I think the bigger sin of the Strivers-esque criticism is that what is the alternative they are proposing? I wish there was a current version of Bradbury & Evans, which published Dickens novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak house in pamphlet form once per month, and once completed would compile them into one volume, i guess we would call that volume a "novel." Same for Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Balzac, etc.. and most of the great 19th century novelists. The economy of literacy enabled a culture of monthly physical pamphlets by a handful of notable authors and hundreds of forgotten ones.
But that era is gone. Where else can someone publish a novel piece by piece, gain a readership, and succeed. Ignore the content of Major Arcana; it's journey from Pistelli's mind to page to substack to paperbound volume is the real story of the economics of contemporary writing.
Strivers is criticizing Pistelli for being alive now. I guess it's his fault he wasn't born in 1844. For better or worse this is the world we have. We can lament the present all day long. Just like tariffs, they won't bring back the fantastical past we imagine days of yore to be. This is the now. Criticism that is incisive is the most riveting thing there is. When it exists just to be critical? That's just boring.
i think webnovels function as modern serialization. im a big webnovel guy. a lot of webnovels are pretty bad, but some of them are really incredible. one of my favorites is 'sss class suicide hunter' which is a lot better than the title implies. or 'omniscient readers viewpoint.' wattpad has few bangers, but they are serializing novels and then printing physical copies when finished. royal road is better for english fantasy, and i know there are plenty of guys who have websites for serializing their novels. fanfiction on archiveofourown also functions as serialized novels, and plenty of novelists have gotten their start on there. (naomi novik comes to mind.)
i will note that the webnovels i read are generally not "serious" novels. i maintain that 'sss class suicide hunter' is a beautiful treatise on loving stories and humanity. (the author's current project, 'im an infinite regressor but ive got stories to tell' is also really good.) but they are firstly entertainment and only secondarily philosophical. but i think the sign of a really good book is when it can perfectly mix entertainment and philosophy. dostoevsky did this excellently in crime and punishment, although the brothers karmazov is more on the philosophical treatise side of things. contemporarily, 'the three body problem' was originally serialized. (asia has a better setup for this than the western world. when i say i read webnovels i often mean fan translations of asian novels.)
point is that people are totally serializing novels. i read a bunch of them. theyre just serializing them online and not in pamphlets.
I'm brand new to Substack and was pleased to find an editor's wide-ranging defense of future fiction. Why Stivers or anyone would claim that a new method of releasing fiction would never produce a great work is beyond me. The author of eight small- and medium-press novels, I'm planning on releasing a hybrid memoir/fiction on Substack because I'm neither famous nor traumatized, requirements for other publishers. Maybe I'll get a few readers. A former National Book Award fiction judge, I'm writing this a few minutes after discovering that JAMES won the Pulitzer. That doesn't speak well for big-house publishing since the novel is half-hearted and, it seems, tossed off so Everett could get out of the small presses and into a big house.
It's odd that Stivers uses Roth as a template considering that he and his books have largely been jettisoned from contemporary literary culture and especially from academia.
I'd say Roth has held on a bit better than some of the midcentury giants. I know a lot of twenty and thirty somethings who still like and read him, and I think he survives in some college curriculums. He's had a better afterlife than Bellow or Mailer or even Updike.
A caveat I'll add with Bellow: I do see people on *Substack* talking him up a bit more. I think there are the smallest stirrings of a Bellow comeback. I could even see Mailer getting a new look in the next few years. Not from the academy, but average literary people who are intrigued.
One guy who does seem strikingly gone is Updike. I don't meet any literary people in the wild who cite him, whereas Rothians I meet quite a bit.
I have a theory that the next literary wave will be the return of the big book—the multi-generational epic, the cradle-to-grave 450-pager. I think somebody's novel in the mode of Bellow's Herzog is on the way.
"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."
Two great points and why I think the fear in AI ("why AI can be so insidious"), though unnerving, is ultimately a needless worry for the artist.
Good piece. My main beef is that I don’t think “purity” is the right word to capture what, say, you and John have that feels distinct from what’s come before. John’s really ambitious. You’re really ambitious. A lot of us are. But severing us from the realistic prospect of real fame and riches does change the focus of our ambitions, and also, more dramatically, changes the incentive structures. So far it’s looking like a healthy development, but I think it’s misleading to suggest that the main shift is toward more “purity.”
It's not a moral purity; what I meant more was a certain purity of action. Sure, you want praise and acclaim (I do) but you've really got to WANT to do it for its own sake. You can't even sell out if you try!
I can't decide if I agree with you or not. It feels like we're all a bunch of scrappy bands in a local music scene. Many of us are really hustling. There's some kind of imagined reward on the other side of some kind of success, but if you really looked at it realistically it's a fantasy. I think it's very possible to operate in bad faith, whether you call that selling out or something else, in this context.
What seems more pure to me, at a minimum, is that we have to genuinely entertain in order to succeed, whereas in the more official ecosystem you can succeed by impressing the right gatekeepers, by signaling the right kind of taste or politics. And you can also, and perhaps more importantly, be excluded from success because you don't impress the gatekeepers in the right way.
The point about purity of purpose is an important one, and I can imagine that shift leading to an irruption of strong writing in the coming era. I thank goodness for that as it may help rekindle a more literate culture. But this points to a particular privilege of writers amongst creatives. Writing can be pursued with almost no overhead, so the opportunity to work remains intact in a fragmented world of diluted compensation. Almost every other art form, from theatre to sculpture, will be bruised and bloodied by these developments.
True, the average traditionally published novel will be better—simply because there are quality filters. This shouldn’t make you conclude that all these infinite monkeys aren’t onto something.
The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide's advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life.[40] Finally, the book was published at the author's expense by Grasset and Proust paid critics to speak favorably about it.
I think you meant "at author's expenses" which might may think of self- published, but Grasset is a long time publisher a one known to take risks. Ex: Cixousfirst books were published there only later Gallimard published her.
An important discussion, appreciate the thoughtfulness of it. The author writes, "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." Why shouldn't it? I think that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Politeness aside, we all know that what's written today can't compare to Dostoevsky or Melville or [name your great author]. The reasons why are complex, but it seems like we're moving toward the opera category, as an obscure art form, We will have a standard, classical repertoire that is so beyond contemporary offerings, that we don't much bother with it.
Maybe look outside the USA. The world still produces thousands of excellent books of fiction each year. Most readers probably aren't especially interested in the next great American novel, they're enjoying a much wider menu.
Beautiful words as usual. I find critics like the aforementioned to be a particularly lamentable example of academic intelligence. Nothing feels worse than winning an argument by making everyone else feel like they are wrong. And in any case, there’s no such thing as bad press, so let the reviews good and bad roll in. I’ve been here for three years, experimenting, being diligent, and it had been the most fruitful period of my novelistic life. Onwards and upwards.
Curation. I have nowhere to turn for trusted recommendations these days - in music, film, or novels. I said "trusted" because everyone is recommending this or that (and often their own work), but who has my taste?
Years ago I followed a couple music bloggers to discover new music, but even those days are gone. I keep hoping to stumble onto a substack or X or YT or anything with close to my taste. Someone who is putting in the gritty hours plucking gems from the tornado of noise. Gems that I find shiny. No luck yet. There's millions of critics and reviewers - curators. Ten magnitude what there was in the 20th century. Maybe curators need curators.(Probably already exists.)
If the old world was pangea and it is fragmenting into millions of islands, which island has my tribe? Who can map it? Maybe that will be AI's great gift to us - to map the terrain so we might find our way
Leaving aside Major Arcana in particular, Stivers is playing the cheapest trick in the book: comparing the very best from Category A with the abstract hypothetical average of Category B.
This was beautifully written. In the 90s when I was first working on Upton Sinclair, Pat Holt was the editor of the San Francisco book review. she encouraged me to submit reviews; even better, she edited them and pushed me to be a better writer. There is no editor of the book review now. Pat was not alive when I finally was able to publish my biography of Upton Sinclair, which you may not have heard of because I could not get any reviews in newspapers. I love substack, and here I feel like my work can have a new life.
Ross, I appreciate the 'What’s left unanswered is canonization'. Though I disagree that it is about the quality of writing - most of what I read does not seem different, and richness of vocabulary or turn of phrase; it is still mainly about Brooks Seduced by story: the use and abuse of narrative. To your point, he demonstrates on himself how the through time literature's canons evolve and dissolve. 'Canons' which differs from canonization. Even the use of the term 'autofiction' took time to be legitimate. As an anecdoce being curious to check ProwritingAid Beta reader quality I uploaded the book I already published (self); though, against my desire as stated in my foreword, it would often be categorized as 'memoir', I was surprised AI classified it as 'autofiction'. With my French background, familiar with the concept I found it a more accurate description of it. What I found disheartning is the discussion around this issue is avoiding to link literature to confronting language (not style) and not only plot or story. How it has to do with form and language, willingness to break the mold in which we found ourselves caught into what you developed about the 'new world'. I am thinking of writers as Cixous, Lispector, but also Maiakovski or Louis Aragon and Breton or for complicating the whole Morrison or jon Fosse. All that without bringing Joyce... In brief the 'difficults'. Not the era of Annie Erneaux. That brings me to the second point: desarming the readers of their responsibility to pair themself with the authors by recognizing that the work/pain of the writer must be matched by the willingness of the reader to overcome the 'difficult'. What is more accepted with visual arts but more foreign with literature. Writing is work and reading too. Thank you
I think the bigger sin of the Strivers-esque criticism is that what is the alternative they are proposing? I wish there was a current version of Bradbury & Evans, which published Dickens novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak house in pamphlet form once per month, and once completed would compile them into one volume, i guess we would call that volume a "novel." Same for Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Balzac, etc.. and most of the great 19th century novelists. The economy of literacy enabled a culture of monthly physical pamphlets by a handful of notable authors and hundreds of forgotten ones.
But that era is gone. Where else can someone publish a novel piece by piece, gain a readership, and succeed. Ignore the content of Major Arcana; it's journey from Pistelli's mind to page to substack to paperbound volume is the real story of the economics of contemporary writing.
Strivers is criticizing Pistelli for being alive now. I guess it's his fault he wasn't born in 1844. For better or worse this is the world we have. We can lament the present all day long. Just like tariffs, they won't bring back the fantastical past we imagine days of yore to be. This is the now. Criticism that is incisive is the most riveting thing there is. When it exists just to be critical? That's just boring.
i think webnovels function as modern serialization. im a big webnovel guy. a lot of webnovels are pretty bad, but some of them are really incredible. one of my favorites is 'sss class suicide hunter' which is a lot better than the title implies. or 'omniscient readers viewpoint.' wattpad has few bangers, but they are serializing novels and then printing physical copies when finished. royal road is better for english fantasy, and i know there are plenty of guys who have websites for serializing their novels. fanfiction on archiveofourown also functions as serialized novels, and plenty of novelists have gotten their start on there. (naomi novik comes to mind.)
i will note that the webnovels i read are generally not "serious" novels. i maintain that 'sss class suicide hunter' is a beautiful treatise on loving stories and humanity. (the author's current project, 'im an infinite regressor but ive got stories to tell' is also really good.) but they are firstly entertainment and only secondarily philosophical. but i think the sign of a really good book is when it can perfectly mix entertainment and philosophy. dostoevsky did this excellently in crime and punishment, although the brothers karmazov is more on the philosophical treatise side of things. contemporarily, 'the three body problem' was originally serialized. (asia has a better setup for this than the western world. when i say i read webnovels i often mean fan translations of asian novels.)
point is that people are totally serializing novels. i read a bunch of them. theyre just serializing them online and not in pamphlets.
I'm brand new to Substack and was pleased to find an editor's wide-ranging defense of future fiction. Why Stivers or anyone would claim that a new method of releasing fiction would never produce a great work is beyond me. The author of eight small- and medium-press novels, I'm planning on releasing a hybrid memoir/fiction on Substack because I'm neither famous nor traumatized, requirements for other publishers. Maybe I'll get a few readers. A former National Book Award fiction judge, I'm writing this a few minutes after discovering that JAMES won the Pulitzer. That doesn't speak well for big-house publishing since the novel is half-hearted and, it seems, tossed off so Everett could get out of the small presses and into a big house.
It's odd that Stivers uses Roth as a template considering that he and his books have largely been jettisoned from contemporary literary culture and especially from academia.
I'd say Roth has held on a bit better than some of the midcentury giants. I know a lot of twenty and thirty somethings who still like and read him, and I think he survives in some college curriculums. He's had a better afterlife than Bellow or Mailer or even Updike.
Very true on those three guys. I wonder if Bellow's conservatism is one reason for his exile.
A caveat I'll add with Bellow: I do see people on *Substack* talking him up a bit more. I think there are the smallest stirrings of a Bellow comeback. I could even see Mailer getting a new look in the next few years. Not from the academy, but average literary people who are intrigued.
One guy who does seem strikingly gone is Updike. I don't meet any literary people in the wild who cite him, whereas Rothians I meet quite a bit.
I have a theory that the next literary wave will be the return of the big book—the multi-generational epic, the cradle-to-grave 450-pager. I think somebody's novel in the mode of Bellow's Herzog is on the way.
"a dive into art for true art’s sake"
"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."
Two great points and why I think the fear in AI ("why AI can be so insidious"), though unnerving, is ultimately a needless worry for the artist.
An uplifting article, thank you.
There is nothing irrelevant about a belch in a hailstorm.
Good piece. My main beef is that I don’t think “purity” is the right word to capture what, say, you and John have that feels distinct from what’s come before. John’s really ambitious. You’re really ambitious. A lot of us are. But severing us from the realistic prospect of real fame and riches does change the focus of our ambitions, and also, more dramatically, changes the incentive structures. So far it’s looking like a healthy development, but I think it’s misleading to suggest that the main shift is toward more “purity.”
It's not a moral purity; what I meant more was a certain purity of action. Sure, you want praise and acclaim (I do) but you've really got to WANT to do it for its own sake. You can't even sell out if you try!
I can't decide if I agree with you or not. It feels like we're all a bunch of scrappy bands in a local music scene. Many of us are really hustling. There's some kind of imagined reward on the other side of some kind of success, but if you really looked at it realistically it's a fantasy. I think it's very possible to operate in bad faith, whether you call that selling out or something else, in this context.
What seems more pure to me, at a minimum, is that we have to genuinely entertain in order to succeed, whereas in the more official ecosystem you can succeed by impressing the right gatekeepers, by signaling the right kind of taste or politics. And you can also, and perhaps more importantly, be excluded from success because you don't impress the gatekeepers in the right way.
Anyway. I'm not sure. Will continue to ponder.
The point about purity of purpose is an important one, and I can imagine that shift leading to an irruption of strong writing in the coming era. I thank goodness for that as it may help rekindle a more literate culture. But this points to a particular privilege of writers amongst creatives. Writing can be pursued with almost no overhead, so the opportunity to work remains intact in a fragmented world of diluted compensation. Almost every other art form, from theatre to sculpture, will be bruised and bloodied by these developments.
Guess who else self published? Marcel Proust.
True, the average traditionally published novel will be better—simply because there are quality filters. This shouldn’t make you conclude that all these infinite monkeys aren’t onto something.
Publisher fought about 'having'. Gide admitted his mistake and Gallimard took over. Even posthumely!
didn’t he have to pay Gallimard to publish the first volume? (Later on their relationship was more traditional)
The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide's advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life.[40] Finally, the book was published at the author's expense by Grasset and Proust paid critics to speak favorably about it.
I think you meant "at author's expenses" which might may think of self- published, but Grasset is a long time publisher a one known to take risks. Ex: Cixousfirst books were published there only later Gallimard published her.
You're quite right I was mixing up Grasset and Gallimard in my head!
An important discussion, appreciate the thoughtfulness of it. The author writes, "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." Why shouldn't it? I think that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Politeness aside, we all know that what's written today can't compare to Dostoevsky or Melville or [name your great author]. The reasons why are complex, but it seems like we're moving toward the opera category, as an obscure art form, We will have a standard, classical repertoire that is so beyond contemporary offerings, that we don't much bother with it.
Maybe look outside the USA. The world still produces thousands of excellent books of fiction each year. Most readers probably aren't especially interested in the next great American novel, they're enjoying a much wider menu.
Beautiful words as usual. I find critics like the aforementioned to be a particularly lamentable example of academic intelligence. Nothing feels worse than winning an argument by making everyone else feel like they are wrong. And in any case, there’s no such thing as bad press, so let the reviews good and bad roll in. I’ve been here for three years, experimenting, being diligent, and it had been the most fruitful period of my novelistic life. Onwards and upwards.
Curation. I have nowhere to turn for trusted recommendations these days - in music, film, or novels. I said "trusted" because everyone is recommending this or that (and often their own work), but who has my taste?
Years ago I followed a couple music bloggers to discover new music, but even those days are gone. I keep hoping to stumble onto a substack or X or YT or anything with close to my taste. Someone who is putting in the gritty hours plucking gems from the tornado of noise. Gems that I find shiny. No luck yet. There's millions of critics and reviewers - curators. Ten magnitude what there was in the 20th century. Maybe curators need curators.(Probably already exists.)
If the old world was pangea and it is fragmenting into millions of islands, which island has my tribe? Who can map it? Maybe that will be AI's great gift to us - to map the terrain so we might find our way
Leaving aside Major Arcana in particular, Stivers is playing the cheapest trick in the book: comparing the very best from Category A with the abstract hypothetical average of Category B.
This was beautifully written. In the 90s when I was first working on Upton Sinclair, Pat Holt was the editor of the San Francisco book review. she encouraged me to submit reviews; even better, she edited them and pushed me to be a better writer. There is no editor of the book review now. Pat was not alive when I finally was able to publish my biography of Upton Sinclair, which you may not have heard of because I could not get any reviews in newspapers. I love substack, and here I feel like my work can have a new life.
Ross, I appreciate the 'What’s left unanswered is canonization'. Though I disagree that it is about the quality of writing - most of what I read does not seem different, and richness of vocabulary or turn of phrase; it is still mainly about Brooks Seduced by story: the use and abuse of narrative. To your point, he demonstrates on himself how the through time literature's canons evolve and dissolve. 'Canons' which differs from canonization. Even the use of the term 'autofiction' took time to be legitimate. As an anecdoce being curious to check ProwritingAid Beta reader quality I uploaded the book I already published (self); though, against my desire as stated in my foreword, it would often be categorized as 'memoir', I was surprised AI classified it as 'autofiction'. With my French background, familiar with the concept I found it a more accurate description of it. What I found disheartning is the discussion around this issue is avoiding to link literature to confronting language (not style) and not only plot or story. How it has to do with form and language, willingness to break the mold in which we found ourselves caught into what you developed about the 'new world'. I am thinking of writers as Cixous, Lispector, but also Maiakovski or Louis Aragon and Breton or for complicating the whole Morrison or jon Fosse. All that without bringing Joyce... In brief the 'difficults'. Not the era of Annie Erneaux. That brings me to the second point: desarming the readers of their responsibility to pair themself with the authors by recognizing that the work/pain of the writer must be matched by the willingness of the reader to overcome the 'difficult'. What is more accepted with visual arts but more foreign with literature. Writing is work and reading too. Thank you
Very true on all three of those guys. I wonder if Bellow's conservatism is part of his exile