A response about Adam Kelly's new sincerity

from Jeffrey Lawrence

In response to my rather grumpy review of Adam Kelly’s New Sincerity, Jeffrey Lawrence has written this on Notes.

A few days ago, Henry Oliver published a short post panning Adam Kelly’s 2024 book New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age. Since I argued in a recent review essay that New Sincerity was the best scholarly monograph written on contemporary US fiction since Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, I felt compelled to respond.

1) Oliver starts his review by saying that “Adam Kelly doesn’t know what ‘neoliberalism’ is” and later asserts that “When Kelly does explain supposedly neoliberal ideas (as in Becker’s model of human capital), he gets it wrong. So wrong that one economist I showed that passage to called it ‘crazy bullshit.’“ Obviously there’s an ideological difference at play here. Oliver is a defender of the liberal tradition. Kelly is a critic of the most recent iteration of that tradition from the left. It strikes me as fair for Oliver to dispute Kelly’s conception of neoliberalism, but not for him to insinuate that Kelly has no standing to speak about economics (as in the argumentum ab auctoritate above). Kelly happens to have taken his primary degree in Economics, where he finished first out of a class of 300. I happen to be in a reading group with Kelly right now in which we are carefully studying the very economists that Oliver thinks Kelly doesn’t understand (Hayek, Friedman, etc.). There’s no need to undercut Kelly’s expertise in order to disagree with him.

2) I share Oliver’s distrust of “neoliberalism” as a catchall term that literary scholars began to use in the early 2000s to designate everything that was wrong with the world. The main reason I characterized New Sincerity as the most important book of literary criticism about the “neoliberal period” is that, to my mind, Kelly makes a compelling case that the major US authors of the “post-boomer” generation were deeply engaged with the core assumption associated with neoliberalism, namely that it “validates self-interest above all other ends.” Whether that is a true statement about (neo)liberal economics or governance at the turn of the 21st century is debatable. What Kelly compellingly demonstrates in New Sincerity is that a belief in its truth structured the narrative worlds of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, and other canonical US novelists of the period. The book’s achievement is at the level of literary method and interpretation, not economic theory. It’s a shame that Oliver focuses exclusively on the short sections on neoliberalism in the introduction to Kelly’s book and says nothing about the powerful literary readings that follow it.

One of the things that disappoints me the most about the contemporary academic humanities is how ideologically homogenous it has become. A very specific strain of progressive thought dominates, and all other modes of inquiry are silenced or marginalized. One of the things that most excites me about Substack right now, particularly in venues such as The Metropolitan Review, The Point, Compact Magazine, and Wisdom of Crowds, is that it brings together intellectuals of different political persuasions. I’m all for vigorous debate across ideological divides, but it needs to be actual debate, not just the slinging of accusations. I’d love to see a serious conversation between Oliver and Kelly about contemporary literature and economics in which Oliver actually puts forth a counterargument that they could discuss. Who on here wants to set that up?

My thanks to Jeffrey for such a considered response. I could have been more courteous about Kelly, for which I apologize. I was irked by the all-too-familiar easy manner in which major thinkers are misrepresented! Here is Julianne Werlin on the topic.

Perfect response and I fully agree. These are the kinds of debates we need to have. The consensus in literary studies has allowed many people to be so vague about the economics and politics their models imply—why articulate positions clearly if everyone agrees?—that they’re full of implicit contradictions and absurdities. My own perhaps included: it’s impossible to see everything about your own ideas that others can see.

And here is my reply.

Thanks for such a good reply. I agree with most of this! And I agree strongly about the need for ideological diversity and debate and Substack and so on.

I am not well qualified to comment on his readings of the novels, DFW et al being “not my area” as it were, and I linked to your positive review and someone else’s for that reason. I was offering a short blog that looked at one thing, which I think is fair and a difference between blogging and traditional reviewing. Mine was a marginal contribution.

One small thing: I thought I was careful to say that Kelly mischaracterized the thinkers he discussed, rather than that he didn’t understand them himself. I do take your point, though. It is notable, to me, that Kelly tends to quote other people summarizing them, rather than the thinkers themselves. He is, in fact, wrong about Becker. And academics ought to give a fair hearing to major thinkers. It goes beyond the introduction and is part and parcel of the book’s presiding ideas, not just the readings. It is also, as you suggest, an acceptable blind spot among literary academics. Whatever he himself knows, that is not what he the author of the book has put across.