“dehumanizing effect on our culture”

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 works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by 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 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."

…

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/opinion/literature-books-novelists.html?smid=threads-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

NPR fic pics

After long days focused on the facts, our newsroom reads a lot of fiction at home. We asked our NPR colleagues what they've enjoyed reading so far this year, and these are the titles they shared…

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5356144/fiction-books-summer-2025?utm_source=threads.net&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

Some of us are still here, though we may be culturally irrelevant. So much the worse for the culture.

Men are leaving fiction reading behind. Some people want to change that.

...One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone's time, not just men's. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

"Our competition isn't other publishers," said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. "It's social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people's time, attention and financial resources."

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

"It's a problem if anyone isn't taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium," he said. "It's hurtful not to be well-rounded."
...
nyt

The Overstory

Richard Powers' powerful ode to the natural world was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. Discover our Monthly Spotlight for May.

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/monthly-spotlight-the-overstory-by-richard-powers

31 Novels Coming This Summer

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/books/review/new-fiction-books-summer-2025.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Music embodied

"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

Richard Powers, at his best, on the power of music: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/15/richard-powers-music/

“An Outlook Recognizably Ours”

What is the first truly "contemporary" American novel, the book that regardless of its age still feels decidedly current in its tone and sensibilities? A swarm of candidates comes to mind (many of them in the LOA series): the psychologically dense, morally ambivalent fiction of Kate Chopin; the urbane and ironic surrealism of Jane Bowles; Ann Petry's prescient dissections of race in America. But one of the strongest claims comes from Walker Percy, the Louisiana-born doctor-turned-author whose 1961 masterpiece, The Moviegoer, was published sixty-four years ago this May.

Paul Elie, who edited the LOA edition of Percy'sThe Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961–1971, writes in a 2019 New Yorker article:

With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life,The Moviegoer is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.

Immersing readers in the mind and muddle of Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who spends his days cavorting with secretaries and taking refuge in the cinema, The Moviegoer is barely a novel in the traditional sense. Loose, discursive, psychological without being psychoanalytical, Percy's prose is pitch-perfect, conjuring a voice you can't get out of your head.

Consider a few of Binx's more memorable observations, as astute and relatable today as they may have seemed taboo and troublingly frank in the early '60s:

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

Catching the leading wave of a loneliness epidemic washing over the country, Percy's narrator treats alienation and malaise as a doctor might search for telling symptoms in an ailing body:

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

Despite its title, The Moviegoer is less about watching movies than the ways in which movies and movie logic have come to feel, in an atomized age, more real than life itself (Binx himself refers to the process of "certification," where the appearance of a place or person in a film confers specificity upon it, a sense of actually existing in the world).

Emerging from a less media-saturated era than our own IP-soaked present, Percy's novel deftly captures the feeling of being adrift in a sea of images, dreams, and abstractions—our own and others'—in which profound musings about the nature of life and faith stand on equal footing with the mundane and workaday. The effect, strangely enough, is liberating: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself," reports Binx. "One is free."