> 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?
pseudocomposer · 2h ago
This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is.
Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
jl6 · 1h ago
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
citizenpaul · 2h ago
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
whstl · 1h ago
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
voidhorse · 2h ago
This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
bigstrat2003 · 15m ago
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
pseudocomposer · 1h ago
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
citizenpaul · 43m ago
> there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
crq-yml · 24m ago
Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens of art towards technical and political measurements. When a work is incomparable in the way in which it achieves verisimilitude it is escaping this system.
citizenpaul · 8m ago
You are basically talking about the part where the system is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good automatically.
Animats · 2h ago
> 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.
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
whstl · 2h ago
True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
xhkkffbf · 2h ago
And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
golol · 2h ago
I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.
eviks · 2h ago
> 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
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's
another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
citizenpaul · 2h ago
>bigger social part
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
nottorp · 2h ago
> It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
citizenpaul · 40m ago
>That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
voidhorse · 1h ago
I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
pfdietz · 11m ago
I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster. Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems to transcend the particular political position taken, if any.
libraryofbabel · 1h ago
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.
tolerance · 2h ago
> 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.
citizenpaul · 2h ago
> it spoke the language of memory,
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
tolerance · 2h ago
Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared language.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
citizenpaul · 28m ago
Tech doesn't change human nature. We are still the same as 100,000 years ago without tech.
tolerance · 2m ago
In my original comment, I said that I believe that our brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same things as before.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
Thanks.
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?
tolerance · 1h ago
He isn't, and I won't be convinced that he is until Supreme puts his face on one of their shirts.
voidhorse · 2h ago
I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
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??
xhkkffbf · 2h ago
The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.
voidhorse · 2h ago
Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.
We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
ang_cire · 2h ago
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.
fullshark · 3h ago
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.
vintermann · 1m ago
So it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the internet has an unlimited supply of critics?
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
How has that changed since the mid 20th Century?
dmoy · 2h ago
Self publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
kayodelycaon · 2h ago
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.
amanaplanacanal · 2h ago
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.
whstl · 2h ago
This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism.
I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.
Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.
For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.
Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art.
Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
WalterBright · 3h ago
My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod Magazine.
Ekaros · 2h ago
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...
jtwoodhouse · 2h ago
"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
photochemsyn · 2h ago
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.
com2kid · 2h ago
99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm).
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
schwartzworld · 4m ago
99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty much every other genre inside it. At this point it’s infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
exmadscientist · 2h ago
Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get masterworks. (I decided to check The Left Hand of Darkness off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually heavier than the last three books I've read put together. The introduction. And it's about five pages long.)
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
libraryofbabel · 39m ago
Oh boy, Left Hand of Darkness is a good book. And I always tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is brilliant. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
amacbride · 1h ago
A well-known observation!
“Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
nottorp · 1h ago
One Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :)
No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.
Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
gherkinnn · 2h ago
Turning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
voidhorse · 2h ago
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.
TimorousBestie · 4h ago
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.
peacebeard · 3h ago
Some better versions of this take might be “In the culture war many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem antagonistic.” or “Our culture changed and I don’t like it anymore, get off my lawn.”
MangoToupe · 2h ago
For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't want to read for the most part—even those who purchase the books.
gherkinnn · 2h ago
I find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of the terminally online.
xhkkffbf · 2h ago
My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.
nottorp · 1h ago
Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the message to keep you interested.
As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)
TimorousBestie · 1h ago
Was Tolkien woke? I wonder.
pfdietz · 3h ago
I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.
Papazsazsa · 3h ago
The reason you read literary fiction is because you're curious about the outer edges of human thought or experience.
esafak · 2h ago
But does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the writer writing about something that is inherently complex, and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel. The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to justify the investment.
UncleMeat · 2h ago
Is it inaccessible? Some books are, but there is a huge amount of literary fiction that follows traditional narrative and is comprehensible to anybody with a high school education. There are more than enough such books to fill a lifetime.
esafak · 2h ago
I don't mean every work of literary fiction; only those commonly regarded as difficult, like Pynchon's.
tekla · 2h ago
It's not inaccessible. Its just that you don't have the reading skills from lack of use.
mcnamaratw · 1h ago
Don’t be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I’m happy to debate … but only using specific examples. Authors and titles.
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
antasvara · 56m ago
>Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
pfdietz · 2h ago
Yes, I'm sure it all our faults, not that of the product.
tekla · 1h ago
Yep, skills need to be practiced before you engage with harder material
pfdietz · 1h ago
Or, authors need to be subservient to the needs and desires of the customers.
trinix912 · 2m ago
If their goal is to write bestsellers, sure. That's where the €1 leisure novels come from. OTOH, if their goal is to push boundaries or be original, being subservient to the desires of the customers is counterproductive.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
voidhorse · 2h ago
This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
“This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature”
No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.
Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
voidhorse · 1h ago
Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding" is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative ones.
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
mcnamaratw · 1h ago
Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works and authors? That would help a lot.
voidhorse · 22m ago
Sure, here are some of my favorites:
Faulkner,
Thomas Bernhard,
John Barth,
Henry James,
Herman Melville,
Fleur Jaeggy,
Dostoyevsky,
Marguerite Duras,
Poe,
Hawthorne,
Rosemarie Waldrop,
Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
But that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.
kayodelycaon · 2h ago
Interesting. That’s exactly why I read science fiction.
nottorp · 3h ago
This is HN, they may be looking to put a monetary value on it.
awongh · 2h ago
There's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author directly into your brain.
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
drakonka · 2h ago
Fiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about the decline of literary fiction.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
awongh · 2h ago
I think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
LordShredda · 2h ago
It's fun
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?
Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.
culturthrowaway · 2h ago
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.
TFA starts with the sentence “Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the literary (straight) (white) male” and then goes on to explore that with much more nuance, as well as many other factors.
mcnamaratw · 2h ago
Of course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?
bccdee · 2h ago
> explicit institutional discrimination
Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:
> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]
That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:
> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.
If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.
> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.
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?
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
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.
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.
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
Thanks.
https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/hartford-grad-sues-s...
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/mass-literacy-isnt
Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.
Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.
For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.
Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
— Stephen King
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'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
“Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.
Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
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.
As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
The full definitions can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
Based on the recent survey results, only half of US adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level 4 or above.
I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.
Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James, Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.
eg https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-...
Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:
> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]
That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:
> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.
If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.
> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln
> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...
As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.