A slower output this week, last week, and probably next week as I work on drafting another lengthy author profile for Metropolitan Review; meanwhile here’s a quick note about something I noticed on Substack recently.
I really liked your book, so please don't take this as a dig, but I think the trend you're picking up on is substack writers fantasizing about their writing being consequential, even if the consequences are negative. Speaks to an anxiety that they're basically shouting into the void.
Sort of the writer's equivalent of fantasizing about dying in a war.
I don't take that as a dig at all, I think you're definitely seeing what's there! And it'd be concerning, offputting, a bit martyr-y if they were all *overtly* about someone speaking the truth to power. They'd all be kinda terrible, I think, if that were the case.
The reason I find it interesting is cuz they all display this thing so differently. VICTIM is very straightforward monologue, basically, but there are lots of really intricate narrative hijinks going on, indicating that the narrator's lying about literally every detail in the story. WAYBACK MACHINE is both indulging its smutty, gossipy, celeb-scandal impulses, critiquing those impulses, and having a conflicted experience of revealing its own loneliness. WHY TEACH has its own subtextual psychodrama going on where I think the narrator is also pretty unreliable and, while I can't speak to the average reader's experience of CUBAFRUIT (since I wrote it), I can say there are unreliable narratorish things going on there, too, and that the ending isn't what it seems. (Or that's the goal.)
This is a revealing non-sequitur that is rampant among literary Substack. (For very curious, very ironic reasons, should anyone want to parse it out.) Such dismissive non-sequiturs could be made of these "Substack" novels, and are made by parts of the establishment. One knee-jerk non-sequitur should not engender other knee-jerk does-not-follows. Of course there are ideologies behind these non sequiturs that whole classes of people and institutions are deeply invested in, whether they are conscious of it or not. The "Substack" literary scene guts itself by not getting a handle on this. It narrows the scene in ironically partisan and political ways. Brandon Taylor outed some though not all of this in his recent post "ideology in fiction."
This whole debate on style, or on purple vs. minimalist prose, etc., reminds me of when I used to work as an adjunct in an English department in which there were two warring schools of teaching composition, one that emphasized the importance of correct punctuation, and one that disregarded the importance of punctuation. And the two schools HATED each other. Although colleagues in the same department, the members of the different schools refused to greet each other in the teachers' room or hallway. The thing was, both schools worked, if the teacher was good.
Good lord. I wasn't faculty at a college, but I worked in a college writing center for eight years, and the professors' mailboxes were in that room. Every day we'd see these microdramas play out with differently-hued silences that people directed at one another. Such a noxious vibe.
And thanks for the kind words about the TMR piece. Speaking of noxious vibes, I'm in a pretty dark/miserable place with it, as I was the Vollmann piece, which is maybe a good thing, as it prompts me to kinda...go farther than is maybe healthy.
This is a super interesting observation, and while I haven’t yet read any of these novels, I feel like this might be part of a larger trend of literary writers starting to process the rhetoric and ideals of the 2010s, now that we have some distance. In the last few years I’ve read scores of books that featured cancelled and “cancelled” figures, and trans literature frequently tackles the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that often results in marginalized communities eating their own. Even in stories where no one is actually cancelled or expelled from their community, the threat is often still part of the text, looming over everything.
It’s funny, my liberal mom keeps bemoaning the fact that there are so few big pieces of media that have tackled our 2016-present political situation head-on, and she wants me to write a novel about Trump’s administrations. I won’t be doing this, and I feel like I understand why few other writers have attempted it, and I wonder if the literary obsession with identity politics, cancellation, community expulsion, etc is partly sublimation: the actual events shaping our world seem too mind-bending to be dealt with, so we turn to the realm of ideas and rhetoric instead.
Something about Barney is really triggering to people! Was quite surprised by the amount of bullying he got.
I really liked your book, so please don't take this as a dig, but I think the trend you're picking up on is substack writers fantasizing about their writing being consequential, even if the consequences are negative. Speaks to an anxiety that they're basically shouting into the void.
Sort of the writer's equivalent of fantasizing about dying in a war.
I don't take that as a dig at all, I think you're definitely seeing what's there! And it'd be concerning, offputting, a bit martyr-y if they were all *overtly* about someone speaking the truth to power. They'd all be kinda terrible, I think, if that were the case.
The reason I find it interesting is cuz they all display this thing so differently. VICTIM is very straightforward monologue, basically, but there are lots of really intricate narrative hijinks going on, indicating that the narrator's lying about literally every detail in the story. WAYBACK MACHINE is both indulging its smutty, gossipy, celeb-scandal impulses, critiquing those impulses, and having a conflicted experience of revealing its own loneliness. WHY TEACH has its own subtextual psychodrama going on where I think the narrator is also pretty unreliable and, while I can't speak to the average reader's experience of CUBAFRUIT (since I wrote it), I can say there are unreliable narratorish things going on there, too, and that the ending isn't what it seems. (Or that's the goal.)
This is a revealing non-sequitur that is rampant among literary Substack. (For very curious, very ironic reasons, should anyone want to parse it out.) Such dismissive non-sequiturs could be made of these "Substack" novels, and are made by parts of the establishment. One knee-jerk non-sequitur should not engender other knee-jerk does-not-follows. Of course there are ideologies behind these non sequiturs that whole classes of people and institutions are deeply invested in, whether they are conscious of it or not. The "Substack" literary scene guts itself by not getting a handle on this. It narrows the scene in ironically partisan and political ways. Brandon Taylor outed some though not all of this in his recent post "ideology in fiction."
This whole debate on style, or on purple vs. minimalist prose, etc., reminds me of when I used to work as an adjunct in an English department in which there were two warring schools of teaching composition, one that emphasized the importance of correct punctuation, and one that disregarded the importance of punctuation. And the two schools HATED each other. Although colleagues in the same department, the members of the different schools refused to greet each other in the teachers' room or hallway. The thing was, both schools worked, if the teacher was good.
I look forward to reading your next piece in TMR.
Good lord. I wasn't faculty at a college, but I worked in a college writing center for eight years, and the professors' mailboxes were in that room. Every day we'd see these microdramas play out with differently-hued silences that people directed at one another. Such a noxious vibe.
And thanks for the kind words about the TMR piece. Speaking of noxious vibes, I'm in a pretty dark/miserable place with it, as I was the Vollmann piece, which is maybe a good thing, as it prompts me to kinda...go farther than is maybe healthy.
This is a super interesting observation, and while I haven’t yet read any of these novels, I feel like this might be part of a larger trend of literary writers starting to process the rhetoric and ideals of the 2010s, now that we have some distance. In the last few years I’ve read scores of books that featured cancelled and “cancelled” figures, and trans literature frequently tackles the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that often results in marginalized communities eating their own. Even in stories where no one is actually cancelled or expelled from their community, the threat is often still part of the text, looming over everything.
It’s funny, my liberal mom keeps bemoaning the fact that there are so few big pieces of media that have tackled our 2016-present political situation head-on, and she wants me to write a novel about Trump’s administrations. I won’t be doing this, and I feel like I understand why few other writers have attempted it, and I wonder if the literary obsession with identity politics, cancellation, community expulsion, etc is partly sublimation: the actual events shaping our world seem too mind-bending to be dealt with, so we turn to the realm of ideas and rhetoric instead.
For your mom:
https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/loop-day-table-of-contents
thank you, this looks right up her alley! I'll pass it on.
I hope it strikes a chord!