The cultural decline of literary fiction

I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument:

Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.

The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.

This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.

I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.

> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.

I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.

Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.

Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?

   * length
   * mass/length
   * tension

People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today as "genre" and not literary is the problem.

I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.

His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.

I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?

Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.

> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. > > — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341

People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.

It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.

I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:

> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.

The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.

Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.

I really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since 2001 isn't really true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...

It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years.

Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).

I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.

That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.

Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??

This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it. I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling" anything.

There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable.

I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.

Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed, there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.

Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.

Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.

My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It’s been shoved in my face from middle school through college. Everyone writing “genre fiction” is not a Real Author.

Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.

I’ve been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It’s easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it’s $19 (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.

There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are doing fine.

The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.

My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod Magazine.

"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.”

— Stephen King

I'll toss two theories into the pool:

The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.

The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education. This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.

>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics.

Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.

Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.

Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"

Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.

Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.

My problem with books is that it takes a lot of time to read a book, and it's very difficult to tell beforehand if I'll like the book.

I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to stay on top of the recent thing...

This was a great read!

I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside.

I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable.

As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.

When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one).

From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.

Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.

Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.

Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).

You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.

I agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be something other than pure entertainment".

> after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction

I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.

Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today.

The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.

I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real.

When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.

In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:

> For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance.

But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"

While I disagree that “the publishers went woke” is a salient reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down to a single causal factor.

I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.

To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.

By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.

Perhaps a generation+ of explicit institutional discrimination at every level of the pipeline very specifically targeted against the demographic that created 90% of all previously valued literary fiction, played some role in its decline.

eg https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...

I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard earned lesson.

But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general.

It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding.

All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go.

The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.