Is Literary Fiction Dead?
No. Some of it just needs a more modern definition
Recently in The Spectator, author Sean Thomas wrote about the death of literary fiction. He cited the changing attitudes of readers, the lack of a sufficient attention span, being glued to our phones, and searching only for books with a real story, no longer reading what for decades has been labeled “literary fiction.” The industry will tell you the numbers are way down.
Most times, literary fiction is easy to spot even without someone telling you so. In most cases, it’s character-driven, sometimes plotless. Critics frequently call literary fiction, even the best of it by reviewer standards, as books without story. Too much centered on the writing and not enough on the narrative and plot.
Sean Thomas wrote that maybe it’s time to say “good riddance” to literary fiction, and he also pointed out the shift in how readers and publishers have identified, then and now, the so-called literary author.
“Once upon a time, literary novelists such as John Updike, Richard Ford, A.S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Ondaatje and many others were viewed as the pyramidion of literature. Nowadays, such writers are published — if published at all — by little imprints, who offer advances that would barely cover Tom Wolfe’s dry cleaning bill: a typical pro writer in 2024 earns around £7,000, half the income of a decade before.”
That’s about $7600.
Bleak
But this is certainly not the reason literary fiction should be shunned. Yes, the tastes of the reading public — its lack of patience, and its addiction to the sometimes cheesy and cliched TV plot twists of nearly every streaming series — have been dramatically altered over recent years. However, maybe it’s not all about reader habits but more about the lack of tolerance for something else . . . pretentiousness.
There’s that book that people take to the coffee shop that “says something about you” when other patrons spot you reading. Holding up a copy of, for example, Paradise by Toni Morrison or The Satanic Verses, or anything by George Saunders is bound to signal that you are “well-read,” “intelligent,” or, dare I say, “sophisticated.” Not saying any of us have done this on purpose, although some surely have. Still, we all know what books we’re talking about, and what openly reading books in this genre might signal to the world — knowledge, intelligence, contemporary spirit, and, dare I say for some, an air of pretentiousness.
Readers, I believe, are rejecting all of this.
How about this for a solution? Let’s not call it literary fiction anymore. Instead, let’s call out those specific works that critics or publishers claim to be written by the next “voice of a generation” or the book that “will change literature.” This is pretentious literature, what I think Thomas is truly referring to.
The other day, a friend of mine asked, “Have you read Ulysses? Certainly, you have, right?”
Yes, I have. Read it three, four, maybe five times, and I’m still unsure whether I’ve embraced it fully. I’m not ashamed to say that. Is Ulysses pretentious? No, not for me, but certainly it is what we have been told — serious literary fiction. It is a groundbreaking work, yes. All true and good. But how many people these days are buying copies of Ulysses at their local bookstore? Its reputation as “pretentious” or “too complicated” (maybe they’re the same thing in some respects), certainly precedes the reading of James Joyce’s work.
There are plenty of other books in this category. Think War and Peace.
I enjoy a lot of what is and has been labeled as traditional literary fiction. I many times gravitate to stories without hard plots, more character-driven narratives, and find myself falling in love with the prose. Whether you want to call the works of these authors literary fiction or not, one has to agree that the books by Rachel Cusk, Annie Dillard, Claire Keegan, Sigrid Nunez, or Haruki Murakami, and even Patti Smith — works not always found on the traditional bestseller lists — are often applauded as triumphs, highly regarded, reviewed with enormous praise.
Are these authors pretentious?
I guess the reader has the final say on that. The point is that literary fiction, what we have come to traditionally believe it is, has its place on our shelves. Read it. Savor it. I believe it’s today’s anti-clickbait. But be careful of “literary fiction” that publishers claim will change the world. That’s the pretentious stuff. Those are the books I believe Sean Thomas might be talking about in his piece, the books he wants to offer “good riddance.” Thomas would likely debate me on this, claiming I shouldn’t be making assumptions about his opinion. But he’s the one who wrote the article, he’s the one calling for a sea-change in the literary language landscape. He does have a point, no doubt, and I urge you to read the article in The Spectator to create your own opinion. But I ask that you don’t come to a conclusion about a longstanding literary genre until you embrace the entire picture of the modern author, the shaky status of today’s publishing world, and the state of the modern reader who, as I write this, is most likely searching for the TV remote so they don’t miss the most recent episode of The White Lotus.
I heard it’s pretty good.
David W. Berner is the author of several award-winning books of memoir and literary fiction. He has been teaching writing for more than twenty-five years.
