The Future of the American Novel

Meditations on What Comes Next

Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931, Oil on canvas, via Getty Images

Today, we have something a little different for you — an essay on the literary discourse by our Editor-in-Chief. If you’ve been enjoying everything The Metropolitan Review has to offer, please consider pledging $80 for the year so you can receive our print issue, which is now in production. It will be very smart and very pretty. We’ll have news soon about a launch party in New York City, which promises to be the party of the season. Pledge TMR today!

—The Editors

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There were surely critics, in the middle of the 1960s, who had no concept of what was to come. The counterculture could feel faddish; so could New Hollywood, sexually explicit novels, baroque pop, and acid rock. If history is a procession from A to B, it must never be forgotten that everyone in every time was living a life in transition, in the eternal present. Retrospective judgment only goes so far. Apprehending the future is inordinately difficult — now, and always. If you’re sure of it, you’re probably wrong. Knowing which way the wind blows is a special sort of art, one few can even start to master.

And so, in the middle of the 2020s, American literature — and culture, broadly — appears to be at a crossroads, or at least barreling towards one. This is what The Metropolitan Review is all about; this is our raison d’être. Much of what we do is traditional — publish reviews and essays — though how we do it, and deliver it to you, is not. We have our own website, but we also publish via Substack, where the bulk of our readers lie. I don’t wish to discourse too much on a tech platform that has been the source of so much discourse already, some of it intriguing and some of it tedious, but it’s fine to linger, for a moment at least, on the newsletter service that is methodically becoming the locus of digital written culture. In a recent column in Compact entitled “The Great American Novel Will Not Be Substacked,” the literary critic Valerie Stivers declares, while invoking The Metropolitan Review and our contributor John Pistelli’s new novel Major Arcana, that “the rebellion-lit pitch — the books are great and publishers (and the reading masses) just don’t appreciate them — is dead wrong.” Stivers flays some of the writing in Major Arcana — it is a novel that I have personally, and effusively, praised — and seems to take issue with the reality that it was first self-published and serialized on Substack before being reissued, last month, by Belt, a small publisher out of the Midwest. “I feel it is time to face some harsh truths regarding this kind of gonzo publishing,” she writes. “The painful fact is that these books are often poorly written, for what I suspect are a number of reasons.” Her reasons include: friends and critics being too soft, the degradation of prose standards “in all written communication, so fewer people know how to look critically at a sentence anymore,” and the difficulty of the mission of writing “epic narrative fiction” in an age of autofiction, which has favored minimalism and solipsism.

None of this, on its own, is wrong necessarily, if there’s a tone in Stivers’ piece that makes me wary. She is a talented critic, and one grounded in history. She invokes Philip Roth, pointing to the painstaking nature of writing itself, and how Roth, when accepting an award, celebrated the “the ruthless intimacy of literature, its concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the particulars,” as well as “passion for the singular and the aversion to generality that is fiction’s lifeblood.” In turn, the small-press and Substack writers aren’t yet up to snuff, Stivers argues. “Literary fiction is in trouble, and we do need new voices and new directions. But they need to go full Roth on it, and they haven’t yet.” I disagree, in part because I believe Pistelli wrote a great novel, one that would have been a product of the publishing mainstream twenty years ago. But I am less interested, here, in the merits of Pistelli’s Major Arcana or Stivers’ criticism. Rather, I want to peer ahead.

There’s no way to know what, from a stylistic standpoint, literature will look like a decade from now or what movements will come to predominate. Autofiction, of the vintage that made Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti (literary) household names, appears exhausted, as do the “alt-lit” provocateurs who caught a blaze of press in the early part of the decade and have left behind novels of relatively little import. Maximalism might return, or a new social realism, or something else entirely. Who’s to truly know? The novel itself, contained in physical book form, is shockingly durable, given the onslaught of the internet and the billions behind AI. If a certain kind of novel is not selling as well as it once was — the prestige literary fiction that received a decent amount of mainstream media attention — discussion of fiction, at least online, has not abated. The Substack universe has many fiercely held opinions on Middlemarch, Twain, and Pynchon. Does this mean we are a backwards-gazing culture? Maybe. But I prefer less pessimism: narrative arcs have endured for thousands of years, human beings are wired to tell stories, and innovative language continues to enthrall. Beyond Major Arcana, there are new small press and independent books that have already kicked up a great deal of digital debate, like ARX-Han’s Incel, and the growth of Substack itself promises, at the very minimum, fresh subcultures to make literature — of both the contemporary and more ancient sort — feel vital.

What is guaranteed to change is how literature is foisted onto the public. For many decades, there was a stable model of book publicity, just as there was a lucrative and predictable model for the delivery of news, television, and cinema. Think of the history of media as a form of continental drift: in the twentieth century, there was something like Pangaea, a supercontinent, an industrialized mass culture that could unify enormous numbers of people around particular books, television shows, movies, and works of art. There were countercultures as well, ideological and regional currents to work against the mass, and there was a healthy tension between what crackled at the bottom and what floated at the top. It’s always best to guard against nostalgia, but there was much to recommend about the blend of technological advancement and analog reality that made the twentieth-century culture what it was. The internet only arrived at century’s end, and before then there were decades of mostly uninterrupted progress. Print newspapers and print magazines wrote on and reviewed the products of culture, and physical movie theaters ensured cinema was at the heart of the zeitgeist. Record labels, large and small, distributed their art as physical artifacts to be sold in stores and heard on the radio, a communal medium. A song, a novel, or a movie could live in the bloodstream of mass culture in a way that is simply, with a few exceptions, no longer possible today. If a publisher wanted to make a particular author or novel “happen,” there were mechanisms and a networked ecosystem to make it so. Magazine and newspaper critics were placed on high alert, ads were bought in print periodicals, and the author was dutifully dispatched to television shows, radio stations, and various print interviewers. A book tour, spanning many cities, was organized. The campaigns were intensive and impactful. It’s not that, in the 2020s, none of this occurs anymore. Rather, it’s that the world where such a happening could nudge the culture in one direction or another is ending. As they once said in a deservedly acclaimed 2000s teen comedy, “fetch” isn’t happening — and can’t be made to happen.

And the prestige economy goes with it: as many, including me, have essayed on ad nauseam, novelists today are rarely famous and almost never rich. The novel itself — at least one that is newly-published and yet to be canonized — seems destined to become a conservatory art form, like opera or poetry, poured over and beloved by a relative few. The era of the mass market paperback, Updike and Didion in the drug stores, is gone. At the same time, there can be millions of human beings who care a great deal about the novel and who are passionate about the written word. As technology slowly degrades our daily existence, devolving us into twitchy, slop-hungry screen-addicts, the novel is an obvious antidote — to live in your own imagination, with another consciousness, is one of the greatest of all human gifts, that alchemy of narrative and language indescribably profound when it is finally made apparent. If the twentieth century was Pangaea, we are now in a continental shattering, with land masses breaking off and drifting to their own peculiar destinies on the horizon line. We don’t yet know what will take form. The headline of Stivers’ Compact column was intentionally provocative but naturally impossible to prove: How can we be so certain the great American novel, whatever that might be, won’t be Substacked? Or that there aren’t small-press or self-published authors laboring with Roth’s discipline? The age of certainty is very much over. The continents will keep breaking up.

What is possible now, as fame and acclaim and riches become more unattainable for the novelist in this culture, is a purity of pursuit — a dive into art for true art’s sake, since it must inevitably be for that and likely nothing else, not for celebrity or a blockbuster film. There are fewer and fewer literary stars, and fewer and fewer stars of any kind; the universe today is vaster, populated by many more cultural galaxies, and one master of one realm can be completely unknown in another. If the writer is disabused of their outdated notion of “making it,” of owning two or three homes off the proceeds of a book and swaggering into Elaine’s with Woody and Mailer and Keith Hernandez, then the act of writing itself becomes something else, perhaps something more transcendent — a spiritual quest, akin to the monks who spent centuries preserving written records with little payoff beyond the knowledge that their work would inform an unimaginable future, long after they were dead. To be human is to create — this is why AI can be so insidious, working against this impulse which has rested within us for millennia — and as long as there are humans on this Earth, there will be novels. Small press, big press, no press; stories will be told, language will evolve, and greatness will always be possible.

In the near future, the next decade, more and more of written culture will rest on Substack. This is not an argument for or against the platform; it is merely the reality of where we are. Writers are congregating in a newsletter and blogging service with network effects. Pistelli’s Major Arcana has already been discussed more than a decent number of novels released this year by major publishing conglomerates with far larger publicity budgets. Other books that ricochet through this ecosystem will receive a similar treatment. The worst fate for a writer is to be ignored, for their novel to be as irrelevant as a belch in a hailstorm. A de facto social network of highly literate individuals who number in the many thousands will ensure that books of a certain quality and appeal will simply not vanish. That is heartening. What’s left unanswered is canonization — if there is a new literature, or a rising literature that supplants what came before, what institutions in the mainstream will exist to harden it all into artifacts for study, as literary critics and academics once did for movements like Modernism and novels like Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby? This is not to suggest the literature being produced now, especially outside the mainstream, can be compared to the seminal American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet it’s important to consider what might come next, with the humanities under attack at most universities and fewer scholars, like those at Columbia who saved Melville from obscurity, dedicating their lives to literature. It might be true, as a character once mused in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, that the very stone one kicks will outlast Shakespeare, but it’s just as true that we may be several centuries away, at least, from outlasting Shakespeare. Until then, we muse on the churn of the present, and the vast sea of future extending before us.

Ross Barkan is the Editor-in-Chief of The Metropolitan Review.