Does the Maximalist Novel Still Matter?
esquire.com
esquire.com
There's no question that today space is being made in publishing for "other voices." But this article in no way says that is a bad thing, or agrees with the book author's implication of the same. To the contrary, it explains in a useful way (imo as a white man who might want at some point to publish a book) what white men can do to stay competitive as modern reading audiences change. Books are a business. If you can't get with the times, whose fault is that, really?
God forbid critiques of your own normalized racism and sexism be unoriginal and boring to you.
That says more about you than anything about the critique itself.
> as well as on the irony of a white man complaining about how hard it is to get published... even though he just got his book published!
Where’s the irony in an established successful author facing discrimination, and — unlike the many authors that will never have the opportunity due to said discrimination — using their slightly more privileged position to call it out?
Books, as I said, are a business. When you write a manuscript, chances are that it will be rejected by at least a few publishers before someone decides it fits their business goals. That's not discrimination, it's how the world works. I haven't seen any data showing that the percentage of new releases by white men is somehow less than the percentage of white men in the country. What I have seen is a lot of anecdotal complaining by people who are no longer benefiting from the obsolete modes of discrimination that they formerly rode to success.
You don’t believe that rejecting an author’s book on the basis of their gender or race is discrimination?
> … a lot of anecdotal complaining by people who are no longer benefiting from the obsolete modes of discrimination that they formerly rode to success.
People are complaining about explicit discrimination on the basis of race and gender.
> … people who are no longer benefiting from the obsolete modes of discrimination that they formerly rode to success.
This isn’t about producing a level playing field, but in fact, actively discriminating against individuals on the basis of race and gender.
To quote:
> Bo Burnham said, “There’s a lot of elephants in the room right now, as there should be. Maybe there were elephants there the entire time… and I think it’s slightly unfair for us to expect the solution to these inequities to be perfectly fair.”
> This is the bitter pill many white men find difficult to swallow.
Why yes, discrimination is difficult for anyone to swallow.
The only surprise is to see so much prejudice and bias celebrated by the same people who spend so much time pretending to care about discrimination and marginalization of others.
On that note, the ideas and the payoff had better be worth it. Otherwise, If you don't have the content to warrant it, you're abusing your reader. A maximalist novel is actually laziness in some ways (see the Mark Twain line about writing a long letter).
When I read the quotes from Mount Chicago, I'm rolling my eyes. They come across as trite, reheated leftovers, served in a Michelin star package. Likely these are cherry picked examples, but they are part of the author's published book. He needs to own them.
I will say, the article is worth reading, or at least skimming, for the Seinfeld quote at the end alone. It may have singlehandedly changed my mind about some aspects of modern comedy.
Do you mean Pascal? It was Blaise Pascal who wrote, in 1657, that his letter was longer than usual because he lacked the time of making it shorter.
After looking up the Quote Investigator [] it seems that sentence from Pascal has a long history of being quoted and appropriated by many authors in English; and in 1975 "an article in the “Chicago Tribune” of Illinois about writing postcards attributed a version of the saying to Twain".
But the originator is French philosopher and polymath Blaise Pascal ;-)
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Therefore outrage? Why am I supposed to care about that?
Is it a true picture of the world? It very much is, according to this very article. So why are you complaining, Esquire?
Yeah, he might be acidic in his writing. That's what happens when you ruin a person's livelihood because of his race and gender.
>This is the bitter pill many white men find difficult to swallow. In order for space to be made for others, then space that before was given to them must be relinquished or shared. Moreover, equality isn’t just about replacing X amount of men with Y amount of women—or white people with POC, or cis people with trans people—but about deliberately carving out space that is entirely theirs.
This stuff is why Trump was elected.
This article pretended to a broader point, but it was really just another painful exercise in self-flaggelation from a cis white male that refuses to volunteer their own platform to a “marginalized group” while asserting that other “cis white males” ought to do the same.
As Jonathan Russell Clark himself states in his bloviatingly maximalist essay:
> “This is the bitter pill many white men find difficult to swallow. In order for space to be made for others, then space that before was given to them must be relinquished or shared.”
To which I say: you first! Recuse yourself to make room for others. Anything else is rank hypocrisy.
Or, make the simple admission that this is all horrifically invidious and nobody’s work should be judged on the basis of the color of their skin or what’s between their legs.