, if less and less over the years of corporate consolidation, selected books for publication based on their own personal taste. Certain numbers of them invented the transcontinental book tour (Charles Dickens would beg to differ); others set off revolutions in the field of paperback trim size. They were trailblazers of novel marketing categories that found expression on chainstore bookshelves, now largely shuttered. Above all, they ate expensive lunches they didn’t pay for themselves.
Sinykin’s larger claim about American literature – that conglomeration changed it in a meaningful way – is founded on a category error. Whereas creative-writing programs and the MFA system generally can reasonably be thought of as a site of literary production – places where novels are written and environments that in some ways shape the books written in their confines – the publishing industry is in fact the first stage of literary consumption. Unlike, say, the series of Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books in the 1980s and 90s, literary books are not the brainchild of publishing houses. Agents typically represent clients who have already written their manuscripts and editors purchase the rights to publish those manuscripts, a process that involves putting covers on the books, sending advance copies to reviewers, advertising campaigns, and so on (the hypnotic effects of TikTok being the current industry obsession). The work that agents and editors do on literary novels is more akin to tree trimming than tree planting.
Sinykin is aware enough of these realities that he hedges the claims of his theory of ‘conglomerate authorship’ behind a series of trite and familiar ideas: that writers ‘internalize’ the demands of acquiring editors; that the ‘authorship’ we typically attribute to individual writers is but a mask for a process diffused among the ‘conglomerate superorganism’. ‘Myriad figures introduced or empowered by conglomeration,’ he writes, ‘exercise influence on each stage of a book’s life, from conception to its acquisition and editing to publicity: subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats . . . Each working interdependently with the others produces conglomerate authorship.’ So the idea of ‘conglomerate authorship’ equals the book plus its marketing apparatus. But who could possibly care about the last part of that equation besides someone professionally engaged in the marketing of books?
Sinykin proposes a new method of reading, according to the publisher’s colophon:
To read a book through its colophon is to read it anew. Aesthetics double as strategy. Author and publishing house might be – often are – in tension, a tension that plays out between a book’s lines. The game a book plays is significantly different depending on whether its colophon is Bantam’s rooster, Doubleday’s anchor, Graywolf’s wolves, or W.W. Norton’s seagull, for reasons this book unfurls. I linger over books in these pages, reading them through the colophon’s portal, in light of the conglomerate era. I show how much we miss when we fall for the romance of individual genius. In novels, the conglomerate era finds its voice.
The cynicism of this notion is impressive, if also disgusting. To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign. Falling ‘for the romance of individual genius’, in Sinykin’s schema, is akin to thinking there’s something special in the soda aisle when you see the Sprite insignia but fail to comprehend that it’s just another product of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
Big Fiction resembles a systems novel in which the heroes find themselves navigating situations the scope of which they can’t comprehend. In Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Nick Shay and other characters are only flickeringly aware of the way the dynamics of the Cold War and its aftermath shape their lives; a late scene sees Shay – by the 1990s a waste management executive with an international portfolio – visiting a clinic for survivors of the mutating effects of experimental nuclear blasts set off near their native villages in Kazakhstan and noticing that the victims are wearing surplus T-shirts from a gay and lesbian festival in Hamburg, Germany, ‘the result of an importing ploy gone wrong’, a detail that signals the evacuation of meaning under globalization. In Big Fiction, the hero is the reader and the children are novels on the shelf by Jonathan Franzen, Sally Rooney, Scott Turow, Jeff VanderMeer, Marilynne Robinson, and John Waters, all clothed in book jackets with the Farrar, Straus and Giroux colophon: three fish (adopted when the firm acquired Noonday Press in 1960). Are the fish meaningful? Was the goddam dog who kept Hergesheimer up all night cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity?
‘If this book has a villain,’ Sinykin writes – as if a book that purports to be a work of literary criticism should have villains and the villains should turn out to be writers themselves – ‘it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge.’ Those ‘systemic intelligences’ are responsible for what we read only in the sense of manufacturing, distributing, and selling us books. Ultimately, Sinykin insults the reader’s intelligence, suggesting a consumer of books in the twenty-first century who lacks awareness of the workings of publicity and marketing, doesn’t understand how to read a book review, judges novels by their covers, and can only believe the hype.
As in many works of autobiographical fiction – or autofiction, as we call it these days – there is an episode of personal shame and trauma at the heart of Sinykin’s book. He tells the story of his own ‘aesthetic education’ as a reader: Tolkien, Piers Anthony’s ‘Xanth’ books, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger. His parents were ‘avid readers’, and had shelves full of bestsellers and book-club picks. ‘That all of these,’ he writes, in a startling revelation, ‘from Conroy to Salinger, were white men reveals as much about the homogeneity of the publishing industry as it does my family’s gendered and raced purchasing habits.’ For a time, he broke out of the gender trap, and his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Then, following a list of recommended reading for the AP English exam, he bought a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow:
No one I knew had heard of the book, so it felt like I had made a discovery. (No matter that it was in print and in stock at Barnes & Noble.) It became my talisman . . . Carrying the book made me feel unique, and reading it made me feel smarter than everyone else, but it was more than that. The language was exhilarating, the sensibility hilarious, the politics strange and enchanting. Gravity’s Rainbow gave me everything I needed to become, years later, an English professor: a talismanic object, with its teal spine and blueprint design, later to be held together with a strip of duct tape; a lesson in how to distinguish myself from others based on my taste; a fondness for liberatory politics; and a love of challenging prose, lush language.
But the fun could not last:
It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic education not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again.
How awful! It is not a stretch to understand how an individual who prided himself on being smarter than everybody else and then was embarrassed to find that fellow English-department graduate students shared his taste for the bestselling winner of the 1973 National Book Award would go on to distinguish himself from the crowd by writing (or at least putting his name on) a book (authored in truth by the Columbia University Press/Emory University English Department/Modern Language Association superorganism) that reduces aesthetics and their pleasures to market strategies and susceptibilities, that elevates the holders of placeholder jobs in the publishing world to the heights of scholarly scrutiny, and that demonizes and erases writers themselves (or at least the idea of them). It’s not hard to see the ‘game’ he’s playing: academic careerism.
Along the way, Sinykin’s method of reading through the colophon when he lingers on novels, typically for a page or two, leads him to some ridiculous, tedious, irrelevant, and dubious arguments, and others broad to the point of meaninglessness. ‘Danielle Steel is deeper than you think,’ he writes, bemoaning the fact that ‘Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA International Bibliography, Danielle Steel six’. I read forty pages of a Danielle Steel novel to check his claim, and found she was less deep than I could have imagined, her characters skinny-dipping in a shallow pool (a river, actually) of simplicity, cliché, and soft pornography. Of Morrison, he writes, ‘Beloved capitalized on the new market for horror created by the success of Stephen King,’ as if the book’s true literary forbear were not William Faulkner, as if ghost stories were not as old as time, and as if the novel’s more pertinent rivals in the cultural marketplace weren’t, per Stanley Crouch, works of Holocaust literature. Sinykin picks up on a remark of Morrison’s about writing Beloved after quitting her day job at Random House, and so – in his favored mode of reading novels – it becomes an allegory for the conditions of its production. He admits that the claim is ‘ludicrous’ but makes it anyway.
It’s also the dullest possible way to read that novel, and the same goes for his readings of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, both of which treat the corporatization of American entertainment. That their lessons also apply to publishing isn’t exactly a surprise, especially in the case of Doctorow, who like Morrison worked as a book editor in New York. Of Wallace and his crusade against addictive corporate entertainment, he writes: ‘His dream of saving America from itself was a fantasy that allowed him to complete the project but had little to do with the phenomenon that spurred decades of debates, listicles, and personal essays about the myth of genius, his bandannas and misogyny, and the cultural politics of men recommending books to women.’ Alas, the achievement of Infinite Jest has been felled by a cannonade of listicles.
Sinykin writes that after decades of modest sales, consistent critical admiration, and scant fame – following the death of his long-time editor Albert Erskine – ‘Cormac McCarthy fell in with an ambitious agent, editor, and publicist and transformed his style from dense prose and aimless plots to more crowd-pleasing literary Westerns.’ But in fact, at the time McCarthy published All the Pretty Horses, he told an interviewer from the New York Times Magazine that he had been at work on the Border Trilogy (of which Horses is the first volume) for a decade, since before the publication of Blood Meridian. His shift in style (not the first in his career, nor the last), the death of his editor, and his move to more effective management were a coincidence, not a case of cause and effect.
Along with Joan Didion, whose final novel The Last Thing He Wanted happened to be a thriller, McCarthy and Morrison are, in Sinykin’s account, writers of ‘literary genre fiction’, an umbrella term for books by writers with fancy prose styles that partake of forms usually associated with commercial fiction. As usual he sees this as a market strategy, not a purely aesthetic choice (no such thing) by writers who grew up in a culture saturated by film, television, comic books, and pulp fiction, many of them imported from the novel tradition before ‘literary fiction’ was coined as a marketing category. Perennial genres now often sold as literary fiction include the social novel, the domestic novel, the comedy of manners, and so on, but Sinykin doesn’t dwell much on these because they predate the era of conglomeration, and their persistence tells us little about it, other than that corporations continue to sell things they can reliably sell.
One of those things is autofiction, a term borrowed from the French that came into vogue among anglophone critics and writers of jacket copy over the past fifteen years, after the rise to prominence of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Teju Cole. ‘Just because autofiction is old, though, does not mean its mode of deployment is unchanged,’ Sinykin writes. ‘That it has a new name ought to tip us off. It, for one, is another kind of genre play that makes a bid for a large readership under the current market dispensation.’ What genre isn’t a ‘genre play’? Were Augustine, Margery Kempe, and James Joyce not making bids for large readerships under their market dispensations, furthering their brands? Sinykin quotes a remark of mine, from an essay in Bookforum, that autofiction ‘restores at least the illusion of autonomy in the hands of an authorial alter ego’, but I wasn’t talking about the publishing. I was rather drawing a contrast between characters in books of autofiction and those in systems novels. Sinykin’s theory of literature is what Guillory would call a ‘strong theory’: it is broad and reductive. When everything a writer does is a market play, nothing written is not a market play. And if everything we read is just a highly evolved marketing campaign, why read at all?
The most perverse of Sinykin’s readings is of Percival Everett as an exemplary nonprofit author during the era of conglomeration. Sinykin uses a computational model of analysis he developed with another scholar to analyze the differences between a set of novels published by Random House and a set published by nonprofits. He describes their findings:
We found that nonprofit novels tend to privilege embodiment, craft, and localism. They give more attention to what it feels like to live in a body, describing perception, sensations. They draw on the language of artistic practice and the world of craft: forms, colors, shapes, surface. They tend toward rural settings. By contrast, Random House novels tend to privilege language of law and power, bureaucracy, and dispositions. They give more attention to the results-driven world of ambition, the linguistic formalism of administration, and the manners and mores of polite correspondence.
Leaving aside the vagueness of these terms and the question of whether the model has an irony filter, I wonder what can be gained by such a method that couldn’t be gained by reading the books in question, aside from time saved. Sinykin subjects Everett’s novel Frenzy to the model and finds that it’s ‘a borderline case, hovering in its language between the poles of conglomerates and nonprofits’ – could be Random House, could be Graywolf. After this nonsensical waste of time (the model also thinks Beloved must have been published by a nonprofit – ‘By placing Black women and their embodied experience at the center of her account, she overwhelms the arid institutionalism and racist epistemology of schoolteacher, and thus of conglomeration, leading the model to recognize her novel as nonprofit’ – ah yes, the iron logic of a model you made up, performing a task a human can do better than a computer – reading a book – and performing it incorrectly), Sinykin summarizes the novel, a retelling of the myth of Dionysus, and writes: ‘Frenzy is an allegory for the plight of the writer in the conglomerate era. To speak in the city is to be subject to the rationality and instrumentality of capital. To speak in the wilderness is to submit oneself to the embodiment of frenzy.’ The split between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac is an old one, and no doubt it applies to the divide between corporate and independent publishing. After explaining the business model of nonprofit publishers as in part relying on donors who favor multiculturalism and lists that include writers of color, Sinykin concludes of Everett:
Close reading Percival Everett reveals a struggle – embedded in his sentences, his characters, his plots – between author and institution. Ironically, Everett, in his essays, interviews, and personal correspondence, fails to recognize that Graywolf and its fellow nonprofits operate according to a parallel racial logic as the conglomerates, one the image of the other in a funhouse mirror. He praises Graywolf as exempt because it publishes him, when, for Graywolf, he serves as a vessel for its mission of liberal multiculturalism, a prized commodity for its niche markets. Although it contradicts his stated motives, Everett’s literary project could be read not to condemn markets, but to condemn those markets that propagate inauthentic and constraining racial fantasies; his novels, that is, espouse one more liberal multicultural vision.
Actually, close reading is not necessary because the struggle between artists and institutions is often Everett’s explicit subject, as in Erasure and So Much Blue, to name two of his dozens of books. But poor Everett: all that writing and he turns out to be just another tokenized sellout to the nonprofits. Good thing he took his new book James to Doubleday for a decent paycheck.
‘This book defers judgment about whether conglomeration was good or bad in an effort to explain what it has meant for US fiction and how we should read it,’ Sinykin writes. But if what it has meant is that aesthetics are marketing strategies and how we should read fiction is through the colophon on the book’s spine, certain judgments are inevitable: that conglomerate publishing, with its reliance on comp titles in its selection of books to bring out, stifles originality by ignoring it until it has a proven track record of profitability (as in the cases of Knausgaard and Roberto Bolaño, whose books were picked up by FSG after they were hits for Archipelago and New Directions); that taste and quality count for less and less if they can’t be translated into marketing terms; that even the nonprofit publishers are just checking boxes for their plutocratic donors out for a tax break and for self-perpetuating charitable foundations; that any pleasure we take from contemporary literature is at best an accident and more likely a hoax.
The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary. Another editor at an independent house, a veteran of Penguin Random House, called her current method of acquiring books ‘throwing shit at the wall’ to see what sticks. During the trial that resulted in the government’s enjoinment of the merger of PRH and Simon & Schuster, the prosecution argued that the industry proceeds by rationalized methods that can be measured and ought to be regulated while the defense likened the work of acquiring manuscripts to casino gambling. They both had a point. Sinykin is invested in a highly rationalized view of the business because it brings his own efforts closer to the realm of science than to subjective judgment – the longstanding agon of literary study in the academy. But the fact remains that new literature has become a minor and diminishing concern of the publishing industry. If corporate publishers could eliminate the risks inherent in peddling literature at all – by, say, moving to a model whereby they gobbled up the hits produced by independent presses, often called ‘the minor leagues’ at the merger trial – they would do so. The point of the government’s enjoinment of the merger was to maintain the competition between the Big Five corporate publishers, which is the only reason authors receive high or even moderate advances. Fewer and fewer of such authors are those we would deem literary; more and more are celebrities.
Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history. The legal and political economic imperatives of the moment mean that the rights to backlist titles will tend to accumulate in a few hands to be exploited for as long as the copyright lasts. Most books will go out of print forever, as most deserve to. Those that last will retain trace impurities from the conglomerate system, but the presence of the corporate taint – I mean, the colophon – won’t be the reason we continue to read them, nor was it the reason we read them in the first place. Year after year our culture compels people to think of and understand themselves as consumers. This dreary view of life, which advertises itself as critical or at least conscious of commerce, capitalism and complicity, quickly becomes another form of marketing, and when applied to our reading habits it amounts to a distracting narcissism, looking in the mirror when our eyes should be on the page.
‘Books serve our self-image,’ Sinykin writes. ‘The books we like say a lot about us, whether we know it or not.’ He is, like many in his profession, operating under the influence of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who drew upon and expanded Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about conspicuous consumption and ‘the regime of status’ and applied them across classes, especially in the realms of education and culture. I am unqualified to comment on France, but I have always been skeptical when Bourdieu’s program is imported wholesale to America. In my experience, most Americans are hostile or indifferent to reading and glad to have gotten done with it in their schooldays if they did it all. They prefer the pleasures of sport, television, and various online distractions. And why not? Those things are fun and mostly painless. In an anti-intellectual country, reading books at all says more than enough about you, and you already know this because the rest of them don’t let you forget it.
Bourdieu, Sinykin, and many of those he quotes view reading and writing primarily as social activities, inextricable from our relations with others. Anyone who has read a novel knows this is true and it would be pointless to deny it. One of the reasons we read literature is to experience the author’s purchase on society and to see how it corresponds with our own. Literature’s perennial advantage over sociology is that it can do this through the means of irony, paradox, and beauty. It is not restricted to the empirical, it is free to invent, it has recourse to fantasies that are truer than real life. It is less enamored with disclosing the obvious. The greater the novelist, the richer the picture of the world depicted within it, but also the more resistant the work becomes to being reduced to sociology. There is a reason why, when Thomas Piketty wants to add flourishes to his map of the economy in nineteenth-century France, he turns to Balzac, and why Lionel Trilling thought there was no better guide to property in Regency England than Jane Austen. But for the novelists themselves this sociological richness is a byproduct of their aesthetic ambition, never the main chance.
Though reading is a social activity, the opposite is also true – something novels and their characters are always telling us. Silent solitary reading, removed from religious ritual and the scriptorium, is a recent development in human history. As Guillory points out, in the beginning, reading alone was the subject of moral panic, linked to the sin of masturbation. These suspicions of impurity, corruption, and self-indulgence remain with us today in the menace of book-banning. Like whimpering dogs, philistines will always be with us.
Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of understanding difficult books, the pain of grasping the literary history from which books emerge, the pain of looking at something we can’t yet comprehend though we know we could, the pain of examining the nature of our own pleasure. Perhaps it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of literature to the disenchanted explanations of political economy, to the suspicions of paranoid reading, to the preening pondering about what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us.
Life is lonely, painful, and punishing. On behalf of the freelance book reviewer/London litmag office/Downtown Manhattan scene superorganism that speaks through me, I assert that reading and writing are best done in perfect solitude; that sometimes what you read and what you write should be kept a secret; that when you’re by yourself popularity doesn’t matter, nor does money, nor does fame, nor does status; that when you are a teenager and you have shut yourself into a room to read Kafka for the first time, your parents and your little sister should stop knocking on the door because you are turning into something else, something they will never understand.
Image © Harland Miller, I Am the One I’ve Been Waiting For, 2016, Courtesy of White Cube Gallery