#47: all aboard the Pequod
on Dan Sinykin's Big Fiction
Dear Readers:
Here is an email from me, w/ the boredom & the horror & the glory in it. It’s number 47.
Here’s a little potpourri of things to tell you, then I’m going to get into it Big-Fiction-wise:
I wrote this poem “Taylor Swift the Eras Tour,” and somehow writing, sending it to Dan for feedback (as everyone should do with their poems), and submitting it for publication to Sixth Finch was about as difficult, psychologically, emotionally, and in terms of time-management, as writing my dissertation. It is the first poem I’ve published in four years, which gives me a feeling I’m familiar with—I’ve had this feeling two times before, once when I realized it had been four years since my ex-boyfriend and I broke up, and once when I realized my only goal ever in my life had been to publish a book and I was 36 and still hadn’t published a book.
It’s not a feeling of where did the time go, not at all. It is a feeling of knowing exactly what all the minutes from then til now consisted of, and the feeling that there is no way I could have done them differently. It’s like walking around a track while a track team is practicing. I couldn’t have gotten some other boyfriend. I couldn’t have won a poetry prize from a fancy press before I was 30. I wouldn’t have done those things, because then I wouldn’t have been me. I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant and had Bea and just kept writing and publishing poems and books. So congratulations to the track team, but I don’t like running.
Next item:
This is the epigraph page of Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It, a deep and beautiful novel I would love even if my name weren’t in it. It takes place at the kind of college most people go to, the kind I went to for my MFA and Ph.D. and also taught at. The students in this book major in things most people major in, like hospitality management, exercise science, food science, apparel merchandising and product development. I have encountered these majors endlessly in real life and never in a work of fiction, because fiction is written by professors of English and creative writing who like to set their books in worlds where those other majors don’t exist. I’ve never read a book like Come and Get It; it is a folklore narrative about shopping. “It was common knowledge that when purchasing a duvet cover, you should get a full, not a twin.” This book has a profound understanding of the subtlest shades of meaning between the choice to wear “a cotton headband, the kind that comes from Walgreens in sets of three,” versus the choice to wear “one layer of brown mascara”; the choices that make people who they are. Kiley’s treatment of her subject is not only folkloric; it’s spiritual, too. These characters’ consumptions have infected their souls. And to read this book is be confronted with how infected your soul is, too.
The kids at school were writing papers about The Talented Mr. Ripley. When they came in to talk to me about the papers, we kept having these conversations where I was like, “Wait, so from your quotation it seems like he’s in love with Dickey. Is he?” Kid, wide-eyed: “Oooooh yeah.” I was like, I have to read this. I’m now on the third Ripley book, Ripley’s Game, and it’s getting kind of tedious but I have to find out what happens. The second one, Ripley Underground, is my favorite so far; it’s about an art scam. These are European-style road trip novels, though Ripley takes planes and trains, too. It’s like Lolita: crime and road-tripping, and that combo is hard to beat.
A WOMAN
Lucy Biederman, a woman, was a Chicago girl, a child of two Jews. She didn’t let any of that stop her. No, she was on her way. She would write her newsletter, come hell or high water. She had brown hair.
This is how I’d be introduced if I were in Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, by Dan Sinykin. I don’t need to summarize this book to you because, in the style of contemporary trade nonfiction, the subtitle conveniently does that already. The book is published by Columbia University Press, which, in the made-up publishing world of Big Fiction, does not exist. Hilary Plum points this out in her excellent essay about Big Fiction in the LA Review of Books. She enumerates in the clearest of language several important critiques of the book.
For example, Sinykin’s central argument is that as publishing houses became, or became part of, giant multinational profit-driven entities in the ’70s and ’80s, American fiction reflected that change in various ways. But in the service of making this argument, Sinykin “describes writers as making much more strategic, even cynical, choices in their writing, specifically in relation to the publishing industry, than ever seems convincing to me,” Hilary writes. And she points out that the book introduces the idea of writing as a collaborative project, so “by his own argument, that’s not what he means to say writers are doing: this was meant to be an account of a “superorganism,” not of individual writers and their individual choices reflecting the superorganism that is Big Five Publishing.
This book is important, no question. I will draw on it in the Joyce Carol Oates article I’ve been working on for half a decade, as well as any other articles I write about contemporary authors. I’m glad he wrote it. And I wouldn’t say these things I’m about to say about it if it weren’t so well-reviewed. But the excellent reviews it received are, I think, a function of the book’s muddy intended audience, which Sinykin talks about in a short interview at the Millions:
Big Fiction is published at Columbia University Press, but from the early stages, my editor, Phil Leventhal, and I talked about wanting to try to make it a trade crossover. Which is a tricky, perilous task. But bringing in … personal anecdotes was one technique we used to try to signal that this book could invite people in who were not academics.
He is inviting what John Guillory calls “lay readers” into the world of deep literary criticism. To do this, he writes in a prose style that, as Hilary puts it, is “trapped in the stylings of mainstream character-driven fiction.”
Here, let’s meet some people:
“Edgar was extremely thirsty. His appendix had burst. He was eight years old.” (He’s E.L. Doctorow)
“[Judith] Krantz was fifty when she published her first novel, Scruples, in 1978. She was raised on the Upper West Side, the daughter of upwardly mobile Jews. Her father ran an advertising agency that took up ‘half a floor at 30 Rockefeller Plaza’: her mother was a prominent lawyer.”
“Sessalee was a southern woman. She grew up in Baton Rouge. As a college student, she worked at B. Dalton, eventually becoming store manager. From there, she took a job as an assistant bookbuyer for an up-and-coming Texas superstore chain called Bookstop. It was the mid-1980s. Bookstop’s founder was clever.”
“He looked out from his warm eyes set beneath his pronounced male pattern baldness. He wore a salt-and-pepper chinstrap beard. It was Thursday, March 8, 1990.” (E.L. Doctorow again)
(Compare that with what Kiley does in Come and Get It: “Tyler was the type of person Agatha could picture holding her phone for the entire duration of a painfully slow, high-resistance elliptical ride.” Or, “Ryan had blue eyes and fluffy hair and he looked like a Ryan.” I read these sentences, then I look out at the world and I recognize what I read in the world, but I see in a slightly new way because of what I read. Mwah!)
Sinykin introduces all his characters with clipped, proper-noun- and cliche-stuffed, mixed-metaphor-laden sentences. These sentences sometimes seem out of order, un-idiomatic, or weirdly lacking transitions (“It was the mid-1980s. Bookstop’s founder was clever.”) This is confusing, because the book also races through American literature calling books middlebrow and earnest. When you think middlebrow, “Think of John Irving, Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, and Barbara Kingsolver,” Sinykin says. But all of these writers’ characters exhibit flashes of reality, verisimilitude, depth, human consciousness, that is utterly absent from the “cast of characters” Sinykin builds in Big Fiction, his “farm kid from rural Maryland who wanted the whole country to read Faulker—at least his smuttier books,” his “Jewish girl from Long Island who invented the author tour—or so she said.” And earnestness: “The new historical fiction”— Sinykin’s examples include Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Doctorow’s Loon Lake, Ironweed by William Kennedy, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, and Beloved, by Toni Morrison—“was not ironic. It was earnest.” This derisive, or at the very least glib, way of talking about contemporary American literature flatters both Sinykin and his reader, because a book that calls other books middlebrow and earnest couldn’t possibly be middlebrow and earnest itself. That book must be high-brow, ironic, knowing, in a way those other books aren’t.
And when Sinykin talks about women, he always takes care to remind us that they’re WOMEN. There are endless subheads breaking up the text, another way to appeal to the lay reader. Sometimes they’re cleverish like BEING AND TIME WARNER and STEEL FACTORY (about Danielle Steel), and sometimes it’ll just be like, BERTELSMANN. My least favorite subheads in the whole book are probably THE WOMEN and CONGLOMERATE WOMEN. His argumentation relating to women is like those subheads, poking his reader: look, women. For example, in a chapter subtitled “How Women Resisted Sexism and Reinvented the Novel,” Sinykin argues,
The demands of verisimilitude limited the plots available to women. There are no women on the Pequod. The demands of the male-dominuated publishing industry imposed further constraints in terms of genre and the sexism you faced if defying conventions.
The sympathy with women that Sinykin affects as he shifts to the “you” pronoun is not convincing because of the two sentences that precede that shift. There were no women on the Pequod, but the Pequod is a pretend ship. Maybe there are, present tense, women on it now. I consider this an unsettled question; it remains open to me as a writer—and reader, for that matter—in much the same way Huck Finn remained open to Percival Everett and David Copperfield remained open to Barbara Kingsolver. I think Melville is great enough that if he put a woman on the Pequod, we would have believed it. I hope for the sake of American literature that the fact that nineteenth-century whaling ships were all-male endeavors wouldn’t stop any writer from imagining one that is not all male. It certainly wouldn’t stop me! Concerns about “verisimilitude” have not stopped Sinykin from using flat, flattening, dehumanizing language to describe real people.
His flat writing is indicative of the flatness of Sinykin’s central argument. He’s introducing a grand narrative that the economics of contemporary American literary publishing dictates what is written. But that a big fiction. It relies on a world in which small presses and university presses “barely exist” (as Hilary puts it). In his chapter about Norton, an independent, employee-owned publishing house in the age of conglomerates, Sinykin lists some of the writers Norton has published: Ana Castillo, Leon Forrest, Walter Mosley, Chuck Palahniuk, Ishmael Reed. He presents this “counterfactual”:
if Polly Norton hadn’t given the company to its employees in 1945, then, decades later, these writers might never have made it, suggesting what exceeds conglomerate taste, what was nearly lost when the practices of the conglomerate era locked into place, and what works of fiction might have come into the world but didn’t because they exceeded Norton’s vision, too.
What does it mean—and mean to a writer like Ishmael Reed—to “make it”? If “it” is writing, I know they would have made it anyway, because Castillo and Reed publish most of their writing with small presses, not Norton. Leon Forrest’s Divine Days was just republished by a little tiny non-corporate “conglomerate” of the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore (where I bought Big Fiction, as it happens) and Northwestern University Press. Norton isn’t a last stand for writers. Most of the books published every year “exceed Norton’s vision.” There are other ways to “come into the world.”
“Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white,” Sinykin writes. But Sinykin is able to bear it; if he weren’t, he would have written a different book. That kind of overwriting sets Sinykin up for failure in his discussion of Toni Morrison, who really did find the world of commercial book publishing unbearably white, so much so that she quit her position as an editor at Random House, after trying for more than a decade to change it (as Sinykin shows). With Beloved in 1987, Morrison, Sinykin argues, “made good” on a trail blazed by Stephen King and Anne Rice, who “retooled gothic fiction and spurred a craze for horror in the late 1970s and 1980s.” In so doing, Morrison “was thus at the forefront of an increasingly favored tactic—conscious or not—of literary writers earnestly adopting genre techniques.” I’m not a big respect fan, but I do feel that Beloved is a monument worthy of respect, and Sinykin’s language here feels too dismissive: why say “conscious or not,” with the implication that Morrison, who was also a groundbreaking literary theorist, might not have known what she was doing with Beloved? And here again is that word “earnestly.” I think we can agree that this is not a positive word with which to describe contemporary writing. I know I’d only use it to dis someone’s writing, and I certainly wouldn’t want my own writing to be called earnest! It carries the same implication as “conscious or not,” that the writing has slipped beyond the writer’s command. He thinks that of Beloved?
To make this argument, Sinykin again argues from a world that isn’t real. He flattens the world to make his argument make sense:
Conglomerate megaauthors King and Rice wrote gothic fictions → Literary conglomerate author Morrison wrote a fancy gothic fiction
But where is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, in this equation? It also has “a ghost, a haunted house, terrifying violence, and trauma,” the characteristics of Morrison’s gothic, per Sinykin, and it came out in ’82, right on the heels of the King and Rice gothic blockbusters of the ’70s. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Or what about Linden Hills (1985), by Morrison’s possible secret nemesis Gloria Naylor? Another book from ’85, Conjuring, edited by Hortense Spillers and Marjorie Pryse, is a collection of essays about black women writers tracing what Spillers calls the “jagged career” of black women’s writing, “a matrix of literary discontinuities that partially articulate various periods of consciousness in the history of African-American people.” The story Conjuring tells about black women’s writing troubles the neat chronologies and genealogies that can be so seductive for literary critics to build. Spillers writes about “the palpable and continuing urgency of black women writing themselves into history.” I appreciate that Sinykin is theorizing from a different place than Spillers: he’s not building a genealogy of black women’s writing, he’s contributing to recent scholarship about the relationship between publishing and literature. But his arguments would feel more convincing if they left room for other ways of reading—discontinuities, urgencies, communities, and consciousnesses that he doesn’t mention. If he did, would his totalizing argument fall apart?
The book ends with a “Glossary of Publishing Figures.” Here are some entries:
BALLANTINE, IAN. Mass market legend. Columbia University. First U.S. publisher of Penguin, 1939-1945. Left Penguin to become first head of Bantam, 1945-52. Left Bantam to found Ballantine. Published Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and J.R.R. Tolkien for the U.S. mass market. Acquired, edited, and published Carlos Castaneda and Tim Robbins.
DOCTOROW, E.L. Kenyon College, 1952. Studied under John Crowe Ransom. Studied toward a masters in English drama at Columbia University, 1952-53. Drafted into U.S. Army. Editor at New American Library, 1959-64; Dial, 1964-69. Author of several novels.
KLOPPER, DONALD. Enrolled at Williams and Columbia University, never graduated. “Unquestionably patrician”—Robert Gottlieb. Cofounder of Random House with Bennet Cerf. Convinced Philip Roth to come to Random House over lunch at Doney’s in Rome in 1960. Roth stayed until 1972.
SPIEGEL, CINDY. University of Pennsylvania, BA in English; University of California at Berkeley, MA in comparative literature, 1989. Worked at Random House and Ticknor & Fields before joining Riverhead in 1994. Appointed co-editoriali director with Julie Grau in 1998, copublisher in 2003. Poached to establish a new division at Doubleday Broadway, part of Random House, in 2005. Spiegel & Graw shut down in 2019 and reopened as an independent in 2021.
Let’s check on Toni Morrison:
TONI MORRISON. Editor at Random House, 1967-83. Also an author.
I’ve been working on this for days on end and I have to wrap it up. I’m going to close by saying I’m extremely worried Dan Sinykin is going to see this. He talks in interviews about how online he is; he even talks about Twitter in the acknowledgments in Big Fiction. But just as I’m not his audience, he’s not mine.
You are.
Sincerely,
Lucy
What a tour de force. You are a true scholar!
You do walk fast though