Why Most Fiction Constitutes a Bunch of "Me Too" Books

Have you ever had the feeling that most of contemporary fiction is little more than a bunch of "me too" books? Where everyone seems to be writing more or less the same thing in any given genre?

Of course the characters have different names and different characteristics and the plots have different twists, but fundamentally the differences are not that great. Perhaps you like that: since you bought and presumably read a particular book, publishers are pretty sure your would like another that is very similar, and based on sales, that seems to be the case.

If you're an author, and would like to write something different, in most cases, you can forget it, or publish it yourself and hope to heck you are far better at marketing than you are at writing, no matter how good a writer you are.

My basis for saying this is an article called "Comping White" in a recent issue of the "Los Angeles Review of Books," by Laura B. McGrath.

While Ms McGrath was trying to determine why the American publishing industry remains dominated by white folks, her extensive study is actually just as interesting from a different perspective. Ms McGrath, by the way, is an associate director of the Stanford University Literary Lab, a research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature. I couldn't find a definition of "computational criticism" on the Lab's website, but it appears to involve counting things up and then drawing certain conclusions, much easier to do in the digital world than previously.

Ms McGrath apparently did a great deal of counting. "The question of counting, and who counts, in literature is an important one to me," she said, conflating two meanings of the word "count."

McGrath focused on publishers' seasonal catalogs from 2013 through 2019 to figure out that has been going on in the industry, extracting in the process "metadata about 10,220 new fiction releases."

What she discovered, with the help of one editor, is that what matters most when it comes to deciding whether or not to publish a new book is whether it is comparable to existing, successful titles.  In other words, is it "me too" fiction?

"The logic is straightforward: Book A (a new title) is similar to Book B (an already published title). Because Book B sold so many copies and made so much money, we can assume that Book A will also sell so many copies and make so much money. Based on these projections, editors determine if they should pre-empt, bid, or pass on a title, and how much they should pay in an author advance. Above all, comps are conservative. They manage expectations, and are designed to predict as safe a bet as possible. They are built on the idea that if it worked before, it will work again."  So says McGrath in her LA Review of Books article.

The nature of a particular author is also a significant factor in all of this, the article says.

“You get into the type of author that somebody is, and the type of audience that they’re reaching more than you do content," McGrath quotes another editor as telling her.  In other words, if you've written a successful book, it doesn't much matter how good what you next write is. You'll get published again.  This is called "author-audience alignment." And, well, your first book probably was a success because it copied the approach of a book that was previously successful.

"Comps perpetuate the status quo, creating a rigid process of acquisition without much room for individual choice or advocacy," McGrath said, terming prevailing publishing industry practices "basically systems of exclusion."  Her point is that such practices help keep the industry racially white; my point is that even if you are white (as I am), if you don't want to write a "me too" book, forget it.

"Manhattan Morning," by the way, is not a "me too" title, and now you know what that means. You haven't read it!

Thom Browne, a Man of the Hour, Deconstructs Masculinity

Well, this isn't about fiction, but it is very topical.

Traditional masculinity, often characterized as "toxic masculinity," is under assault as never before, in large part as a result of the Me Too Movement. One reads piece after piece these days about how men, and society as a whole, needs to re-examine and re-work just what it means to be a male.

Enter American fashion designer Thom Browne with his latest menswear runway show in Paris. (Click on that link to get a look).

Basically what Browne did this time around was quite literally deconstruct tradition menswear and sew various pieces back together to create new looks.  While some commentators described these as "dresses" or "gowns," they look to me more like "un-bifurcated garments."  But the point seems obvious: men need to take themselves apart and put themselves back together in a different form in order to successfully adapt to social change.

But what about Browne himself? He seems stuck in the mold of wearing mostly very traditional, precisely tailored men's suits and related garments.

So the message remains at best a mixed one.

Elena Ferrante's Exceptionally Dark View of Humanity

The popular Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante has an exceptionally dark view of the human condition and of society, believing, among other things, that violence is "an essential trait of the human animal."

Violence in her view stems from nature rather than nurture, or to put the world nurture another way, from how societies happen to be organized. And each generation, she believes, is obligated to rediscover and verify the horrors of society, only to also discover their impotence to correct them.

Ferrante, which is a pen name, is most famously the author of four books known as "The Neapolitan Quartet," but she also earlier published three other novels.  While she has declined to reveal her real identity or appear as Elena Ferrante in public, she has provided written answers to many questions and a great number of these have been collected in a book called "Frantumaglia," and subtitled "A Writer's Journey."

As a representative of her publisher explains: "The little problem was that, having promised the first publishers to whom we sold the rights that Elena would do an interview for each of those countries, the author suddenly found herself having to respond to some forty interviews, from all over the world."

In this post, I'm going to cherry pick her responses to various questions, starting with one from 2003 and proceeding forward in time.

Asked whether her fiction was undergoing a change after she had described the arrogance and insolence of a particular character and compared the character to the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, Ferrante replied as follows:

"I don't know, I hope not. Let's say that I am interested in understanding the fact that everything in life is turning into a show, draining the very concept of citizenship. I'm also struck by how the person is more and more unhappily dedicated to becoming a personage. And it frightens me that a classical effect of fiction -- the suspension of disbelief -- is becoming an instrument of political domination in the very heart of democracies."

Then, in 2006, a reader asked Ferrante how would she explain what the reader viewed as an increase in violence in Naples. Ferrante's response was:

"In Naples nothing more and nothing less is happening than what has happened for decades: an increasingly vast and well articulated intertwining of the illegal and the legal. The new fact isn't the explosion of violence, but how the city, with it's ancient problems, is being traversed by the world and is spreading through the world."

Then, at one point in 2014, Ferrante was asked to comment on the then-current state of Italy. Here is what she said:

"Italy is an extraordinary country, but it has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest. This confusion, concealed behind verbose self-promotion of all kinds, runs through criminal organizations as well as political parties, government bureaucracies and all social classes."  That makes it difficult, she went to say, to be a truly good Italian, but the country does still have some excellent citizens.

Asked again, in 2015, about violence in Southern Italy, Ferrante replied:

"Violence is an essential trait of the human animal and it's always lying in wait, everywhere even in your marvelous country [Norway]. The perpetual problem is how to keep it under control." Later in the same interview, she declared that "our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again."

Again in 2015, Ferrante is asked why she finds the theme of "erasure" -- erasing oneself, or being erased by others; disappearing or being disappeared -- so compelling.  The answer, in part:

"Every day we find ourselves faced with the intolerable, and no promise of utopia -- whether it be political, religious or scientific -- is capable of calming us. Each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent."

Later in the same year, Ferrante is asked, in effect, why she doesn't write more optimistic stories.

"I'm always surprised," she responds, "when somebody points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence."

By way of explanation she says: "Since the age of 15, I haven't believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on earth -- in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me."  But at the same time, she says, she believes most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin and that she is comforted stories than emerge through horror to redemption. "But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn't believe in it. … I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions."

"Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening."

Ferrante's stories are full of people quarreling and on that topic she sees a quarrel as a rhetorical device that metaphorically represents a suspension between two sides [or states of being], "and it effectively summarizes the time we live in."

Continuing … "With the concept of class consciousness and class conflict defeated, the poor, the desperate, whose wealth consists only of angry words, are kept, by means of words, on the threshold -- between the degrading explosion, -- which makes them animals, and the liberating one, which humanizes and initiates a sort of purification.  But in reality, the threshold is continuously breached, it becomes a bloodshed, a bloody war among the poor. Or it leads to acquiescence, to subservience of the weak toward the strong, to opportunism."

Asked her view of the last 40 years of the 20th century, which in the view of one questioner, were a favorable period relative to the "violent widening of gap between rich and poor" in the early years of the current century, Ferrante responded as follows:

"History and stories are written from the balcony of the present, looking out on the electrical storm of the past; that is to say there is nothing more unstable than the past. The past, in its indeterminacy, presents either through the filter of nostalgia or through the filter of preliminary impressions. I don't love nostalgia; it leads us to ignore individual sufferings, large pockets of misery, cultural and civil poverty, widespread corruption, regression after minimal and illusionary progress. I prefer acquisition to acts.  The forty years you cite were in reality very difficult and painful for those who started from a position of disadvantage. And by disadvantage, I also mean, above all, being a woman. Not only that, starting in the seventies, the masses that endured inhuman sacrifices to climb a few rungs up the social ladder were already experiencing the torments of defeat, as were their children. Not to mention a sort of latent civil war; so called world peace, always at risk; and the beginnings of the most devastating technological revolutions, which paralleled one of the most devastating deconstructions of the old political and economic order. The new fact is not that the millennium begins with the widening of the gap between rich and poor -- that is a given.  The new fact is that the poor no longer have any horizons in life besides the capitalist system, or any horizons for redemption besides religion."

Asked about the family, Ferrante responds:

"The family is violent in itself, as is everything that is based on blood ties -- that is to say ties we don't choose, ties that impose on us responsibility for the other even if we never chose to take it on. … Principally, it's hard to accept that bad feelings are provoked not only by the stranger, the rival -- the one who is on the other shore of 'our' body of water, who is not on our soil and does not share our blood -- but, perhaps with even greater compulsion, by those who are close to us."

What is at the bottom of this seemingly hopeless situation?  Once again we are back to Pogo and his observation that "we have met the enemy and he is us."

"What corrupts us is the passion for ourselves, the urgent need for our own primacy," Ferrante says.

Welcome to the "it's-all-about-me" culture where we are all supposed to create, develop and ultimately monetize our own personal "brand." Collective approaches to betterment are passé.

How Iris Murdoch Opened a Young Woman's View of Life

I recently published a short post on why people read fiction and here is another on the same theme.

Susan Scarf Merrell, a novelist and creative writing instructor, has a recent piece in the New York Times in which she relates how discovering the works of Iris Murdoch at a young age opened her eyes to a different world than that in which she was being brought up.

Merrell relates how she grew up in a literary family where books were everywhere, passed around from one person to another and discussed at dinner, in the car or on walks. These included works by authors such as Dickens, Austin, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, George Eliot -- you get the picture.

Iris Murdock was not in the family canon. And despite being a contemporary author who had, at the time Merrell discovered her work by chance in the closet of a vacation house in Sicily, written about half of the 26 novels she would eventually publish, was never mentioned in the Merrell household.

For the young woman -- and this is no doubt a story familiar to many -- Murdock's novels opened a new world of possibilities. Life could be considerably, and excitingly, different from what Merrell up to that point had imagined.

"Her people voiced prejudice, held misguided opinions, and Murdoch took them down, but with understanding and affection.  Marriages ended, things were said, there was way too much drinking and even some fighting, and life went on. Yes, in Murdoch's world characters behaved badly and were not always punished for it.  And even if they were, they found their way to reasonable fates."

And, of course, there was all the sex: "hetero- and homo-, extramarital, even incestuous, all charged with violence, betrayal and yearning -- utterly thrilling to an overly protected kid like me."

Did Merrell then share or discuss these works with other members of her family?  She did not, clearly feeling they were not part of that world.

"I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional works of one's own."

Color Prejudice Can Be As Strong as That Based on Race

When I started writing this blog four years ago, my first post was about a short story in the New Yorker  by Toni Morrison called "Sweetness," which was actually the first chapter of a since-published novel called "God Help the Child."  Over the years, it has become one of my most-read posts and you can find it here.

In a nutshell, the story was about a light-skinned African-American woman who experiences a profound sense of prejudice against her much darker infant daughter.

I mention this because there was a report the other day that the African nation of Rwanda is moving to ban sin-bleaching agents, such as mercury, deemed to be harmful.  Skin-bleaching is a billion dollar industry in predominantly black countries, the article noted.

Why is that?

"In Rwanda and other countries, people use cosmetics to bleach their skin because they feel that lighter skin is the ideal or indicates higher social status. Dark-skinned people do not necessarily see people like them in billboards, movies and advertisements, and dark-skinned celebrities sometimes grow more popular after bleaching their skin. This all makes it easier to believe that darker skin is of lesser value or is not considered as beautiful," the article said.

Those interested can read the New York Times story from which that quote is taken or watch a video on the topic that appeared in the Washington Post.

What is to Come: The Matriarchy

Well, Ok, this is another post that is not about fiction -- unfortunately.

Since the election of Donald Trump as President, many commentators have said that even when he is gone, U.S. politics will never be the same again.

And recently we have had some evidence that they are correct.

I'm thinking here of Rashida Tlaib, recently elected to the U.S. Congress after previously serving in the Michigan state legislature.  The other day, in public remarks, she referred to Trump as a "motherfucker." In the view of New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, Tlaib's use of such terminology was perfectly justified -- for a variety of reasons -- (even though either Goldberg herself or her editors declined to print that word in her column).

Back in the 1980s and 90s, when I was covering various Congressional issues as a reporter, one of he most irascible members of the House of Representatives was David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat. Very liberal, he had little use for many if not most conservative members of Congress and who knows in what terms he may have referred to them in private.  But in public, Obey was careful to say that he held such and such a member of Congress "in minimum high regard."  Translated, that meant Obey considered him a total scoundrel, or worse.

Those were back in the bad old days when "the patriarchy" pretty much reigned supreme and especially in Washington DC.

Well those days are over, it seems, with Democratic voters returning a flood of women to Congress. So much for toxic masculinity.  In its place, we can apparently look forward to equally toxic femininity.

Who is to blame?  Well,  the name Trump will undoubtedly come to the lips of many.  He broke all the rules of civility in public life and most importantly, deliberately and without apology, arguably thus thrusting open the floodgates for all that is apparently to come.

But I'm afraid it's really back to Pogo declaring "we have met the enemy and he is us."

We the people collectively elected Donald Trump even though he failed to win a majority of the popular vote, and even though we knew exactly who he was and how he operated based on his conduct during the primaries and the run-up to the general election.

Yes, things have changed. Welcome to the world of Rashida Tlaib and the impending "matriarchy."

Religion Seen as Most Difficult Topic for YA Fiction

I've written a number of posts on YA (Young Adult) Fiction because it has been showing good growth while sales of most other genres of fiction are described as stagnant or even declining.

Not surprisingly, given what anyone can easily find on the Internet, few topics are off limits for young adults (aged 12 to 18) except perhaps religion. That's the view of Donna Freitas, an author of such books and a person who has a doctorate in religious studies, as recently expressed in the New York Times  weekly book review section.

"A writer can go as dark and violent as it gets. Sex is more than fine. ... Graphic, instructive, erotic, romantic, disappointing: bring it all on.  Even better, current YA novels now have many L.G.B.T.Q. protagonists ... which was not the case 10 years ago."

In fact, "the sky is the limit," Freitas said, except for religion.  "Religion is the last taboo."

Since most wars these days seem to be grounded in religious differences, that's a curiosity even beyond the reasons Freitas gives in her article.

"As a frequent speaker on college campuses, I can confirm that while young people may be more skeptical about traditional religion, their hunger for a more inclusive, nontraditional spirituality is  constant," Freitas said. While teenage readers "search for themselves" in the books they read, few protagonists of YA fiction identify with a particular faith or claim spirituality as something of interest, she said.

Why don't authors address such interests?

"We worry someone may be trying to convert or indoctrinate teenagers; we resist preachiness about certain moral perspectives,"  Freitas said.  But at the same time, she conceded that "religions and religious people have done and still do reprehensible things in our world, to women, to children, to some of the people I care most deeply about."

Not to mention what they do to other societies in general that don't happen to adhere to their faith. Remember what ISIS did to their neighbors and what they apparently would have loved to do with us, and what we in turn did to them?  And all the "collateral damage" that occurred in the process?

But Freitas' point is nonetheless well taken.  And I say that as an agnostic.

Signaling Virtue is Where It's At, Especially for White Males

New York Time conservative columnist David Brooks, who has mostly been wandering in the political wilderness since the election of Donald Trump, had a highly amusing, and mostly on target, satirical piece in the Jan. 4, 2019, edition of the paper.

It was all about what constitutes being a "good person" in the current age.

I will focus on one of his four recommendations: feeling indignant all of the time.

"When you are indignant, or woke, you are showing you have a superior moral awareness.  Your indignation itself is a sign of your goodness, and if you can be indignant quicker than the people around you, that just shows how much more good you are," Brooks wrote.

This is called "signaling virtue" and I cited an example of it in a recent column where Washington Post critic Ron Charles, a white male, expressed his indignation that J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is still in the canon of great books.

"We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision," Charles said, beating his breast for even greater effect: "We have met the phonies and they are us."

To be a good person these days it is also necessary to attach the word "privileged" to every mention of white males and as you can see above, Charles hit that particular "signaling virtue" nail on the head, too.  Actually,  "privileged" is the currently right adjective for white females, too, but it is best not used by a male.  Any criticism of women, no matter what race, could be viewed as misogyny and one then certainly can't be a good person.

There was a time, Brooks said, when people thought being good meant living up to some external standard of moral excellence.  But not now. "Self display" is where it's at.

If you feel a need, you can signal your own virtue by getting very indignant about this post.

Why Do People Read Fiction -- Beyond For Entertainment?

Why do people read fiction beyond the simple reason that it is entertaining or diverting?

One reason might be to expand one's horizons -- to find out more about the world in a fashion that is less dry or sleep-inducing than non-fiction.

When I lived in England, my chief means of finding out more about the English and their country was by reading their novels.  And when I lived in Japan, I did the same thing -- this time Japanese novels in translation, including "The Tale of Genji," which took me months to get through. Fortunately, there were a significant number of excellent translations of Japanese literature, both classic and contemporary.

But another reason is to find out more about oneself.

"Teenage readers search for themselves in books," said Donna Frietas, an author of Young Adult fiction, in a recent New York Times book review article.

Teenagers aren't the only ones.  When I self-published my first novella, "Manhattan Morning," some of my friends who were kind enough to read it said it wasn't that interesting for them because they could not identify with my protagonist and thus did not find him interesting.  And, indeed, I soon began to realize that much (but not all) of the feedback that I received said more about the person giving me their reaction than it did about my book.

It is a revealing exercise and one that leads to a certain amount of self-reflection.

JD Salinger Viewed As White Male Canon Fodder

With the white population of the U.S. declining toward minority status, the country's cultural traditions are episodically under attack and perhaps nowhere more forcefully than with respect to literature.

It's time to revise "the canon" -- the prevailing list of great books that are not just mostly euro-centric, but heavily the work of white male authors, reformers contend.  The canon, while unofficial, is nonetheless highly influential, particularly when it comes to deciding what books children should read in school or be taught in college.

The latest assault comes from Ron Charles, a white male himself, who reviews books for the Washington Post. He seized upon J.D. Salinger's 100th birthday (Jan. 1, 2019) to bash the relevance of "The Catcher in the Rye," an iconic coming-of-age novel that has sold over 65 million copies since it was first published in 1951.

"We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision," Charles said.

"We have met the phonies and they are us," the critic declared, apparently feeling it expedient to  signal his own personal virtue. More accurately, he might have declared that "he" had met the enemy and it was "himself". Just who are the "we" and the "us," one wonders?

Noting that the U.S. is experiencing a renaissance in young-adult literature -- a topic I have addressed in several earlier posts (search on the label "young adult fiction") -- Charles said it is "no longer tenable to imagine that the anxieties of a white heterosexual young man [Holden Caulfield]  expelled from an expensive prep school capture the spirit of our era." Today's "snarky young anti-hero" is more likely to resemble the black French Canadian boy in a forthcoming book called "The Field Guide to the North American Teenager," by Ben Phillipe, a black male born in Haiti,  he said.

But, as Clark's article makes clear, Salinger and his small set of published works aren't dead yet.  The New York Public Library, he noted, is planning a special exhibition of manuscripts, letters, books and artifacts for October 2019.  And once Salinger dies, the trustees of his literary estate could seek to cash in on the theatrical, film and television demand for his stories estimated to be worth as much as $50 million.

"Don't think it won't happen," Charles said, implying demand for the white-male literary canon still has legs.

As for "The Field Guide to the North American Teenager," the public will in due course decide whether it needs 65 million copies or not.