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Done in by Time

thelampmagazine.com

28 pointslermontov15 comments

> If you doubt this, ask yourself the work of which contemporary novelist, poet, composer, or painter you are eagerly awaiting. I’ll pause here a moment while you fail to find any.

I don't want to use the term "gatekeeping" here, but this type of posture on a topic as subjective as personal preferences is quite odd. While the author thinks they're "making a pause while you fail to find any", I'm here coming up with examples of contemporary creators that I can't wait for them to release their new stuff. (In painting, writing, and cinema).

I don't consider we're in a "low state" as described, but I think we may be coming at this from different definitions about what low state means.

"But just now the novel of every century is in search of readers. For more than two centuries the leading literary genre, the novel at the moment seems to have a dim future. No other literary form engages so directly with human nature, none at its best rises above all other modes of thought in its engagement with humanity in all its variety, and none deals so deeply with the truths of the heart. The significance of its loss would be inestimable."

And get off my lawn.

There are plenty of new novels. Visit a bookstore. Most of them will be forgotten, but some will be read a century from now. Novels face more competition from other forms of entertainment than they used to. But they still sell in volume. It's not like books of poetry.

Young adult novels have become much better over the last decade or two. Teenagers are willing to read multiple volume novels now. That wasn't the case before Twilight and Harry Potter. Yes, there have been multiple volume young adult series for a century, such as "Nancy Drew and the ...". But they were pretty bad.

Knockoffs are a problem. About fifteen years ago, "Teen Paranormal Romance" filled six bookcases at Barnes and Noble. That didn't include the vampire content in Romance, Fantasy, and Best Sellers. I remarked to one of the store staff goths that if they shelved all the vampire books together, they'd be half the sales floor. She said the Hunger Games knockoffs were starting to come in and would be pushing out the Twilight knockoffs. She was right.

many people have been waiting years for the next installment of a certain fantasy novel

You mean the Kingkiller Chronicles right?

> ask yourself the work of which contemporary novelist, poet, composer, or painter you are eagerly awaiting

Marathon, by Bungie Studios (and frequently on the composer side the work of Christopher Tin), but who's counting?

More seriously: the nature of art has changed and this article doesn't seem willing to accept that change. Art can be the work of one creative talent, but it can also be the collective work of a whole army of people acting on a consensus goal. And right now, a lot of the resources of art creation are tied up in large-scale, multidisciplinary projects: movies, videogames, studio music.

Saying you're waiting for a movie to come out is precisely as much a statement about anticipating a work of high art as saying you're interested in what Dostoevsky will write.

Exactly. It's also a complete self-own. You know who can name several painters with highly anticipated upcoming shows? Literally anyone who actually cares about painting.

Sometimes (often) when people get older, they stop listening to new music, reading new books, or going to art openings. Then, slowly, they start assuming that the world is the problem. That art has gotten worse, or there's somehow less of it. But of course the thing that has become boring is the person.

The author is 88 years old (not that advanced age is always a barrier to liking new things, but it frequently doesn't help) and has been a reactionary for decades. The magazine publishing this is, as noted on the page header, Catholic and thus also invested in the vision of "cultural decline" that the article expresses.

Is this just the constant survivorship bias of the present? Only the best of the past has survived until now. Only the best of now will survive the next two centuries so that someone in that time can bemoan the state of their present day literature.

I'm sure the 23rd century will have its equivalent of roman statue avatar social media accounts citing today's best art and asking "why can't we make culture like this anymore?"

There was a ton of disposable literature in the 19th century. It's when the term "pulp" started to be used for trashy novels.

...and all the periodicals in 19-20th century magazines or newspapers, that were written by a single author for extended periods of time, but not good enough to be published as a separate worthwhile book. We don't talk about those, because we don't even have them within our frame of reference. Completely forgotten.

Great examples, I hadn't even thought of those.

> Alexander Gerschenkron, a labor historian at Harvard, in a 1978 issue of the American Scholar set out three criteria for a good book: It should be intrinsically interesting, it should be memorable, and it should be re-readable. Hemingway, alas, passes only the second of these tests, and is today probably not worth reading much beyond anyone’s twenty-first year.

Wow!

> The twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it.

What about Faulkner? Toni Morrison?

I share the sentiment about the magnitude of the loss of the novel, should it occur. Probably the last truly great novel I read was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and that's twenty-some years old.

Much great writing is now actually living in the realm of the fanfic and the self-published. This is not the death of art; if anything, it speaks to art's creation having become so prolific that there is no publishing-house gatekeeper that can contain it.

It's hard for me to take seriously a "Where are all the novels?" critique when there is currently a very active long-novel-title-to-multi-hour-anime pipeline running at white-hot intensity. Perhaps the author missed them because they're in Japanese.

> ... the twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it

Even if we were to deny artistically creative 20C novelists their depth as a mere retread of the nineteenth century's, whatever that means, I don't think that the same terms of dismissal would apply to comic books, graphic novels, hypertext novels and hypertext graphic novels, or novels written with radio or audiobook dramatization in mind, all of which do allow mature thrills to be expressively enhanced and intermingled -- not only cheap thrills.

Scott Miller had a good idea about the importance of the novel form, however: "Maybe I'm just thick ... but whenever novels run out of simple intrigue, they tend to fall into a sort of formulaic display of personal insightfulness, and beyond the scope of about a chapter, one insightful individual carries on in fiction a lot like the next. That said, I have nothing against intrigue, even porn; if I were honest with myself, I'd probably put INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on a list of 20." [1]

[1] http://www.loudfamily.com/askscott1997.html

I'm skeptical of the loss of the novel. Of late, I've started reading more than I have in years. I'm trying to find new authors and subject matter, and also revisiting some old favorites.

Still, there is a huge problem: discoverability of new authors. This is a problem in lots of areas, but I feel like it's particularly bad here. There are many new authors trying new things but how to find them amid a sea of rough drafts that should never have been published? Most of the time when I try a recent new author's work I am greeted with something that reads like fanfic.

Then there's AI slop, which is apparently flooding Kindle thanks to grifting influencers like (apparently) Andrew Tate teaching people how to do this. That's only going to make it harder.

Wondering how people here look for new authors. The best I've found has been to look in certain genres or subject areas of interest, look for up-and-coming works, then read a sample. I can usually dismiss trash within a few pages. But it's still time consuming.

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