Where the Crawdads Sing and the Bestseller List

Not long ago I returned to the depressing activity of perusing recent bestseller lists. I say depressing because of how consistently they confirm every one of my worst suspicions about the state of American publishing--most obviously that an industry which, behind its wearisomely upbeat PR, is in terminal decline in an age in which long-form reading is dying out, and ever more reliant on trafficking in the long superannuated Big Names of the last century, ever more closed to new talent and new ideas, ever more repetitive in its content, ever more blatant in a crassness that has never been better than unbearable, ever more sanctimonious in regard to those outside it and critical of it.

This has certainly seemed to me the case with thrillers after my attempt at a systematic examination of that important corner of publishing, where one finds nothing but the big names and themes of the '90s (legal thrillers by Grisham, forensic thrillers by Cornwell, Patterson's stuff, remained dominant, further down the list "new" Clancy and "new" Cussler novels continue to appear, etc.). And so does it go wherever else I look, with this even proving the case with apparently "new" names offering what may be sui generis work.

Like Delia Owens, whose Where the Crawdads Sing was a bestseller for three years--still on the list as Reese Witherspoon (whose book club, which apparently rivals Oprah's now, did much to promote Owens) produced the film.

Contrary to what some may have thought Owens was not some "first-time" writer catapulted to fame and fortune by her fiction, but, in what is the pattern less touted by the sleazebags of the "You Too Can Become an Author!" industry and the rags-to-riches story-flogging mainstream media but always far more common, an already famous person cashing in on their position with fiction. Already an internationally bestselling author in the 1980s with Cry of the Kalahari, she even enjoyed considerable non-authorial celebrity--as a result of her husband being suspected of murder in Zambia.

Such people can reasonably hope to get a novel into print via trad-publishing with all its resources--not least the ability to command the applause of les claqueurs and make the other "ugly" preparations required for success in the "theater of literature." And when what they offer is, in spite of its superficially non-genre appearance, a murder mystery which in its identity politics and "ecological" sensibility and, above all, its misanthropic outlook, is in line with the zeitgeist as felt by those postmoderns who lead the book-buying audience these days, they can hope not just for success, but grand success--in this case, one of the highest selling books of all time.

By contrast, others can't hope to get their books even looked at--especially if they offer a different point of view from that prevailing among the middle-aged, middlebrows of Park Avenue and the coastal elite to which it never lets us forget it belongs.