I loved Bridge over San Luis Rey. It's no surprise that it's David Mitchell's favorite, it's very like a Mitchell novel! Very intricatelt structured and thoughtful, but perhaps not thematically deep. Oddly enough I have a love for the middlebrow of ages past (I'm a fervent lover of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair and John O'Hara and the early period stories of F Scott Fitzgerald, for instance) while disliking our contemporary middlebrow stuff. That could just be competitiveness though
For instance I was recently thinking that unworthy books have always been acclaimed, after all Arrowsmith won the pulitzer, but then I was like no you know what? Arrowsmith was a good book! Better than the goldfinch anyway
I've never read Lewis, Sinclair, or O'Hara, maybe out of a fear of the middlebrow! (Nor The Goldfinch, though I like The Secret History.) Do Edith Wharton and Willa Cather count? I love what I've read of them, as I love Steinbeck. The boundaries really are porous, though, especially with novels, and especially in the eye of critics as acerbic as Macdonald. To stick with early 20th-century examples, I think anything easier to read than The Sound and the Fury *could* be called middlebrow by somebody, including The Great Gatsby or A Farewell to Arms.
I mean I don't think anything old can really be middlebrow unless it was popular in it's own day. Merely being widely assigned in school can't make something middlebrow, as by definition that can only happen if the high brows agree. By that standard great Gatsby wouldn't count. Wharton and Catcher were successful and critically acclaimed in their own day and some of Cather's lesser work does seem kind of middlebrow. Do people actually call the great Gatsby and a farewell to arms middlebrow? Imho it's really faded as an insult, with the growing democratization of taste. I think most critics would be afraid of the elitism that middlebrow connotates.
I think the idea is that Hemingway and Fitzgerald became so popular after the war that they were functionally middlebrow, as was Hemingway's later stuff, which Macdonald criticizes. I agree with you that most people wouldn't use the term today, but it's the subtext of even mainstream criticism, like those Parul Sehgal New Yorker essays decrying trauma-plots and the magic of storytelling, both staples of middlebrow lit. This was the origin of the anti-Franzen animus too, especially after the Time cover, and why he didn't want to be on Oprah in the first place. Woolf says that high and low must unite against the middle, which I take to be the subtext of a lot of identity politics criticism too: the critical elite siding with the oppressed against the oppressive middle.
Yes as I recall macdonald marks out old man and the sea as one of his four examples of middlebrow. I agree that in that context middlebrow is rather protean, as I would consider most mainstream critically acclaimed books to be middlebrow, and those are, definitionally, the books the mainstream critics like :) Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal are great readers I am sure, but collectively they define the middlebrow, even as they attempt to avoid it.
Like whatever the average nyt and new Yorker reader enjoys is surely middlebrow
Right, and this is why I don't think we can structure our whole taste around avoiding middlebrow, since it's a function of the social context as much as of the work. When Merve Emre swoons over Ulysses in the New Yorker, does it become middlebrow even though it doesn't become easier to read? Did Bolano suddenly become middlebrow when he got popular, even though his texts didn't get any less allusive or any less violent? Highbrow becomes such a receding horizon that we'll be left with nothing but that Man Ray poem:
Honestly I do agree about the purpose of the aesthetic in pedagogy being indoctrination. I sometimes suspect that’s partly how we got here, to some of the reductive mistakes that the left liberal culture world made in the last decade: a certain vein of second wave feminism universalizing that insight while trying to alter the pedagogical stories we tell ourselves in childhood in order to live, not recognizing that at a certain point the education ends and one becomes an adult possessed of critical faculties.
Yes, they forgot or never knew that form educates, not content, so they insisted on didactic content, and now no one can spell out even obvious meanings if they're expressed through form rather than stated, like Nolan being against the A-bomb.
I think there is a distinct American highbrow, it just has a wildly different genealogical origin then it’s European counterpart. I’m thinking here especially of third stream and free jazz coming up out of the low and middlebrow and wherever it is you want to locate the origin of the postmodern novel. As for your own stuff: I haven’t really thought out what this might mean, so take it off the cuff, but it’s some of the only truly intellectual middlebrow fiction I’ve read, at least of recent vintage!
Right, we could even talk about Leaves of Grass (and contrast it with the European counterpart: Les Fleurs du Mal). American highbrow is born directly out of the vernacular for lack of aristocratic artistic precedent. I will take your comment to exculpate me: if it's "truly intellectual," it can't really be middlebrow!
I loved Bridge over San Luis Rey. It's no surprise that it's David Mitchell's favorite, it's very like a Mitchell novel! Very intricatelt structured and thoughtful, but perhaps not thematically deep. Oddly enough I have a love for the middlebrow of ages past (I'm a fervent lover of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair and John O'Hara and the early period stories of F Scott Fitzgerald, for instance) while disliking our contemporary middlebrow stuff. That could just be competitiveness though
For instance I was recently thinking that unworthy books have always been acclaimed, after all Arrowsmith won the pulitzer, but then I was like no you know what? Arrowsmith was a good book! Better than the goldfinch anyway
I've never read Lewis, Sinclair, or O'Hara, maybe out of a fear of the middlebrow! (Nor The Goldfinch, though I like The Secret History.) Do Edith Wharton and Willa Cather count? I love what I've read of them, as I love Steinbeck. The boundaries really are porous, though, especially with novels, and especially in the eye of critics as acerbic as Macdonald. To stick with early 20th-century examples, I think anything easier to read than The Sound and the Fury *could* be called middlebrow by somebody, including The Great Gatsby or A Farewell to Arms.
I mean I don't think anything old can really be middlebrow unless it was popular in it's own day. Merely being widely assigned in school can't make something middlebrow, as by definition that can only happen if the high brows agree. By that standard great Gatsby wouldn't count. Wharton and Catcher were successful and critically acclaimed in their own day and some of Cather's lesser work does seem kind of middlebrow. Do people actually call the great Gatsby and a farewell to arms middlebrow? Imho it's really faded as an insult, with the growing democratization of taste. I think most critics would be afraid of the elitism that middlebrow connotates.
I think the idea is that Hemingway and Fitzgerald became so popular after the war that they were functionally middlebrow, as was Hemingway's later stuff, which Macdonald criticizes. I agree with you that most people wouldn't use the term today, but it's the subtext of even mainstream criticism, like those Parul Sehgal New Yorker essays decrying trauma-plots and the magic of storytelling, both staples of middlebrow lit. This was the origin of the anti-Franzen animus too, especially after the Time cover, and why he didn't want to be on Oprah in the first place. Woolf says that high and low must unite against the middle, which I take to be the subtext of a lot of identity politics criticism too: the critical elite siding with the oppressed against the oppressive middle.
Yes as I recall macdonald marks out old man and the sea as one of his four examples of middlebrow. I agree that in that context middlebrow is rather protean, as I would consider most mainstream critically acclaimed books to be middlebrow, and those are, definitionally, the books the mainstream critics like :) Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal are great readers I am sure, but collectively they define the middlebrow, even as they attempt to avoid it.
Like whatever the average nyt and new Yorker reader enjoys is surely middlebrow
Right, and this is why I don't think we can structure our whole taste around avoiding middlebrow, since it's a function of the social context as much as of the work. When Merve Emre swoons over Ulysses in the New Yorker, does it become middlebrow even though it doesn't become easier to read? Did Bolano suddenly become middlebrow when he got popular, even though his texts didn't get any less allusive or any less violent? Highbrow becomes such a receding horizon that we'll be left with nothing but that Man Ray poem:
https://poets.org/poem/poem-23
Honestly I do agree about the purpose of the aesthetic in pedagogy being indoctrination. I sometimes suspect that’s partly how we got here, to some of the reductive mistakes that the left liberal culture world made in the last decade: a certain vein of second wave feminism universalizing that insight while trying to alter the pedagogical stories we tell ourselves in childhood in order to live, not recognizing that at a certain point the education ends and one becomes an adult possessed of critical faculties.
Yes, they forgot or never knew that form educates, not content, so they insisted on didactic content, and now no one can spell out even obvious meanings if they're expressed through form rather than stated, like Nolan being against the A-bomb.
I think there is a distinct American highbrow, it just has a wildly different genealogical origin then it’s European counterpart. I’m thinking here especially of third stream and free jazz coming up out of the low and middlebrow and wherever it is you want to locate the origin of the postmodern novel. As for your own stuff: I haven’t really thought out what this might mean, so take it off the cuff, but it’s some of the only truly intellectual middlebrow fiction I’ve read, at least of recent vintage!
Right, we could even talk about Leaves of Grass (and contrast it with the European counterpart: Les Fleurs du Mal). American highbrow is born directly out of the vernacular for lack of aristocratic artistic precedent. I will take your comment to exculpate me: if it's "truly intellectual," it can't really be middlebrow!