Can a Writer Survive Without Being a Star?
Literary Culture, Consensus Culture, and the Politics of Fame
Downtown is filled with the sound / of the full and the part time losers. —Ida, 1996
In the mid-2000s two young sociologists, Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts, invited 12,000 young Internet users to do an experiment that would let them study how new music becomes popular online. They created a closed, invitation-only social media site—like an ersatz MySpace—where users could listen to and download previously unknown pop songs. One group of users was shown a randomized list of available songs, with no other information; the other was shown how popular each song was among other members of the group. In order to test the effect of perceived popularity, Salganik and Watts played with the rankings in the second group, at times “inverting” them so the least popular songs appeared to be the most popular.
The results? As they reported in a 2008 paper, “Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market,” the perception of popularity—even a totally false perception—mattered more than any other factor in the initial success of a song. Over time, however, in their experimental world in which only 48 songs were made available for download, the results were different: the songs that genuinely seemed to appeal to the most listeners recovered some of their success in the end, even if they lost out at first. The most chilling result was this: the more users were exposed to rankings of popularity, the less music they downloaded overall. Self-fulfilling prophecies, it seemed, many the users less curious, less inclined to listen to music that hadn’t been pre-endorsed by someone else.
In short, Salganik and Watts put it this way: “Any individual band could expect to benefit by artificially inflating their perceived popularity, regardless of their true appeal or the strategies of the other bands; thus all bands have a rational incentive to manipulate information. When too many bands employ this strategy, however, the correlation between apparent popularity and appeal is lowered, leading to the unintended consequence of the market as a whole contracting, thereby causing all bands to suffer collectively.”
A few months ago I met a young writer at a party—a recent graduate of a prestigious MFA program who published his first novel this spring with a popular and well-respected literary imprint of a major house. Let’s call him David. David’s book release had been less than thrilling: it had landed on some “most anticipated” lists but hadn’t received many reviews, especially not that one crucial one in the New York Times Book Review. David told me he felt absolutely crushed and devastated, and I told him I couldn’t sympathize more—the very same thing happened with my first book, The Train to Lo Wu, in 2005. But the worst part, he said, was that a close friend and classmate of his had become a literary superstar: her first novel had received incredible fanfare and been chosen for a nationwide TV book club. “I was in the room when she got the call,” David said. “Listen, you have to understand, in my program, if you get a $250,000 book deal, it’s nothing. It’s a disappointment.”
I didn’t know what to say: or, rather, I wasn’t sure what to say first. I wanted to know if that’s the message this young writer was getting from the MFA faculty: why weren’t they being good mentors, why weren’t they offering better advice? I wanted to talk about money: how the amount of an advance isn’t as meaningful as most people think, how few books ever earn out, how little control writers have over how much their publisher invests in them.
At the same I knew none of that was what David really needed to hear. Somehow he had absorbed the message that in order to feel successful as a literary novelist, he had to be famous—like Oprah’s Book Club-level famous—which is like telling a cardiac surgeon she’ll only succeed dressed up as a clown. But as we’ve all learned by observing American political life over the last decade, outrageous lies are the hardest to disprove, especially if they’re shared by others: they harden into an ideology, a kind of collective promise. In this case, among writers, it’s a promise to make ourselves deeply, collectively miserable.
Between March and May 2023, leading up to the series finale over Memorial Day weekend, the New York Times published 54 articles about Succession. It profiled all the show’s leading actors, some of its peripheral ones, even the family members of some of the peripheral ones. They wrote about Succession’s portrayal of family, political power, food, fashion, yachts, Barbados, private jets, Scotland, the media, and the Battery Park waterfront. If you read the Times daily it was hard to find a day without Succession. They covered it not only as if it was the only show on TV, but the only cultural event of any kind happening that spring. (The Emmy nominations this year have followed the same practice: in some categories only two shows are nominated, Succession and The White Lotus.)
On the simplest level, consensus culture is something we’ve all witnessed a thousand times: the moment when a certain cultural object—an author, a book, a film, a concept, a phrase—becomes the thing to talk about, the headline, the marquee, the rage, to the point of being beyond critique. It’s not just fame, it’s—to steal a phrase from Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty—a kind of cultural coercion. In White Flights I wrote about one encounter I had with the literary variety of consensus culture when I was in graduate school in the year 2000: Dave Eggers gave a standing-room-only reading, where he asked people from the audience to sing eighties hits (think “Don’t Stop Believing”) while he read from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I left after about twenty minutes.
Consensus fame—like all varieties of fame—doesn’t last; sometimes it inspires a backlash or a milkshake duck response; but even when it fades, the object in question retains a certain glow, a kind of legacy elite status, or what Harold Bloom, that loathsome would-be seducer, called “the aura of election.” In the literary world, not quite as fickle as other cultural realms, writers who have experienced a meteoric rise often stay up there in the firmament, thanks to a major award, a tenured position, a huge boost in cultural capital or sometimes actual capital. Sometimes that’s the good news. Dave Eggers, an organizational genius, leveraged his moment of fame to create three major literary institutions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, McSweeney’s Books, and The Believer, and a literacy nonprofit, 826—and, to his everlasting credit, handed over control of them early on, so they wouldn’t be permanently attached to his persona and literary career. No matter how you feel about his writing, you have to admire the good he’s done for many other writers, and the US literary scene writ large.
But usually consensus culture does only one thing: it casts a blinding light. Like cocaine, it sears new neural pathways into the brain; it creates a hunger for more of the same. And this is where it binds perfectly to the Internet, the world’s perfect fame-making machine. It’s no longer unusual or special to encounter a writer who is supposed to be the Next Big Thing, or a book that is supposed to a heartbreaking work of staggering genius: if you’re on social media, you see those words every day. Writers, editors and publicists are all aware that there’s an arm’s race of blurbs and superlatives happening all around us. And true to Salganik and Watts’s prediction, every time a new debut appears, piled up with all the right blurbs, with distinctions and awards, with hype and publicity from every corner, it produces a dilution effect. Even the books with the best odds of success have a harder and harder time “breaking through”—that is, approaching the level of consensus fame, even briefly.
Call this a reflection of (to steal a term from Anand Giridharadas) winner-take-all culture, or superstar culture, or influencer culture, or what have you: it’s a reflection of the extreme inequalities pervading all aspects of the contemporary world, a need to divide things into categories of total success (for a few) and abject failure (for everyone else). There’s a paradoxical quality at work here, where material cultural production (books, movies, music) is concerned: it’s now possible to a consumer with a small disposable income and an Internet connection to read, watch, or listen to almost anything ever created, but as Salganik and Watts found 15 years ago (and Renata Salecl demonstrated before that in The Paradox of Choice), an increased variety and availability of cultural goods doesn’t necessarily guarantee a richer, more varied cultural life.
It also doesn’t guarantee that there will be any kind of equitable distribution of attention, awards, publicity, and money. In fact, precisely the opposite. Consensus culture, by definition, creates a broader version of what Viet Thanh Nguyen, referring to Asian American literature, calls “narrative scarcity”: the idea that there is only one story, one novel, one film, everyone should pay attention to. Scarcity, of course, is a basic dynamic of how capitalism works: scarce resources are the most expensive and desirable. But cultural scarcity, as Nguyen forcefully and rightly insists, is always invented scarcity. It brings out all the worst impulses in a culture already inclined to shuttle things into categories and subfields. It’s highly gendered and highly racialized. It hides the obvious truth, which all artists know about their own fields: there is much more great stuff out there than any reader, listener, or viewer can possibly absorb. We live in a time of fantastic cultural plenitude, but also a kind of affective poverty, weighed down by the need to only consume what everyone else seems to be consuming.
There’s a generational or historical shift at play here, one I don’t think receives enough attention. In Dave Eggers’s era, when Gen X writers briefly dominated US literary culture, being rich and famous was lame—or, rather, to admit that you wanted to be rich and famous was lame. The great Gen X cultural figures were self-effacing and self-satirizing, often riddled with guilt and prone to destructive behavior. The last twenty years, on the other hand—going back at least to Kelefa Sanneh’s epochal New York Times piece “The Rap Against Rockism” in 2004—have been the heyday of poptimism, which in literary culture has meant the embrace of everything pop culture has to offer, from superheroes to comic books to hip hop to Cocoa Puffs to a way more unembarrassed attitude about fame, money, and success. Poptimism, which in the beginning positioned itself as a critique of the white male obsession with rock’s gritty authenticity, has a liberatory feel, but as many critics have pointed out (perhaps most famously bell hooks in her scathing critique of Beyoncé) it essentially amounts to an agreement with capitalism. Mark Fisher described it as capitalist realism: only what is successful is meaningful. Not long ago, a well known (but not what I’d call famous) literary novelist told an interviewer that their favorite place to curl up and read a good book was on a first-class trip to Dubai. This line stuck in my mind not just for its specificity (why Dubai?) but for its unapologetic decadence, its in-your-face assertion: this is what a successful writer deserves.
Let me make this clear: the problem isn’t simply that publishers spend disproportionate amounts of money and energy picking winners and losers by promoting a small number of books (although, yes, that is a problem); or that awards and other honors sometimes go to writers who seem inordinately popular for no good reason (this has been this case since the beginning of literary time); or that some literary writers are unapologetically wealthy and into fancy stuff (ditto). The problem is our supercharged perceptions of fame (and validations of fame, and worship of a tiny class of literary celebrities) have pushed the bar for what counts as “success” has risen impossibly out of reach, especially for emerging writers with no track record. At the same time, the self-reinforcing language of fame in the literary world has become so overused and diluted that everyone has it and no one wants it—or rather, everyone wants to keep using it, but it doesn’t seem to work. Everyone is thrilled to announce their latest success. A blanket congratulations to us all. As Jennifer Senior described parenting some years ago, it’s all joy and no fun.
Literary writing, in the US as in most of the world, is a subculture, a niche culture. Like all subcultures it has insiders and outsiders; it has power players and dominant institutions; it has its own jargon, its own referential field. What it does not have is a huge audience. A major literary writer, like, say, Don DeLillo, is hardly known among the general public. Like opera or dance, literary writing (or “the literary arts”) is regarded as a high art in American culture, meaning it receives funding and support from national, state, and local governments, nonprofits, arts councils, endowments, and so on. (Not nearly enough, but that’s another story.) Commercial publishers are also a major player in the literary world, but as anyone involved in publishing knows, most literary titles don’t sell more than a few thousand copies and are published at a loss, the same way that for decades major record companies sold classical recordings as a marker of their prestige and importance. (They still do, but to a much smaller degree—to the point where major orchestras now release their own recordings digitally, like indie bands on Bandcamp.) In other words: literature is a high-prestige niche that comes with a great deal of cultural capital attached, but it’s still a niche, and a pretty small one.
Correspondingly, about 99% of the time, actual literary success means something like this: a string of books published to good reviews, a full-time teaching job, or some other means of making a decent income; a sprinkling of awards, fellowships, grants, and other recognitions over the course of decades. If you’re lucky, you might get an infusion of cash from an advance or award every so often. For the vast majority of writers that’s the best case scenario, and that involves never (or almost never) supporting yourself entirely from your own writing. As the beloved jazz guitarist John Abercrombie was fond of saying, “The best way to make a million dollars playing jazz is to start out with two million dollars.”
If I wanted to be brutally honest with David (more honest than one usually is with a person one has just met) I would say: welcome to the best case scenario. That’s been my life, and probably, to some degree (hopefully!) it’ll be yours. Or I could have put it this way:
In the winter of 1995, alone in the cold basement of the Bryn Mawr Alumni Used Bookstore in New Haven, I came across a battered, but very striking, paperback from 1969: Going Places, short stories by Leonard Michaels. It was, the title said, the hottest literary debut of the year. It was nominated for the National Book Award. It was compared, inevitably, to Goodbye, Columbus. I had never heard of Leonard Michaels. I had no idea that he had been a professor at Berkeley for many years; that he had published a controversial novel called The Men’s Club in the 1980s, closely based on the lives of his friends, and been sued for libel (the details are hard to locate online, and I’d like to know more, if anyone can fill me in), that he’d been published by a small press called Mercury House in San Francisco for many years. I of course had no way of knowing that after his death in 2003 FSG would publish his collected stories (2007) and collected essays, (2009), bringing Going Places back into print after some 30 years. All I knew is I was captivated by the first paragraph, the first sentence: “At the university she met a Turk who studied physics and spoke foreigner’s English which in every turn expressed the unnatural desire to seize idiom and make it speak just for himself.”
I experienced what I can only describe as a moment of profound communion with this lost writer. I told myself, I’m the only person in the world right now holding this book. But that was just my melodramatic undergraduate self speaking. Michaels wasn’t forgotten or lost; he never went anywhere; he just never became famous. He became part of the ocean of cultural plenitude, remembered and loved mostly by anonymous readers and a lot of writers of his own time. What I should have said to David is that any writer would be lucky to be Leonard Michaels. Those are the odds. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.
Special thanks to Adaner Usmani for pointing me to Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts’s study.