I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.
It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher’s Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958, and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.
Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number of people who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher’s Weekly yearly top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?
I’m not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn’t know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, “The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.”
As a result of this assumption, novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Literary talk was so central that even some critics got famous: Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin and before them Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. There were vastly more book review outlets, in newspapers across the country and in influential magazines like The New Republic.
Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the internet. It has destroyed everybody’s attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. As Yingling points out, the decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet was dominant.
People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell’s “1984” (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has sold over 20 million. Americans still love literary books. When the research firm WordsRated asked Americans to list their favorite books, “Pride and Prejudice,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Jane Eyre” all came in the top 10.
People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.” It’s just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed.
I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years.
Go back to the 1970s and artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there was Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift.” In movies there was “The Godfather” — I and II — and “Apocalypse Now.” Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialized, bureaucratized and less freewheeling today.
The literary world was especially hard hit. Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses. When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?” It seemed like a small and judgmental world.
Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.)
In 2023, the British Journal of Social Psychology published a fascinating study by Adrian Luders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle. They looked at a sample of the American electorate (mean age 34) and analyzed their opinions on issues like abortion, immigration, gun control and gay marriage.
They found that left-leaning people tend to have more extreme and more orthodox and tightly clustered views on these issues. If you know what a left-leaning person thinks about immigration, you can predict what he thinks about abortion. Right-leaning people tend to have more diverse and discordant views. A right-leaning person’s view on immigration is less predictive of his views on gun control. There’s more conformity on the left.
This accords with my experience. When I visit a school in a blue part of the country, students often say they are afraid to speak their minds in class. It also reminds me of a study Amanda Ripley did with the polling and analytics firm PredictWise for The Atlantic in 2019. That study looked at which counties in America were the most open-minded and which counties were most prejudiced against their political opponents. There was plenty of intolerance on the right (especially in Florida), but the most intolerant county in America appeared to be Suffolk County, Mass., which includes the city of Boston, and the Bay Area wasn’t far behind.
Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You’re not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe’s words, to stand “firm and alone.” Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage.
If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the small coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course you’re writing will be small and just like everyone else’s. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You’ll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won’t make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won’t want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you canceled.
Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.
In 1989 Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper’s called “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he tried to inject a little audacity into his fellow novelists. He implored his fellow novelists to get out of their intellectual ghettos and write big audacious novels that could capture an age, the kind of novels Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis were doing in their day. Wolfe did that himself in 1987 with “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” his sprawling novel about all layers of New York society — which holds up very well today.
We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side.
Which brings me to the good news. If the problem with literary fiction is social pressure and a failure of nerve, then that can be solved. I am told, by someone who teaches young writers, that right now there are bold young novelists doing important work. It makes sense to me that they will want to break out of the constraints that others have lived by. Maybe there are stars coming up just on the horizon.
Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn’t give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can’t match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature’s comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanization all around us.
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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
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