Weekly Readings #176 (06/16/25-06/22/25)

a fit audience, though few

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

🙏🏼

My new novel, Major Arcana, turns two months old today and continues to drive conversation. Consider the insightful Amazon review above, for example.¹ (Speaking of Amazon, you can order Major Arcana in all formats—print, Kindle, and audio—here and in print wherever books are sold online.)

Then there is Catherine Baker’s long, patient, detailed, informed,² and finally almost anguished ideology critique in Strange Horizons.³ A Sedgwickian “reparative reading” is attempted, and yet the novel proves resistant even to being forgiven.⁴ Our critic nonetheless admits the following:

Perhaps, on Magnus’s terms, the novel has done its job: I have thought about it more than any other book this year, as I try to understand what effect it might want these elements I find so irksome to have, and on whom.

George Monaghan also elaborates on his brief consideration of the novel in last week’s boys-are-back-in-town New Statesman article:

This book is magnificently realised in so many places. The delirious vision of a delirious visionary at the book’s core – of the comic book artist Simon Magnus, his illustrator Marco Cohen, and the girlfriends Ellen Chandler and Diane del Greco – is so compelling and provocative. I really loved it.

If you would also like either to really love it or to think about it more than any other book this year, you might please order Major Arcana today.

Meanwhile, The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, goes on. We are now enjoying Shakespeare Summer. This week I posted “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning,” an episode on Shakespeare’s transgressive pastoral comedy As You Like It, featuring the most potent of his comic heroines in the gender-bending Rosalind, not to mention his self-insert in the melancholy Jaques (i.e., Jakes, i.e., Shakes). Next week: comedy gets dark with the sexual dystopia of the problem play Measure for Measure. For episodes on literary topics ranging from Homer to Joyce, please see the the College’s ever-expanding archive. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

Finally, while I don’t want to get ahead of myself, I can tell you that “talks are now moving forward” about a slim volume, traditionally published, to collect the best of these weekly posts. (Think not a vast compendium but something more like those little old Calvino or Eco books one always sees in the library: Six Memos for the Next Millennium or Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.) Please drop your favorites in the comments. Good candidates for book publication are pieces primarily concerned with literary and cultural (rather than political) matters and those not unreadably immersed in the context of local controversies but rather about questions of perennial interest.

On this most incendiary weekend, I am still not moved to independent essayism. I know I have some books I need to review, and I hope to get to them soon, but for now I thought last week went well and will therefore offer another round of links with commentary. Please enjoy!

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Peakest Link: This Week, This Platform (Redux)

Dan Paul Becker, Hyperlink Painting (2013)

Two well-liked pieces on the decline of literary fiction circulated this week. First, Mesha Maren in The Metropolitan Review blames conglomeration in publishing and publishers’ resultant fixation on machinically replicating with each new book the books that have sold well before. Maren calls this “seriality,” the conversion of every individual work into an ongoing episode in marketing’s saga, as indicated by publishers’ practice of “comps,” where they demand a comparison of each new proposed publication to an immediately successful precursor. An aversion to novelty, a fear of artistic depth, a refusal to grant writers freedom to grow and experiment are the outcome in this telling:

The term “”literary” has been debated for years. It is not a very useful term at all and I for one would like to see it replaced, although I’m not sure what to replace it with (maybe we should just borrow from Lynch and call them “down deep books”). For me, the word literary is only useful as a way to denote books that are meant to be read on their own, with focus and deliberateness, where the experience of each word and sentence is foregrounded.

[…]

The books that “do well” online are conglomerate, serialized books. For a book to “do well” online, it must be able to be reduced to a quickly consumable and comparable description (“for readers of . . . ”) because, as we all know well, social media is not built for nuance. This inevitably leads to what Sven Birkerts calls the loss of “the very paradigm of depth.” The things that make books interesting to me (sentence rhythm for example) are often the aspects that make works non-serializable (i.e., unpublishable at least by the big publishers) and these are also the aspects that are least often mentioned on social media or in reviews. The few book reviews that do still make their way out into the world almost never mention formal aspects of a book, but simply summarize the plot and the themes and connect these aspects to other books with similar plots and themes in order to make the reviews themselves more serializable. The text, or at least the way in which the text was written, is beside the point; the point is the larger themes and the ways that they fit into the ongoing algorithmic series.

No one escapes these traps. Bookstores and reviewers want saleable “comps,” for instance, no less than do publishers, which is why for sales purposes Major Arcana was compared to some kind of YA-adjacent video-game novel I flipped through in Target once. And even if you’ve written something of depth and texture, the publisher’s description will necessarily flatten it into something the system can process. I looked up Mesha Maren to see what she’s written and found a “queer coming-of-age novel about addiction, belonging, and loving a place that doesn’t always love you back.” This sounds like a novel they sell in a mid-sized city’s strenuously “hicklib” indie bookstore next to the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobble-head doll—which is precisely its author’s own point. Orlando, for example, is a “queer coming-of-age novel,” too, but such a marketing designation tells us nothing about “the way in which the text was written”—almost the sole reason to read it. Any book, my own included, sounds stupid in a one-sentence summary.

In a post that circulated widely on Substack Notes, however, one Owen Yingling came to the opposite conclusion as Maren, blaming the decline of literary fiction on its too-exclusive pursuit of “the literary,” here defined in cynical quasi-Bourdieu fashion as that which is consecrated as elite taste by the critic. It’s a reprise of Franzen’s status vs. contract paradigm, which wasn’t persuasive, to my mind, the first time around:

Consider the case of Philip Roth. Goodbye, Columbus was a best-seller and turned into a movie. Portnoy’s Complaint sold half a million copies and was the best-selling book of 1969. But no Roth novel in the 1970s appeared on any best-sellers list, and considering the brusque experimentation of the novels in question: The Breast, My Life as a Man, and The Ghost-Writer, this is no great surprise. And yet he received critical acclaim during the decade: The Ghost Writer was selected by the Pulitzer Committee in 1980 (though overruled by the board which selected The Executioner’s Song instead) and was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Professor of Desire was nominated for the Critics Circle Award, and all of these books were heavily praised by newspaper and magazine reviewers.⁵

Who else was winning awards at this time? With Gravity’s Rainbow’s National Book Award in 1974 (and refused Pulitzer) it was increasingly postmodern authors like Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis, none of whom ever sold a meaningful number of books. Their rise signaled the start of a complete decoupling of sales and critical taste. Authors who consciously shunned the ‘middlebrow’ mass audiences of mid-century America were rewarded by the critics. And authors like Roth, who were in ceaseless pursuit of literary status, readily changed their style to accommodate this new environment.

My own recent brush with traditional publishing tells me that Maren has the better side of this argument. I was recently discussing with a professional whether or not I should try for the whole thing—the agent, the big-five publisher, the substantial advance, and all the rest of it—and was told that unless I planned to write a potential bestseller more or less on the stylistic order of Rebecca Yarros, it would be almost pointless, so intolerant have they become of anything beyond the next prospective hit. Then again, Rebecca Yarros is herself no Stephen King or Danielle Steel, as many observers (e.g., Lincoln Michel) have pointed out. Our cultural fragmentation must be taken into account. Taylor Swift and Donald Trump are our last shared celebrities. We might consider that audiences have not shied from difficulty but have rather become too sophisticated for monoculture. Judging from Substack essays and podcasts, the proper evaluation of Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae seems to require Ph.D.-level competence in cultural studies, even as I guarantee many a “normie” barely know who those stars are, not the way they knew (e.g.) Madonna. Milton wished for a “fit audience, though few,” and that’s what we have now if we have any audience at all. There are worse fates.

Wishing to convoke the volk around shared cultural objects amid a modern fragmentation evident even by about the year 1800 was one doomed project of the Old Romanticism. Another of its doomed projects was artists’ delectation in their solipsism after the failure of that proposed convocation. So Udith Dematagoda warns the New Romantics—I am cited by name—also in The Metropolitan Review, as he evokes the terrible twin destinies of the Old Romanticism in Goebbels’s philistine engorgement of the state and Kafka’s avant-garde starvation of the self (which latter, paradoxically, was also an aggrandizement). His panacea is “duty”:

For the original Romantic ambition was far grander, and far more ambitious, than the promulgation of lyricism — it aspired to a great deal more than the proliferation of mere subjectivity. Such subjectivity was a waypoint, a means to rediscover and reacquaint ourselves with the attributes of a common and shared human experience, which can be encompassed by Frederick Beiser’s notion of the “Romantic Imperative.” The awareness Beiser’s notion — the attributes of a common and shared human experience — should, then, be at the forefront of our minds. And yet, awareness may not be enough — we must be dutiful. Though the romantics ultimately failed in this duty, their defeat should be salutary for us in confronting the specific material conditions of our disconsolate age. The nineteenth century did inform the twentieth, but the inheritance it bequeathed was, for better and mostly worse, a Century of the Self. We live with that inheritance still; only now it has become a universal sickness; narcissism, solipsism, compulsory vanity, and pointless and self-pitying introspection that has become a crutch and a blight in regard to all art.

What would be the pragmatic sign that this “duty” had been fulfilled in the literary text itself? I propose—I have proposed—its sign would be a doubleness: an affirmative address to the broadest audience consistent with a simultaneous marking in the text of the limits to the textuality and subjectivity from which the text originates. In other words, a text whose irony does not corrode its sublimity, whose sublimity does not explode its irony. This is how I try to write, anyway.

We know this project is as impossible as it is necessary because the last century’s single greatest work of literary art, whose feast day fell last week, could not quite achieve it, as Gnocchic Apocryphon observed in a Bloomsday post—

There’s a way in which the novel is unsuccessful because of this lack of any alternative to the uncontrolled chaos of liberal modernity, embodied in form as the dialectic between humanistic narrative and machinic formalism: Joyce cannot make it cohere any more than Ezra Pound could. On the other hand, there’s a way in which this is why Ulysses is the book of the 20th century—and ours. One suspects that if it did cohere it might be something like Pound or the other modernists, some totalizing horizon re-enclosing the world in the vision of the Gesamtkunstler’s dubious politics.

—even as Ella Schmidt, in her own Bloomsday essay, celebrated what incompleteness, if wedded to incompleteness, can nevertheless accomplish in our imperfect paradise:

The epic hero can’t make sense of his weeping without the language of the wailing woman, hysterical with grief. So Bloom can’t make sense of his failures as a man—his dead son, a failure to produce a male heir; his wife’s blatant adultery, a failure to act as a husband—without imagining himself as a woman.

[…]

She makes a distinction between her husband and the general character of men—he doesn’t share their naivety, their carelessness, the selfish way their bodies were made for pleasure and hers for pain. To be a woman, Molly says, is to be caught between the rigid poles of feminine and masculine expression; and who knows that contradiction better than Bloom. Neither will quite fall into place

1. 500 pages of Infinite Jest was enough for me, however. (Enough? Or too much?) I’ll have to die without knowing whether the Quebecois wheelchair terrorists accomplished their mission.

2. Major Arcana is not a roman à clef. With my documented disgust for Alan Moore’s What We Can Know about Thunderman in mind, I intended it first and foremost for readers unfamiliar with the history of American comic books, especially since my intention was not exactly to inspire a love of such comics in the reader. (On balance, though each reader can form an independent judgment, Major Arcana tends to elevate the novel over the graphic novel.) From the real-life personae of the comic-book industry, I took archetypes, and then I made them my own, even remixing them with other icons of paraliterary history. I don’t mind when critics connect Moore-Morrison to Simon Magnus, but my relocation of this figure from Old England to New England was not merely opportunistic on my part, was rather a deliberate reflection on the American Gothic, and is surely justifiable (if it needs to be justified) by, for example, Moore’s own career-long engagement with Lovecraft, an engagement that now includes one of his finest works. Having issued those cautions, I note that Baker is the first critic to spot Ellen Chandler’s IRL analogue, even if I gave my editor-heroine a very different life and destiny from the real one.

3. Ideology critique also hit the other novels of Substack Summer as hard as a bunker-buster this week.

For example, we have Brandon Taylor’s review of Glass Century. Taylor first drubs Barkan with the copy of The Historical Novel in his left hand—

Rather than serving to illustrate the development of the social process through character conflict, where the characters themselves serve as emanations of distinct social forces (the revolutionary spirit vs conservatism, for example), the contemporary historical novel is more akin to a chamber drama whose elucidations are merely descriptive. At least in the case of Glass Century, where there is no demonstrable evolution in the social process through the characters or their conflicts. Rather, history is a thing that happens to them with the strangeness and randomness of weather.

—then he slams him again with the copy of the MFA rulebook (which doesn’t exist, he says!) in his right hand:

But where I think the novel occasionally (or often, depending on how you feel about this sort of thing) gets itself into trouble is when you can feel Barkan overriding the register of his chosen focalizing character. First, let me explain what I mean. In third-person fiction, the author (via the narrator) sometimes filters the story or scene through a particular character’s experience. This is called focalizing. Granting one character’s consciousness primacy in the narration. Usually, in the contemporary way of writing, the focalization feels more or less commensurate with the voice, tone, style, and register of the chosen character. The same scene will have different presentations depending on the chosen focalizer. If you convey the scene focalized through a fisherman, it might feel different than that same scene focalized through a professor. Sometimes authors make use of this assumption and play with our perceptions to wonderful effect. In the case of Glass Century, particularly in the case of Mona Glass, the narration sometimes overruns her and the book seems to speak with an extremely literary erudition and understanding.

On the first point, if I were a different kind of critic, I might speak of Marxism’s insensibility to gender. This is a novel with a plot motivated almost exclusively by a woman born in 1950 who refuses to compromise her personal independence, a choice her older lover does not understand, to say nothing of her even older parents. Can these figures really be said not to embody social forces, and thus to illustrate history “from below,” just as Lukács desired?

The second point contradicts the first, since Lukács believed that the subjectivism of post-Flaubert fiction, formally concretized in what became the focalization rule Taylor enforces, degraded the historical and realist novel’s critical potential to survey objective social forces, as in Scott or Balzac. Auerbach, whom Taylor also cites, thought much the same, as in the melancholy meditation on Woolf in Mimesis’s final chapter; after extolling 19th-century French realism’s perfect marriage of character to milieu, Auerbach feared that our modernist doyenne’s 20th-century stream of consciousness—as well as Proust’s and Joyce’s—portended a de-particularized and de-historicized leveling of the human subject to a mere register of impressions. But enough of this tedious pedantry. I haven’t read Marxist theory since graduate school and agree with Sontag’s dismissal of Lukács for “proposing standards that ought not to be assented to.” More relevantly, I turn to the question of consistent focalization. Verisimilitude may be a literary virtue—I don’t think it is, actually; I think people confuse “verisimilitude” with “it feels real,” which aren’t the same—but it’s certainly the least of the literary virtues, and the first I’ll sacrifice, without hesitation, to interest. And if we’re citing precedent, there’s always Henry James, who for all his devotion to consistent fictional viewpoints nevertheless overwrote all his characters’ minds in the language of who else but Henry James.

A consistent third-person-limited POV with rigorously mimetic free indirect discourse is in about the same position now as the heroic couplet was circa 1790: a once fresh and vigorous form, so fresh and vigorous we took it for a new disclosure of reality itself, that has nonetheless dulled through institutionalization and routinization into little more than a wearying sign of empty literary artifice. (If you’ll excuse one more detour into Marxoid pedantry, see Franco Moretti’s “Serious Century” in his book The Bourgeois for an account of free indirect discourse’s initial power—in historical circumstances, I note, very different from our own, essentially the real or prospective emergence in 19th-century Europe of stable bourgeois societies.) I don’t think it has the immersive power Taylor attributes to it any longer, at least if it’s used without augmentation by a more authoritative narrator. I want to be told something by someone, not just attend to an impersonal black box inside a character’s head. (As somebody or other once enjoined, “Use your human mind!”) We can’t deploy the same technique forever and expect it to keep having the same effect, nor can we invent wholly new techniques without retrieving inspiration from the past. It’s back to Balzac, then, if only for a little while. Think how thrilled Lukács and Auerbach would be to hear it!

The Sleepers, meanwhile, was arraigned from the right for almost the opposite crime as the one with which Taylor charged Glass Century. It does not, said Brad Strotten in his review, sufficiently distinguish itself from (i.e., elevate itself above) the mental and physical level of its characters:

In his UnHerd article, he claims that “pandering to the present has not saved the literary novel,” but he is yet to command a range beyond the scatterbrained and scattered lives of the mediocre elites that he professes to criticise. Gasda might have pulled this off had he offered some fundamental challenge to the tenets of the therapeutic worldview; something beyond the “pathologies of the present.” But the novel’s ideas are as empty as its characters’ lives; it swims in therapeutic currents without irony, without distance, and without an aesthetic transcendence or a broader intellectual vision that might have justified the indulgence.

Taylor accuses Barkan of talking over his characters’ heads; Strotten accuses Gasda of not talking over his characters’ heads. It’s a hard dilemma to resolve, the problem of authorial distance in a novel, and no one has ever quite gotten it right. If you leave your reverence for the classics at the door and revisit Balzac or Woolf with these questions in mind, you will have the same problem with them that Taylor has with Barkan and Strotten has with Gasda, not that I am gratuitously comparing my generation to the past masters.

Finally, from the Murdochian (Iris, not Rupert) center, Mary Jane Eyre judges Stop All the Clocks to overrate language in its relation to the divine:

It’s true that human language enables abstract thinking, but that hardly makes it miraculous in a way that the communication between between flowers and insects or between tree roots and mycelium is not. A blind person can develop a theoretical understanding of the phrase “The sky is blue!” but can such an understanding be compared to the experience of looking up at the heavens?

I agree with the sentiment in general, but I’m not sure the novel is as definitive on this point as MJE makes it sound. Language for the novel, or language’s refinement as poetry, is not “the substance of reality” but our best way of articulating and therefore meaningfully interacting with that substance, which we must do unless we content ourselves with unreflective experience, or so I took the novel to imply.

4. I don’t quarrel with thematic interpretations of my work, and I also don’t accede to the replacement of ideological with aesthetic criteria in literary criticism, but, for whatever it may be worth, Major Arcana’s gender politics now appear to be somewhere to the left of the New York Times.

5. But then Roth wrote the popular American Trilogy in the 1990s—just as McCarthy wrote the popular Border Trilogy in the same period, to take Maren’s example—while Don DeLillo’s and Toni Morrison’s novels got more popular as they got more difficult, culminating in those successful reckonings with high modernism of 1997 known as Underworld and Paradise. And then there’s the aforementioned Infinite Jest, which even I gave up on, but which nevertheless sold 44,000 copies in 1996. None of this comports with the thesis that difficulty killed the literary novel, nor does our author’s citation of the fact that the classics still sell.