How Literature Lost Its Mojo

Opinion|How Literature Lost Its Mojo

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.