Sally Rooney and The Literary Industrial Complex

 Sally Rooney, a self-described Marxist, appears to be willingly serving as the latest tool of what some call the Literary Industrial Complex, a capitalist dream come true.  Basically, it uses the public's infatuation with celebrity to sell a lot more books than would otherwise be the case.

Ms Rooney, author of the best-sellers "Conversations with Friends" and "Normal People," and who has just had her third novel "Beautiful World, Where Are You" published, offers a glimpse of this phenomenon on page 228 of the Hogarth paperback edition of "Normal People."

Therein, the book's chief male protagonist, a young man named Connell who appears to be getting a writing career started, muses over the nature of literature and concludes that books are purchased primarily so educated people can feel superior to the uneducated.

Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was inciteful, all books are ultimately marketed as status symbols and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.  Presumably that was how the industry made money. 

Those were some of Connell's thoughts at the conclusion of a book reading he had been attending at college.

How then does Ms Rooney participate -- beyond just making herself available for interviews, such as in the New Yorker when an except from "Beautiful World" was published there shortly before the book was released -- evidently as part of the marketing effort?

One way is by authorizing a host of branded merchandise to be released around the time of publication -- and making sure it gets into the hands of opinion leaders and with their names then associated with it, out onto social media.

The New York Times described the effort in an article entitled "Beautiful Merch, Where Are You?" (By the way, the title of the "Beautiful World" does not finish with a question mark. probably because there is no answer in Ms Rooney's view.)

As the release date has drawn nearer, anticipation has approximated streetwear-drop levels. In August, Ms. Rooney’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, distributed yellow bucket hats and tote bags (featuring the novel’s cover illustrations, by Manshen Lo) to celebrities, journalists and other so-called literary influencers. They have been encouraged to post about the book using the hashtag #BWWAY.

Lena Dunham, Maggie Rogers and Lucy Dacus are among those who shared photos of the book and its promotional swag on social media. Sarah Jessica Parker was photographed reading it between takes for the “Sex and the City” reboot. In an interview, Delia Cai, a correspondent at Vanity Fair, called it “the status galley of the summer.”

And further ...

Emily Temple, the managing editor of Literary Hub, described the ongoing Rooney-mania as nearly “unprecedented” for a literary fiction release. To her, it calls to mind “Ferrante Fever” — the obsession with the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan Novels, beginning with “My Brilliant Friend,” made her an international celebrity.

And so forth and so on.  Publishing is first and foremost about marketing and marketing is about celebrity. The manner in which Ms Rooney's latest book was launched, and how she participated in it, while decrying capitalism would make excellent fodder for her next novel -- and its collectable swag.

An Example of What I Would Consider a Literary Clanger

 A "clanger" is defined as a conspicuous blunder, and what follows is an example of what I would consider, perhaps unfairly, a literary clanger -- a sentence or phrase that just seems wrong.

The April 27, 2021 email from Literary Hub offered, among other things, an excerpt from a recent novel called Nives by Sacha Naspini. It was translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford and perhaps that is part of the problem.

In a nutshell, based on the excerpt, it appears to be the story of a farmer's wife who becomes a widow when her husband dies unexpectedly in rather disgusting circumstances. She doesn't get along well with her daughter's family and declines an offer to be taken in, insisting on remaining on the farm despite feeling overwhelmed by it's requisites. 

So far, so good, but then came the clanger.

"She soon realized that solitude changed everything about life in the countryside. Each hour passed like a slow-motion smack in the teeth with a shovel; her usual chores took an abnormal turn."

Each hour passed like a slow-motion smack in the teeth with a shovel?  That sentence jumped out at me as so improbable an image that it was all I was left thinking about when I finished the excerpt.

It surely doesn't work as a metaphor -- far too extreme (someone being hit in the teeth with a shovel once an hour -- and continuing on?  I don't think so.).  But I suppose it could be viewed not as that familiar device, but rather as hyperbole -- excessive exaggeration to make a point.

If so, it's unnecessary. Naspini's depiction of the woman's life in the wake of her husband's death doesn't leave any room for doubt. This is a troubled existence. There is no need to ram the notion home with overkill.

So ... that sentence didn't work for me. Perhaps you feel differently.

The Incorporation of Ideas in Fiction

 The latest email from Literary Hub offers an excerpt from Fiona Mozley's novel "Hot Stew," which is described as all about wealth, inheritance, gender and power.  Well, except for gender, that sounds a bit like "The Forsyte Saga," by John Galsworthy, published in 1922. 

But what interested me about the excerpt was Ms Mozley's decision to include a couple of provocative ideas in the middle of an episode of tangled personal relationships.

The first is sociopolitical in nature: whether private charity is good for society or simply serves to preserve for a longer time than might otherwise be the case income inequalities.

In the except, a man named Bastian asks a woman named Glenda how a woman named Laura was doing:

“She’s well. She hates her job though.” “Where does she work?”

“At some kind of charity. They treat her like shit but are constantly going on about how grateful she should be for working in such a friendly environment, and how they’re doing a really good thing by paying her a salary rather than getting her to give her time for free. She wants to leave as soon as she can.”

“What does she want to do?”

“I don’t think she’s fussy. I think in an ideal world she’d be working for some great political campaign with someone amazing she really believes in. But how on earth is she going to find one of those? And, you know, how many people actually get to do a job they like?”

“But isn’t working for a charity a bit like that? I mean, isn’t she already working for a good cause.”

Glenda looked at him as if he’d just vomited.

“Not really,” she explained quietly, as if so embarrassed by what he had just said she didn’t want anyone at the neighboring tables to hear her set him right. “Charity is inherently reactionary, isn’t it? It puts the onus on individuals rather than the collective. It relies on certain individuals having large amounts of disposable income. I think Laura would rather pursue political solutions to the world’s problems rather than charitable ones.”

“Oh right,” Bastian replied.

So there's an idea readers can stop and think about if they wish, or possibly just dismiss Glenda as perhaps an old student lefty who never got over the utopian ideology that tends to go with it.

The second idea is related to the growing acceptance, in some corners of society at any rate, of something along the lines of gender fluidity -- the notion that people naturally have aspects of masculinity and femininity and can slip back and forth between them -- and/or to the notion that stereotyping by outward display is out of date,

Here, the character identified as Bastian, is watching his current live-in partner, a woman named Rebecca, get dressed:

Bastian thinks that tights are strange and he tells Rebecca as much. Then he says, “Isn’t it weird that men and women wear different clothes.”

“Weird how?”

“Just strange. Like, it’s one of those things that you become so used to, you don’t ever think to question it, but then sometimes, for instance, just now watching you put on those tights, you realize it’s kind of bizarre.”

“You could say that about anything,” Rebecca replies. It is sometimes difficult to read her expression and tell whether she finds something humorous or exasperating. On this occasion, he suspects both. “Would you like to wear women’s clothes, Bastian?”

“Not especially. They seem kind of uncomfortable. Especially tights. It’s just that it’s strange that I’m not allowed to. Or, rather, I am allowed to, but it would be perceived as a dramatic statement about my identity when actually, when you think about it, why should anyone care?”

“How radical of you.” This time, she is making fun of him, but he thinks it’s in a friendly way. She goes back to the kitchen and Bastian hears her pour some coffee from the cafetière into her thermos flask and screw on the lid.

Well, there was a story in a local paper the other day about seven-year-old triplets wanting to petition Costco, the warehouse store, not to separate girls and boys clothes.

Women, have, of course, long appropriated menswear. Fashion designers have tried on many occasions to push men the other way -- without success. But perhaps such notions will become more acceptable than in the past.

Lily King's "Timeline:" A Story of Manners, or Who Are We?

 It was more or less by chance -- browsing through the latest Lit Hub email on a slow pandemic morning -- that I read "Timeline" via a link to "OprahMag."  There it was identified as a new short story by award-winning author Lilly King and as "the perfect romantic drama." On the that score, readers can decide for themselves, but I hope not.

The story mainly got me thinking about why one reads fiction.  Well, most fiction is written for entertainment and in the interest of providing a living for the author. Some books eventually fall into what is known as "the canon" and one then reads them  in the interest of "becoming cultured." This notion actually plays a role in "Timeline."

But over the years, the reason I personally have read fiction is to get a better understanding of social values, both here in the U.S. and in other countries.  When I worked in Japan for five years, for instance, I mainly read Japanese novels in translation.  And when I worked in England for eight years, I mainly read English literature. In most cases these were, at least loosely, novels of manners, which is to say books about how people interact with each other in normal, ordinary society.  

"Timeline" is a short story of manners, and in that vein, serves to illuminate the nature of present day American life. It's not definitive of our current culture, of course, and I'm sure Ms King would be the first to say so. But it may well be all too representative of certain currents now running within it. As such, it is worth a read.

Let's Hear It For New Criticism

New Criticism, a movement that dominated American intellectual analysis of literature in the middle part of the 20th century, emphasized a close reading of text independent of the historical, philosophical or sociopolitical circumstances in which it was written. And more important in the current context, advocates of this approach believed the biographical circumstances of authors should be ignored during the process of divining the meaning or aesthetic beauty of writing.

Major figures associated with this approach were John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and, to a certain extent, T.S. Eliot.

I mention this because I read a piece in Literary Hub in which a couple of female authors were described as being upset that readers and/or critics seemed more interested in their personal lives than in what they had written, or, rather, in how their writing illuminated their personal lives.

In the piece, two women, Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett, discuss Lucy, a recent novel by Jamaica Kincaid.

In it (the transcript of a Podcast), Ms Winchester says at one point: "I interviewed Meena Kandasamy earlier this year about The Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife, and she talked about her experience with autofiction [fictionalized autobiography] and saying that she wanted to separate, you know, the art and the artist. And she didn’t want people looking into her own personal life to find out what was “real” and what wasn’t real. And I am reading up on the research for this episode. There a similar conversation with Jamaica Kincaid that, yes, a lot of her work is based on some of her experience, like loosely inspired by. But she didn’t want people to think that she was writing like word-for-word or experience-by-experience upon her own life. And she wanted that separation as well. And I find that interesting that so many women are just having to have this conversation like over and over. It’s like people are just so obsessed with women writers, like what is real from their life and what is fiction."

In other words, these women would that what they have written stand on its own terms.

This preference, it is fair to say, is then largely ignored by Ms Winchester and Ms Privett during their discussion of Lucy.

Early in the piece, for instance, Ms Winchester says: "So I thought we could talk a little bit about her and her background and where she comes from because a lot of her own personal life has informed her writing in a lot of ways."

And on it goes from there.

Well, people are fundamentally voyeurs and perhaps that's what the listeners to the "Reading Women" podcast really want to hear.

 

 

 

Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" Can Feel Out of Date

Emily Temple, a senior editor at Literary Hub, just published a recommended list of relatively short contemporary works of fiction entitled "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages." Sadly, my novella, Manhattan Morning isn't among them.

But that isn't why I bring this up. Rather, one of the books on Temple's list is "The Days of Abandonment," by Elena Ferrante, the author of a series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

"This is the real Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody ... but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece," Temple says.

I am not a woman and therefor probably relatively unqualified to make the following observations, but I read this book and its depiction of a woman's place in a marriage struck me as out of date.

This is the story of Olga whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage, a distressing upheaval no doubt, but one that is particularly shattering for Ferrante's heroine because she feels her very identity has been wiped out.  That's because, and this seems particularly odd for an educated woman in a feminist-sensitive Western world, Olga has given herself over to her husband in totality on the believe that this is what love, in the context of marriage, is all about.

At a couple of points in the story, Olga enumerates lists of things that she did for her husband, starting with getting him through university and supporting him in his work life to the point where she had "made him what he had become." 

In the process, "I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his," she says, noting that she "had had no work, any sort of work, even writing. for at least five years," as she took care of the house, the children and the family finances including the income taxes.

"While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario [her husband] a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would again be as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person."

Instead, she at one point spends several evenings searching through old photographs "for signs of my autonomy."

As she disintegrates, Olga feels not only the loss of her identity and sexuality, she most fundamentally feels increasingly vulnerable and, in the end, instead of remaking herself as an independent woman, settles for safety above all else in a relationship with an older neighbor.

Asked in an interview (re-published in her book "Frantumaglia," or jumbled fragments) if she would call "The Days of Abandonment" a feminist novel, Ferrante replied yes, and no.

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile," Ferrante said.

Mario, Olga's husband, simply fell in love with someone else.

Relevant Literature in the Age of Coronavirus

I usually at least glance through my daily e-mail from Literary Hub and today noticed an item entitled "Italy's answer to the coronavirus is a classic published almost 200 years ago."  The book in question is "The Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni, a story that takes place when the plague has hit Italy.

The book ranks very high in the Italian literary canon and as the author of the LitHub article, Alessio Perrone, notes, has long been a subject for study in Italian schools.

Even if you don't intend to rush out and purchase a copy of the book, I recommend you read Perrone's excellent article about it and how the story relates to prevailing circumstances.  To read it, click on the phrase "excellent article" in the preceding sentence.

List Journalism Is Alive and Well

Literary Hub, an online publication created by the venerable independent publisher Grove Atlantic and the Internet-age publisher Electric Literature, describes itself as “an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life.”

Sounds high brow, doesn’t?

Well, Lit Hub, as it is known, is not shy about being low-brow as well – in this case, list journalism. You know the type: 24 ways to entice HIM into bed (your favorite women’s magazine); the 12 best sports bars in … (fill in the name of your city), etc., etc.

Talking White

Regular readers, to the extent that there are any, know that I have been amusing myself in recent months by writing about various skirmishes in America's on-going culture wars.

With respect to literature, the conflict is mainly an attack on the status of whites, and particularly white males, as being inappropriately in control of how writing should be crafted -- what is good, what is bad; what is noteworthy and what is not; what should be included in "the canon."

The other day, I stumbled on another skirmish, from which I will present an excerpt without comment.

Getting Rid of Western Canonical Values

The literary canon -- essentially a list of books considered the most worthy of consideration -- has long been a pillar of Western culture even if there has been disagreement over exactly which works should be included.  But most have been written by white males and as diversity increases in the U.S. as a result of large-scale non-white immigration in the post-WWII period, that seems to be a growing problem: part of the "culture wars" I have increasingly been writing about.

Do Misfits Have More Insight on the Human Condition?

"I think anybody who has become an artist has learned to claim being a misfit as something that’s cool. Standing outside of the frame is part of what enables us to have insight," said Emily Raboteau, author of "The Professor's Daughter," a novel about a young woman trying to come to terms with a mixed-race background very similar to her own.

She was taking part in a roundtable discussion on what is sometimes called confessional writing published by Literary Hub.

Quote of the Day: On The Rewards of Writing

"If you’re going to write, you’re going to have to find a reason to do it that has nothing to do with money or recognition or award."

That, says poet Hala Alyan in a Literary Hub article, is because publishers mostly say "no."

I also liked the following from the same article:

"We are living in an age of borders, a moment when people will either cling to those borders or try to dismantle them. A time when language matters more than ever, when words can be used to stoke or resist fear, as people try to criminalize words like 'immigrant' and 'trans' and 'Black.' Reclaim language. Allow writing to transcend those borders."

I don't agree with President Trump on much, but I do agree that political correctness has gone too far.

Could I Be a Guest Lecturer For Kathleen Rooney's Course?

Perusing Literary Hub the other day, I was immediately attracted to a headline reading: "To Love New York City is to Walk New York City."

And, one might add, to write about one's walks.

After all, that's what my novella "Manhattan Morning" is all about.  My protagonist, Dan Morrison, with time on his hands, decides to walk from the Warwick Hotel at the corner of 6th Ave. and 54th St. down to just beyond Grand Central Terminal in order to buy a ticket for a bus that will take him to the airport the next morning. That's a distance of about 13 blocks.

As he walks, Dan is assailed by the sights and sounds of the city, which bring to mind a variety of topics thanks to a  process known as associative thinking. Ducking into St. Patrick's for a respite turns out to be anything but as the interior of a church brings to mind an incident Dan would like to put behind him, but still finds troubling.  Eventually, he has an unexpected encounter with a woman at lunch in Grand Central that gets him thinking about his future and his values.

You can read a free illustrated edition of "Manhattan Morning" by clicking on the name of the book.

More Themes of Young Adult Fiction

I've written several posts about Young Adult (YA) fiction, in large part because it is one of the fastest if not the fastest growing category of books in print -- at a time when most categories are flat or declining.

What's in these books?  Well, just about everything and especially, it seems, crest-of-the-wave social topics. If you are young, you want to be with it, right?

Next for Fiction: Trigger Warnings and Safe Pages?

I recently read an article on Literary Hub entitled "On the Use of Sensitivity Readers in Publishing" and it got me thinking: will we soon see novels with trigger warnings appearing at certain interior points, directing readers to "safe pages" within the book, where they can rest and suck on lollipops, certain that they won't encounter any micro aggressions before cautiously proceeding.

"Identity" is where it's at these days, in politics as well as in culture, and woe be it to anyone who offends, even inadvertently, a marginalized group to which they don't belong.  What is a marginalized group?  Well, pretty much any group other than white males, it seems.

Which brings me back to sensitivity reading, which Lit Hub  to its credit admits is a somewhat problematical activity. Is political and cultural correctness compatible with free literary expression and the role it has traditionally played in intellectual life?

The Lit Hub  article gives three views on sensitivity reading: that of a writer, that of a sensitivity reader and that of a publisher. Sadly, no effort appears to have been made to determine what the reading public thinks about this.

Is that important?  I don't know, but one could argue that a failure of certain elites to pay much attention to what was happening on the ground in significant areas of the country led to the election of Donald Trump -- for better or for worse. And one thing Trump repeatedly dismissed during his campaign was political correctness.

The Challenges of Writing About Sex

As we all know well, sex sells and that as much as anything else is probably why it looms as large as it does in a lot of fiction.

But how exactly to write about it, or even more difficult, how to depict it, is a challenge for writers.

Early last year, Literary Hub, staged a single-elimination style tournament for "literary sex writing."  Such prose, I observed at the time, evidently stands in sharp contrast to ordinary old sex writing and as such, may be considered a high-minded, as opposed to a prurient, activity.

How Much Of Your Manuscript Will A Publisher Read?

That's an interesting question, and I suspect there are as many answers as there are publishers.

But since I've just written a post on Elena Ferrante, a contemporary literary sensation, how about her publisher? How many pages of your manuscript would Michael Reynolds, the chief editor of Europa Editions, read?

Thanks to Literary Hub, we know the answer: 30 pages.  But his mind may actually have been made up much earlier.

What follows is the key interchange in an interview of Reynolds by Francesca Pellas:

FP: How do you select manuscripts here at Europa? How much do you read before making a decision?

MR: I read everything that comes in, but I don’t read the pitch first, nor the cover letter. I start with the manuscript. I look at the email just to make sure it’s not something that we don’t publish, and then go straight to the manuscript. I read 30 pages and decide whether it’s worth continuing or not. Sometimes I know from the second line that it’s not going to work for us, but I always, always, give these manuscripts the benefit of the doubt and read those 30 pages. I’ve never changed my mind, but I feel that’s the least I can do out of respect for someone who spent so much time writing something.

The bottom line: make sure you get the second line right!

Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?

This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.

"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"

So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.

The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.

If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.

Aspects of a NYT Article on Book Clubs For Men Only

The New York Times  has an article about book clubs for men only, which you can read in full by clicking on the hyperlink under those words.

I'm not going to address the ins and outs of that notion, which seems reasonable enough, but rather quickly mention two topics contained within the article because they relate to earlier posts on this blog.

The first club mentioned in the article is located in Marin, California, and it has what was described as a cardinal rule:  no books by women about women. While the members of the club were apparently thinking mostly of "chic lit" as something they aren't interested in reading, when it comes to popular fiction in general, they don't have too much to worry about. See my earlier post entitled "Male Characters Dominate Fiction."

White Male Culture: Dominant, But Soon To Be Exotic

When long-time New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton recently died, The New York Times obituary quoted Hamilton's friend, Lewis H. Lapham, as saying the following:

“You were never in doubt about who the cartoonist was. He had a particular beat, as it were — the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges.”