How the world of literature lost its mojo

'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.

- David Brooks

It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the midto late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of bestselling 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 bestselling book of 1974, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was the bestselling 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 bestselling 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 dehumanising 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 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.”