Who's afraid of reading books?

The literati and the prestige economy

Literary discourse is in a dark phase. There is a crisis of the humanities and the English major is dead. The hype cycle isn’t working: debuts don’t break out anymore. Substack went from being a walled garden of literature to just another commercial social network heading towards enshitification. Reading the Beats is a red flag. Books are corporate products, and this big corporatisation of literature has fundamentally changed the product.

Some of these claims have a shadow of truth. English enrolments have fallen, (though that’s not such a problem as we think). And who really was the last author who made a huge breakthrough? If it was Brandon Taylor (2020) or Sally Rooney (2017) it doesn’t seem that long ago. (Is the hype cycle supposed to deliver a major breakout debut every year? Can there possible be that many excellent novels?)

But this mood isn’t original. It’s the new Amazon killed bookstores, Goodreads killed good taste, Twitter made everyone into a writer. And so on. Before that it was the death of the Western Canon and the Closing of the American Mind.

What’s really going on is that literature has lost ground to other mediums for more than a century. Radio, movies, television, and then the internet all took time away from print. People were complaining about the decline of reading in the 1960s. In the 1970s 8% of Americans didn’t read a single book a year. By 2016 it was 27%. Some reports say it is half of Americans. Phones weren’t the first cause of this trend, merely the last.

This technology shift also meant that novels became less and less central to the culture. It was still possible in the ages of James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon to write books that were important to their own times as George Eliot and Dickens had been important, but less and less so.

And the novels we get today often simply aren’t competing strongly enough for relevance. Sally Rooney is good at writing about life with the internet and smart phones but most novelists are not. Even literary critics seem to think that books aren’t very important. Lauren Oyler, supposedly the most celebrated critic of her generation, released a book of critical essays this year that was largely not about literature.

In the nineteenth century, this would have been unthinkable. Imagine the American Civil War without Harriet Beecher Stow or Victorian poverty reforms without Charles Dickens. George Eliot, like so many novelists of her time, was obsessed with the work of Charles Darwin. (Darwin himself was a Dickens and Milton obsessive.) How many novelists today are influenced by the work of scientists? How many of them are au fait with the crucial, cutting edge work from the world of ideas like Norman Rush or Helen deWitt? Many modern novelists are more likely to make their work an extension of Twitter by other means.