The cultural decline of literary fiction
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I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
That's a tough question? Going to college and taking on debt no longer looks like a good choice. What to learn that won't be heavily devalued in four years?
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
More “evergreen” genres like classical, jazz, soundtracks, and also stuff by established artists? Surely!
But pop music recordings get “too dated” quite fast for the mainstream and mainstream audiences. This kinda keeps Spotify and Radio charts fresh and newer artists make some money. IMO of course!
EDIT: Wait! One thing however where you’re right and I’m wrong is with live concerts. Today older legacy acts compete and often surpass attendance of newer acts.
There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how tougher than other media it is.
While specialists and enthusiasts will enjoy and peek at the content, being recognized as someone who writes about the subject and can be presented as an expert of the field can absolutely be the main impact for the author.
John Philip Sousa was right about recorded music.
People will quite happily pickup and play games from many years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made before they were born.
update: I found this screenshot and I think I was remembering Morrowinds characters.
https://slayweb.blogspot.com/2011/08/elder-scrolls-evolution...
Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
Well aren’t we mostly retelling Greek myths and great works the same as Shakespeare did in his time?
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
I didn't.
> what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus
If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning?
Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-remove...
Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are:
* length
* mass/length
* tension
But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can’t vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable string beyond the last point of contact with the strings, and that contact could be released to increase the string length?.
You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two different string gauges. The top four could be heavier gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate gauges and silence the strings? I don’t know much about playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not be such a big deal if he’s the only one playing it, but if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
It might also be possible to teach him how to build simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in post-processing once you know how the parts fit conceptually together.
Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a good post for HN if you can find the time.
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the first step to connoisseurship.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
(I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.)
I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric.
As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs
https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG
Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion sequence of all time https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa
And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture always sends chills up my spine.
That said, I do enjoy some classical music. For instance, I deeply enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1lvxx9lzAg&list=RDz1lvxx9lz...
> Art has no objective measure.
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
Many pieces were intended as a whole, and optimised for specific settings.
I’ve long thought I wasn’t an opera person. I listened to pieces of some on my iPod, or on the tv in music class in school. Then, years later, some friend told me he had extra tickets for the opera.
It hit very, very differently. It is likely the experiences I had gone through since school helped the opera’s theme and songs resonate with me. But I’m pretty sure listening and witnessing it, from beginning to end, in a room carefully crafted for this specific purpose and left little room for distractions contributed immensely.
That's very clearly not what they said at all.
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
Objectively, Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling you get when you drink too much and get kicked out of the party (a foundational principal of Country Western music)
For a wide range of such feelings, some can regard as "lonely", as they develop, achieve a triumph, a catharsis, and finally a recapitulation and a comforting, secure resolution -- communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, i.e., art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEUYq5t-cCM
Bach wrote it for solo violin, but it's been arranged for solo piano, full orchestra, etc.
Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written.
It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music".
Or maybe this is just me.
Actually, no! It's more of “relevance to the state of the world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we keep committing the same errors.”
(I do know Beethoven and Mozart though.)
Just now listened to some of her music, two of her pieces
Good Luck Babe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM&pp=ygUcY2hhcHBlb...
and
Pink Pony Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3Liudev18&pp=ygUOcGluayBwb...
So, with the definition of art as the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion" what I saw in those two pieces was that they were intended for some teen girls and young women -- single, lonely, generally afraid of their circumstances, don't understand what they see of reality, eager for sex but afraid of it, lost, i.e., missing any good cultural, social, or intellectual foundation for understanding reality or facing life, ....
So in the music, the costumes and stage shows are rapidly changing, outrageous, meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are communication, interpretation of those women's experience, emotions, rapidly changing, outrageous ....
In simple terms, those women have circumstances that yield strong emotions that the music communicates.
"Communicates"? Why? As common, to the audience comfortingly confirms that they are not alone and instead like many others.
How could this be? In the past the women lived in a culture based on strong social, practical, economic, religious, parenting forces. Now (1) for millions of those women the culture is weak or gone and (2) the Internet permits getting confirming, reinforcing communication, interpretation of their scary circumstances from the loss of the culture.
In short, the music really is communication, interpretation of the experience and emotions of those women.
To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much the same, i.e., similar audience, but Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more outrageous for an audience with stronger emotions.
As a young man, the teen girls I knew, right, had the anxieties from their circumstances but much more constrained and less scary than now.
The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the sets, costumes, dancing, and words and take just the background music (a lot of drum beating) and the singing. In places, the singing is pretty good, i.e., expressive, but really the singing, as art, is all nearly the same, that is, the same vocal content for the same communication, interpretation of experience and emotion.
I expect that even the current devoted audience will soon, a year or so, give up on the current Chappell Roan -- for a cruel joke, "A one trick pony.".
From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., Barber there is a lot of effective communication, interpretation of a wide range of experiences, emotions, that is, really good art.
For level 101, a major key is glad and a minor key, sad. Then changing keys, selected chords within keys, pitch, volume, variety of sounds from the variety of instruments, combinations, ..., give a lot more tools for expression than used by Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more music, art.
Next, the tools were just means, and Bach, Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good in the artistic content, that is, again, communication, interpretation of human experience emotion.
The rapidly moving pace of the music and performances in those two performances (2 of her hits, of course they're intense) is because she believes those were the more interesting/economical choices at the time. any inferences you make about the women who listen to it are purely based on your personal idea of what you decide women are thinking about on a given day.
It also helped that with good makeup and a good photographer, she had one of the prettiest faces of any human female. She also had a near perfect figure. So, her audience could identify with those. Likely even more important, were her stories of love gained/lost.
I'm a man and so don't much like Swift's art, but the ~$1 billion got me to try to explain her success.
For any men here slow to figure this out and take it seriously, a lot of teen girls and young women have some strong emotions, and art that communicates and interprets those emotions to those teens/women can be very welcome, so welcome to generate ~$1 billion.
I did spend enough time with teen girls and young women to understand a little about their strong emotions.
On key changes in music, the Bach piece in the URL I gave starts in D minor, has central section on D major, and has the final third a lot like the first section and also in D minor.
When I was playing it on violin, I liked the D major section the best. There are some triplets, and I played them insistently, maybe not the best interpretation -- the URL doesn't do that. Maybe I tried the interpretation from a Heifetz performance.
The piece is also sometimes played on guitar. Waiting for a concert to start, a guitarist sat next to composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and said "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer, a man of few words, said nothing until the end of the concert and then replied "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written."
Oh, the URL I gave is a full orchestra arrangement of the Chaconne.
If pop music is that good, I'll be glad to listen to it!
Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.
I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game.
Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer.
It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.
>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.
Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.
Slay the Spire was released in 2017. Are you accounting for indie games?
I would agree that big AAA studios are basically entirely creatively bankrupt at this point, but that's not exclusive to games, the same trend is apparent with movies (remakes of Disney movies, Star Wars sequels, etc.).
Another end-of-ZIRP casualty?
I agree that AAA dev is too risk-averse and that there's a dearth of mid-budget games, but the indie sphere is still very rich.
You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.
Hard disagree. Dialogue is a strength of interactive fiction. Dialogue trees are unique to the medium. Titles like Firewatch, Night in the Woods, and Disco Elysium are all-time great examples of dialogue writing. I'd love to see interactive fiction that put more emphasis on internality instead; in that dimension, Disco Elysium really stands alone.
> maybe LLMs will change that
LLM-generated dialogue is only ever going to waste your time. Good dialogue is expressive and clever and characteristic and dense, none of which describe anything I've seen from an LLM. You'd be better-off just reading the prompt.
While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.
Bethesda even decided to just remake Oblivion rather than show off more of TES 6.
Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.
That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to whatever's been made in the last X years.
Books don’t need to compete with all previous books but just have to be culturally relevant now.
Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia".
Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output. Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible. The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen observation.
> 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy.
You are talking about books for very small kids here. At that age, they were not understanding Alice in Wonderland. But, the small ones actually liked those losing a toy books.
> The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's books.
Kids books and entertainment was always vehicle for teaching kids rights and wrongs. You have that in Narnia, you have that in Thomas the Tank Engine, you have that in pretty much any Christian kids books. The moralizing ethical aspect is especially clear when you look at older books, because distance makes it all that more apparent.
Even Alice in Wonderland is meant to teach you philosophy first rather then be just a story.
My kid seems to prefer choosing classic stories over the piles of modern books we also have.
> At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65.
> Literary fiction peaked on the charts in the 1950s and 1960s and was quite present before then. There was a sustained decline from the 1970s onward.
Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read?
You are operating under the asumption that the issue is authors. I think the issue is the readership. Great books are still being written. They are just not widely read anymore.
The problem is that it's easier to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or watch meaningless YouTube videos than take the time to read a book. There are large teams dedicated to ensuring this stays so and that these products are as addictive as they can be.
We, as a society, have apparently decided that it's acceptable to turn a large part of the population into idiots to sell more detergents. It's sad but at least we are selfdestructing through global warming so the problem will have an end.
And they debunk it by pointing out that classic literary fiction is still being read, it's just contemporary literary fiction that isn't being read (and then they go on to hypothesise that it's this very attitude that is killing contemporary literary fiction readership).
I find it ironic that your comment laments the inability of readers to actually read, while failing to actually read the article that you're commenting on.
Not at all.
Classic fiction is still far out of the most sold books nowadays which is entirely non fiction. That’s in the first half of the article by the way so I might not be the one with reading comprehension issue. I can somehow excuse you because the article author constantly confuses fiction and non fiction readership and fails to comprehend what should be seen in absolute numbers and when proportion actually matters for most of the article.
To address specifically the unconvincingly point that classic sell in absolute numbers, this should be unsurprising to anyone who has gone to school: contrary to modern fiction classics are actually studied and are part of various curriculum.
The other points against the influence of internet (and television before) are equally empty and hinge on a confusion between absolute number of readers (stable) and actual readers of serious fiction (vanishing).
I have little interest in actually commenting the virtues of the article to be frank - it’s garbage. The author opinion that postmodern authors are somehow written for critics is laughable. It’s so devoid of substance. It ignores both the actual critical consensus around those books when they were written (far from universal praise) and what they contain. The rest of the arguments are barely better sadly. And let’s not talk about what the article entirely fails to address: the rise of YA, book tok, the modern fiction bestsellers from Crichton to Dan Brown, the impact of movie adaptation (ever heard of Harry Potter, yes me too).
Anyway, I was merely replying to the comment above mine.
A lot has to do with language in those books. They read as kind of "foundational" and well structured (and I am speaking exclusively about English and Hindi classics, two languages I can read and write in). This gradually takes you on a journey of not only enjoying the language but also learning it. From there, different people branch off in various literary directions, and majority just drops off from the literary journey altogether.
This is completely orthogonal to whether anyone else likes that art or finds it valuable.
Films are a 1-2 hour commitment. A TV series could be anywhere from 10-100 hours. A novella might be a couple of hours, but most people would take at least a day to read a novel. And these need close to 100% attention. Reading all the Hugo winners at a book a week would take 1.5 years, and you've not touched the nominees or books in series.
Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.
I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.
I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary fiction, do you think that it hasn't undergone a transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he gives for it?
Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books by Sally Rooney.
My objection was that, from the perspective of a reader of the submitted article, there seems to be a giant plot hole in the author's story. The author claims:
> beginning in the 1970s, authors were willing to optimize for critical praise at the expense of sales to a degree they had not been before.
This may or may not be empirical true, but the question is why? As far as I could tell, the author never explained why.
> It’s easy to see how a vicious cycle could have arisen from the preoccupation with status, not sales:
> 1. Authors start to optimize for critical praise
You can't just start the argument there! Ironically, the author talks about a vicious cycle, but that's actually a circular argument. I want to see 1 as the conclusion, not the first premise.
> How exactly did this cycle start? I think there’s reason to believe it began in the 1970s.
That's an answer to the question of when it started, not how is started.
The author places as footnote at that point and admits at the very end of the article, "Epistemically, this section is the shakiest."
There is a theory presented about mass behavior, the behavior of novel writers as a group. Yet a psychological motive is lacking. Writers all just decided to change their writing fundamentally, for no apparent reason?
Agreed. I think this was a big miss in the article.
>The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
I think that the second half of the article seems weak because the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the algorithmic feed.
This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the field, we need to consider changes in the relative importance of various factors.
The expected consequence of this is that authors become more dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the article then follows.
There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary" interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not have any useful insight here.
Wow, that's a pretty low bar.
Ask newly minted PhDs about the job market. The submitted article even has a chart and a link about the job market, so which part of that are you disputing?
This is all very well-documented, search for "humanities phd job crisis" and you will find lots of information, e.g. [0].
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/upshot/academic-job-crisi...
If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?
Novels can take years to write, and sometimes years to sell. In the meantime, authors need to pay the bills. Only authors who are already famous get substantial advances for unwritten books. Therefore, aspiring novelists need sources of income to support themselves while they write a novel. Magazine writing and academia have been two of the most common sources of income for aspiring novelists. If those sources dry up, then the supply of aspiring novelists dries up too, and thus the supply of novels. Even if there's a demand for novels, publishers have little idea who will write a great novel before that novel is actually written; publishers can't just throw around money to support a bunch of unproven writers.
> If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?
Ironically, "because of internet" is the vaguest of reasons. Here's what the submitted article said, specifically: "the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable."
Critical awards are a huge boon in getting your book on the very limited and dwindling shelf space (and especially on endcaps and displays, where they're going to be noticed), or on the front page of online book stores.
In a field that is hurting for readers, that's a huge deal. That will get books sold for a *very tiny* number of titles, but not create a stable fanbase. So everyone is competing for those critical awards, causing the genre to spiral.
His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.
I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?
Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.
I really wouldn't expect reading proficiency to be radically different from the distribution we have today which is to say the distribution centers around levels 2/3 which is "can make basic inferences from text."
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-...
Sidenote - Dickens is unreadable to me for two reasons: that version of English is not the same language I speak natively and he uses so much visual descriptions and I'm an aphant.
> LONDON. The Michaelmas term recently ended, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Relentless November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had just recently pulled back from the surface of the earth, and it wouldn't be surprising to encounter a Megalosaurus, about forty feet long, waddling like an elephant-sized lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke hanging low from chimney tops, creating a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as large as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might think, for the death of the sun. Dogs, unrecognizable in the mire. Horses, barely better; splashed up to their very blinders. Pedestrians, bumping into one another's umbrellas, in a widespread outbreak of bad temper, and losing their footing at street corners, where tens of thousands of other pedestrians have been slipping and sliding since daybreak (if this day ever broke), adding new layers to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking stubbornly to the pavement at those points, and building up with compound interest.
The Feast of St. Michael's just ended. Some guy who is roughly akin to the Chief Justice of The Supreme Court is chilling at what is basically "The Supreme Court Building" (The US was so creative with the name). It's raining, a lot. Everything is muddy. Dickens when writing this clearly had just learned recently what a Megalosaurus is. Oh my god Dickens is so pretentious describing chimneys doing absolutely nothing special. The dogs and horses are covered in mud. The people are struggling to get around and are becoming frustrated at one another. The mud is building up on the pavement because of all the people tracking it.
An important part of having a large funnel is giving people a way to really spend their time doing the thing. For example, writing short stories for magazines was once a reasonable way to support yourself for a few years as a young writer, and led to a very large funnel. Take away that infrastructure for young writers, and you get a smaller funnel, and an attrition in quality of the best work.
(Now, consider what happens 10-20 years after we stop hiring new grads for programming jobs...)
Maybe linguistic evolution is playing a role? Contemporary writing is easiest to read because it's written in contemporary English?
I also think The Elements of Style had a real and positive influence, in terms of e.g. sentences getting shorter: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xYn3CKir4bTMzY5eb/why-have-s...
I suppose part of the reason is that the Irish have cultivated a strong literary culture.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/20/we-all...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/30/irish-...
The litfic people would never agree with this, but litfic is also a genre. It has its tropes, and especially it has its snobbery. I think part of its decline may be exactly that: the social circle which values litfic for exclusionary snob value was always small, but now it has been eclipsed. Apart from specific fandoms like Joyce; the Joyceans are closest to SF fans in the way their fandom operates. They even have conventions.
The whole thing reminds me of the exponential increase in published scientific papers but comparatively little to show for it in terms of big name discoveries. Both are immaterial prestige games and can fly off into a spiral.
People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.
It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.
I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:
> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.
The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
Thanks.
Asimovs Foundation book described it well.
I mean... you think this is _new_? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
Civilisation, you will not, survived a few hundred years of _that_.
I'm not sure that the sort of ultra-conformist society that you seem to be thinking of ever really existed.
What Billy really wants is a good Kilgore Trout book, but the supply of those seems to be dead. So it goes.
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
The older culture, where the tropes stem from, doesn't follow the tropes? What?
Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
"Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
> It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the "Slow cancellation of the future".
Hrm, I'm not sure what culture you're thinking of, but many genres are considerably _less_ trope-bound today than fifty years ago. Partly just because there is just _so much more stuff_. It is far easier to publish books. The end of the top-40 system as a curb on what music anyone actually gets to hear has allowed for far more diversity there. Total TV output today must be at least 10 times what it was 50 years ago, maybe more. All of this allows more experimentation.
D&D? How does a book based roleplaying game fit into the argument about lack of imagination.
I’d really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf wrote it.
It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog’s scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion. From what other people have told me, it does.
A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book as a “TOBADNY” — a “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” I LOLed and then realized this was totally the case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
I'd say literary fiction is a genre that focuses on the craft of writing, usually through either poetic prose or deep character study. There are bonus points if the topic or style is challenging, so you get tropes that lead in this direction: deep studies of complicated often problematic characters (Lolita), deep studies of society (Pride and Prejudice), unusual plot structures (Cloud Atlas), experimental prose style (Ulysses), etc. These are literary tropes because they're challenging to write -- in terms of the craft of writing itself. The most literary of literary fiction is "writer's writing" in the sense that some experimental jazz is "musician's music."
And of course you can have deliberate genre crossovers. Literary sci-fi has been popular lately, like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or the already mentioned Cloud Atlas.
There are already debates as to whether Lord of the Rings is "literary" when it checks all the boxes.
Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the most romance novel to ever romance novel in the history of romance novels, is described as literary fiction (and so presumably not genre fiction) by the author. I think history--and hundreds of entries on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org where teenagers gush about their own dark-haired and standoffish but secretly gentle imaginary men--has shown that the reason she's remembered is the substance, not the subject of her writing, as well as the historical significance in her being a pioneer, of course.
I recently watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A historically and artistically important movie, and then you go check the Wikipedia page and the producer described it to the effect "Yeah from the script it looked like some quick slop which would turn a buck."[1]
I think starting out with the idea of making a "literary" work and creating a genre out of "literary fiction" inherently doesn't work. I think the avenues for greatness are either making something experimental that breaks new ground, or something more conventional but that, in exchange, shows you complete mastery of that well-known material. But you can't be great just by appropriating the superficial qualities you identify in past works you yourself consider to be great, because again, it was the substance and not the mere subject that made those work great.
[1] 'Pommer later said: "They saw in the script an 'experiment'. I saw a relatively cheap film".' Citation [36] on Wikipedia
And, not to insult fanfiction writers (I've been known to partake), but I would guess Jane Austen still writes a better broody man than most of them... although probably not all of them. That's a secondary consequence of simply having more people partaking in art to begin with: the more millions of artists you have, that many more one-in-a-million geniuses you're bound to find.
Whatever about that, she remains absolutely unbeaten in writing awful vicars.
(I assume this wasn't her intention, but the vicar is by far the most memorable character, for me.)
I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside.
I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable.
As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.
When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one).
From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.
The last contemporary literary novel I read was Michel Houellebecq's "Submission" and I read it only because it was controversial, extremely well written and Hourllebecq writes novels that appeal to middle aged men. I'm always up for a novel like that, but it seems impossible to find these days.
> The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor, famously, and as a result, there is no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish.
Moreover:
> What we are dealing with now isn’t information overload, because we are always dealing with information overload, the problem is filter failure.
I think this is a compelling take. It's gotten to the point where I have to use ChatGPT to look for good sources instead of Googling directly. I held out for a while, but had to capitulate in late 2024 when search engines just became a total slopfest.
As a sidenote, I did enjoy Houellebecq's Le sens du combat. :P
Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years.
Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-...; the lit fic code is FIC019000).
I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.
There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable.
I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.
Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).
You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).
This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its technology on people. Some good books have been writing exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general does nothing with the premise except make tea.
The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads, people who live for eternity spend time terra forming planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies and exploring the universe, or just becoming something not human at all.
ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality would be trivial to accomplish with that science level. But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
The economics of Star Trek are particularly incoherent; it's not even really clear that it _is_ post-scarcity. Really you only have Picard's word for that, and there's a lot of indication to the contrary.
Pet theory: the Star Trek tv shows are in-universe propaganda made by the Federation, which is a military dictatorship. They should be taken about as seriously as Stalin-era Soviet propaganda, on economic matters.
But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
Greg Egan is a very good example of a novelist who is a GOAT but will be dismissed by most critics of lit-fic because "his characters don't have arcs" or some such.
Maybe the Dune sequels, if you're willing to really, _really_ stretch the definition of 'good'.
Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
“Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’.”
I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty successful realist “literary” writer if she’d chosen to. I am grateful that she chose genre instead.
No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.
Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists.
I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.
Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.
Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.
Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
Yeah, and LOTR is in Middle-Earth, a fantastical world that isn't Earth. The point of the term "magical realism" is that there is still "realism". It's about what happens when something impossible or absurd happens to you and you have to deal with the ramifications in the real world. No one would read The Satanic Verses, think about the themes involved and compare it to LOTR.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.
To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.)
Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.
Lightspeed Trilogy by Ken MacLeod
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (the first book started off quite well, but the other two became a boring slog)
Rise of the Jain by Neal Asher. This one is just so egregiously bad, I don't know how I managed to finish. If I ever have to read another "erstwhile ship" I'll barf.
etc. etc.
Since I'm reading a lot of sci fi, I've ran out of top 1% or so of books an authors pretty quickly. Now I feel like I'm running out of middle-of-the-road authors, too.
---
Edit. I'll add that most sci fi is incapable of even writing characters that have more distinction than "she's a woman, he's a man". They all talk and behave the same.
This is the problem with sci-fi in a nutshell, the characters fall flat in even the most seminal works. They are nor memorable at all and somewhere between uninspired and just downright bad. It's the status quo.
Sci-fi and fantasy fans talk about worldbuilding like it is some esoteric art. In the end worldbuilding is literally just plot, and it's well understood that plot is not the most important part of literature, not compared to deeper themes and characters. Is that because of "literary snobs"? No, it's because when you come back to a book in 20, 50, or 200 years you don't remember whether the protagonist's third neural implant was made of vibranium or aluminum, you remember how that book tackled incredible subject matter with layered characters, and pushed the limits of language in a way only possible in prose. When's the last time you heard of a sci-fi author that wrote like Woolf, or Joyce? Never.
Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".
It's so obvious that sci-fi stories are generally better suited to the medium of film, they can capture the unreality in a more believable way, visually, and take less advantage of the ambiguity of text. It's not like sci-fi novels are pushing boundaries in prose anyways. It's much more pretentious to say they are by calling them equally "literary" than to just accept that novels which exemplify the medium are instead.
The first few Asimov Foundation novels were notorious for talking heads.
Yeah well if you dismiss more literary SF because it focuses on human experience rather than vibranium or whatever, it's not surprising that what remains has flat characters. Don't you see the circular logic?
It reminds me of Sturgeon's law.
I feel like SF magazines have the same problem? Ut looks like all the SF magazines are on the downward slope, to quote Wikipedia:
>[Asimov's] Circulation declined steadily over the life of the magazine and as of 2020 it was below 20,000, more than half of that coming from online subscriptions.
If people would still read SF, why do these magazines fail just like the literary magazines?
Also, I think Banks was more of an old fashioned utopian socialist, which is very different from “woke as fuck”.
About the vast majority of that new fiction, we really have no easy way to tell which of it will one day be considered literary fiction too. Many of the books and other pieces of creative fiction we consider "greats" and literary today, were at some point just, fiction. Tehir future reputation wasn't yet known.
Not quite literary fiction, but Shakespeare's plays were their era's versions of Hollywood films for the masses, but look at them now. Similar applies to many books.
The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.
The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education. This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.
Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.
Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.
For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.
Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.
Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.
— Stephen King
I just read The Body (basis for Stand By Me) and it was as personal and emotionally complex as any literary-approved fiction. It reminded me a lot of The Things They Carried, actually.
I think the biggest issue is that once he was pidgeonholed into being a "trope-master, scary fiction guy", no one would look at his writing any other way. And to be fair, MOST of his writing is overwrought genre stuff, but he has certainly developed into a fine craftsman at his best.
The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun. Historically, most fiction (or art in general) that persists was wildly successful in its time as a prerequisite.
I think that's just prejudice. Literary fiction simply has artistic or intellectual value beyond entertainment, and beyond using familiar tropes.
It's possible that King has some of these qualities somewhere. I have only read ten to fifteen of his novels. But that was enough that I could e.g. predict the ending of The Shining after about 50 pages.
Of all the criticisms I expected to be leveled at the man forgettable was perhaps the last one on my list.
The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.
Some magazines in the olden days were literally nothing but ads - like Computer Shopper.
It was also the edition of the paper with a new TV guide, which I'm sure made my habit very annoying when the rest of the family wanted to see what was on.
I can't afford Fesstools, but that doesn't mean I don't love seeing / reading their ads.
I dropped my very long time subscription to Maximum Computing when they went digital. The end of an era...
Maybe it’s not just a cultural decline, but a deeper shift in how we deal with time, attention, and meaning.
Is it possible that the word "literature" just refers to fiction which has had time to accumulate gravitas, in part due to being old?
If that's true, "literature" production will always appear to be in decline ;-)
I scoured the fiction section, surprised that they didn't have it. Then I asked a staff member. He told me to look in the Literature section....
Even so, with the “top 40” songs/books/what-have-you, I feel like these things are always framed as “cultural decline” when in fact it’s “cultural change” and you just don’t like the thing it’s changing into currently.
Christopher Lasch talks about this in The Culture of Narcissism, but essentially it's a response to greater levels of emotional insecurity due to atomisation and social disconnection.
The other day I was thinking about how absurd it seems from today that in the 19th century culturally cherished people wrote poems on the political situation (at least in Central Europe, think 1848, coffeehouse culture etc.), with rhymes, correct syllable count etc. Not just politics, but anything relevant, like love (romanticism) etc. Totally unironically, as a serious form of the social conversation. The closest we may have to that today is hip hop.
What is the goal of fiction? Escapism. What does it matter if its deep or shallow? The deep ones arent entertaining enough?
If you are expecting a character to enlighten you on a new problem, you are being corrupted by lies.
From Nietzsche to Plato, its agreed, fiction corrupts. Using it for anything outside entertainment is horrifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.
The typical novel takes no longer than watching a season of a serialized TV show... and because it is written as a coherent whole rather than piecemeal, it is much less likely than a TV show to suffer from a bad ending that undermines everything that came before it.
Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.
Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.
Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"
Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.
Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and “enjoyed” it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and expect to have the same impact.
Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn’t be recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction writers… Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this article refers to.
> after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction
I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.
Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today.
The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.
I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real.
When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.
In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:
> For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.
That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance.
But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"
People in general don't take as much risk anymore. It's been variously documented by Byung-Chul Han in The Palliative Society, Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, and even The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch. Generally, it's a response to increasing complexity, atomisation and declining social ties, all of which contribute to a state of emotional insecurity. On a related note, Chris Hedges remarks in The World as It Is:
> But in the game of American journalism it is forbidden to feel. Journalists are told they must be clinical observers who interpret human reality through their eyes, not their hearts—and certainly not through their consciences. This is the deadly disease of American journalism. And it is the reason journalism in the United States has lost its moral core and its influence. It is the reason that in a time of crisis the traditional media have so little to say. It is why the traditional media are distrusted. The gross moral and professional failings of the traditional media opened the door for the hate-mongers on Fox News and the news celebrities on commercial networks who fill our heads with trivia and celebrity gossip.
I talk about this more in my essay here, if anyone is interested, although it's quite long: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/epistemic-telos-god-as-sadi...
As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not "literature" :)
This doesn't seem to be "wokeness" (whatever that means) so much as "shallow writing pandering to an editor somewhere who is obsessed with race but has no education to grapple with it".
By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
The full definitions can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
Based on the recent survey results, only half of US adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level 4 or above.
I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.
Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James, Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.
As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go, literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind.
Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer games, movies, TV.
"Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."
"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." - Albert Camus
You might find it or you might not. But the search will be far more interesting than browsing any website.
I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.
Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.
Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.
> People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on?
Most easily digestible evidence submitted by the author is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/DRBKRA3A086NBEA showing that actual per capita expenditure on reading material has increased indexed to 2017 dollars...
That the percentage of people who can read (and do read one book per year) is higher, clearly isn't translating to more book sales, so people are reading, or at least buying, fewer print books.
But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general.
It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding.
All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go.
The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
Eye strain suggests you probably need corrective lenses of some type. If so, fixing this will improve your quality of life in more than just reading books. Good lighting is also important. E-paper has the advantage that it can be used in bright lighting, e.g. outdoors. For indoor reading you might want a desk lamp positioned to shine extra light on the ebook reader.
And the English language has declined. English has always been a scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism degree.