The Constancy of the Thriller Market as the World Changes

As I have acknowledged many a time bestseller lists have real limitations as an image of the market--merely telling us which ten or fifteen or thirty books in some category happened to be selling fastest at the moment the list was made, while the listmakers' unavoidable arbitrariness in bounding their categories and roundabout and incomplete manner of collecting the data, and the susceptibility of the process to manipulation (there are now companies you can pay to get your book on the list!), leave the lists far from ideal even according to that standard.

Nonetheless, in the absence of better those of us who for whatever reason find ourselves caring about what fiction people are actually buying find ourselves relying on them rather heavily. Certainly such lists have seemed to me of some usefulness in tracking certain developments, like the way that thriller fiction changed profoundly in the 1990s, with the sales of political-international-type thrillers--the spy novels, the techno-thrillers and the rest--declining, audiences instead seeming to prefer more crime-themed, domestically situated thrillers. This seems to me to have had many factors--among them the shift of action-adventure away from print toward other media--but it also seems that the politics of the 1990s, and particularly the end-of-history mood after the Cold War, had something to do with it.

Of course that mood has changed profoundly this century, with old-fashioned great power conflict intensifying greatly--and turning very violent in places like Ukraine and Syria. No longer can one say that great power conflict is not on the public's radar. But is it affecting the public's interests as readers? The question sent me back to the bestseller lists, wondering if there has been a renewal of the presence of thrillers of the sort that deal in such subject matter--but so far I see little evidence of that.

Consider, for example, Admiral James Stavridis' novel 2034 about a Sino-American conflict. It hit the market in a blaze of publicity but I tried and failed to spot it on the Times' hardcover list (the book apparently not making any of the fifteen upper rungs for a single week).

Meanwhile a year after its debut it has a mere 8,000 ratings on Goodreads. Of course, the meaning of those numbers is far from self-evident, and it is not easy to find really appropriate thriller comparisons, because for a long time the market has had so few bestselling thrillers by new authors. It has been just Grisham and Patterson and Baldacci and the rest over and over again, often in the same franchises, with #20 in some series probably unlikely to get a disproportionately low number of ratings to its sales because it is, after all, #20, leaving readers with that much less to say about it. But for all that it is not a particularly impressive number by comparison with their work. John Grisham's Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, out at about the same time, scored over 70,000 ratings. Stavridis' ratings also compare poorly in this respect with the 24,000 Amanda Gorman's poem (a poem in an age in which "no one" reads poetry!) The Hill We Climb got--and, just so you can compare it with books that really got people talking, the over 300,000 ratings Julia Quinn's The Duke and I got (the first of the novels on which the hit Netflix show Bridgerton is based), the 391,000 for Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, and the numbers for those continuing strong sellers of prior years, the more than 1 million ratings for Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and the 1.7 million for Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing. The result is that one may fairly consider the Stavridis book to have found a readership, but it is absolutely no event comparable to that comeback book for the genre, John Hackett's The Third World War, or the pop cultural splash made by the successes of Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and others in the mid-1980s.

It may yet be that the Cold War's end, and other related factors, deprived stories of international conflict of much of their interest for the public--but the revival of those conflicts has not brought that public back as yet in any major way, and likely will not. At this point in time it seems to me that, in contrast with those years when Tom Clancy, Top Gun and Rambo became such a formidable pop cultural presence the thought of war leaves many who had previously gobbled that sort of stuff up weary, repulsed, frightened, and at the least put off by the way techno-thrillers and the like handled such material. Indeed, even Scott Mendleson at Forbes--no leftie publication, that--wrote that for Top Gun 2 to have "no more nuance or commentary on the current military-industrial complex than its predecessor" would be "almost morally irresponsible considering the times we live in" (emphasis added). Meanwhile, those who are receptive to unashamedly '80s-style content appear content to get it from their video games and TV series' and the rest, save for the few (I suspect, old loyalists) who still read Jack Ryan continuation novels.

The Decline of "Lifestyle?"

About a decade ago I remarked the extreme stupidity of that word "lifestyle" on this blog--remarking in particular its use's tendency to reflect a combination of extreme privilege and extreme obtuseness, and in particular a notion that an upper-middle-class-to-rich existence with all its options is somehow the norm for how everyone lives that one can call the prevailing version of "Let them eat cake."

It seems that at the time the word "lifestyle" was still getting more popular, certainly to go by Google's handy Ngram function. The word's use was relatively uncommon for most of the period covered, but its popularity certainly seems to have grown since mid-century, and risen pretty steadily from the 1960s on. Still accounting for only 0.0000027% of the words in the Ngram function registered in 1961, it had exploded to 0.0013% of those words in 2011--usage rising 13 percent a year, year on year, for fifty years, to produce a mind-boggling five hundred-fold increase over half a century, people literally using the word five hundred times as much as they had a half century earlier. And by 2016 it was more popular still (with a 0.0014% score).

Since then there has been a decline in usage, to about 0.0011% in 2017-2019--falling almost as quickly as it surged during that period. Given how long that usage has been building up this does not change the picture much, but it can seem a reversal nonetheless.

Might this drop be meaningful? I can't help but notice that it came in the wake of the Great Recession--as the long-declining prospects of America's "middle class" seemed to collapse. It comes, too, in the wake of changes in political rhetoric that cannot but seem associated. Neoliberalism remains the touchstone for society's elite in economic and social matters--but even so 2016 saw a Republican running on a nationalist-producerist economic platform land his party's nomination and enter the White House and roil world trade with his subsequent moves, all as at the other end of the political spectrum the long-anathematized word "socialism" has become speakable in American life as something other than a hyperbolic epithet. To do so still scandalizes not only the right but the center, even when one is not entirely sure what the speaker actually meant by it, but all the same, things are different here from what they were a decade ago.

Amid all that it would be all too predictable for that unbelievably inane word to finally begin losing favor.

Self-Published Book-Bashing and the Professional Outlook

In writing The Secret History of Science Fiction I had occasion again to consider the opprobrium to which self-publishing is subject--not least, from professional authors. Those familiar with the subject here have heard the laundry list of standard complaints innumerable times--the poor quality of the writing, editing and copyediting of much self-published work, for example (a charge often exaggerated and sanctimonious, given the actual quality of traditionally published work, but not wholly baseless). Still, it does seem to me that there is an element here insufficiently appreciated, precisely because that bit of sociology is rarely raised in the mainstream save by an occasional Thomas Frank (who would seem to have worn out his welcome in the mainstream in the process), namely the fact that writing has become a profession in the strict sense of the term, and that professionals tend to approach the world in certain ways.

As Frank argued from an in-depth knowledge of the relevant subject matter people hear the word "professional," and, I suppose, tend to make positive associations. They think of someone who is supposed to know what they are doing, because of what they are supposed to have been subject to before entering their profession. They are supposed have been trained, lengthily; tested, arduously; certified, impeccably; and now as professionals are part of a community of professionals upholding high standards in the public interest, not least by making sure that their members adhere to those standards--and in the event of a breach, may withdraw the professional standing they have been accorded.

However, even without getting into the question of the extent to which professionals and their organizations really live up to this lofty expectation, there is the rest of the package. As sociologists of the professions have observed, professions entail some group claiming a monopoly over some aspect of life, and saying "No one else is allowed to do this. Anyone else doing this is illegitimate, because this is our turf." Where that turf is concerned they stand in relation to society as an Authority, holding that "Where this matter is concerned, you simply have to accept our say-so, because we know everything and everyone else knows nothing--AND THIS MEANS YOU!" Where the profession's say-so is concerned an internal hierarchy holds sway, with the senior and more powerful setting the party line--and even insiders who question that line suffering the consequences. One can make the case for all of this being used to protect the public--for example, by insuring that practicing doctors are properly trained, keeping frauds and quacks marginalized, making sure that those properly trained, non-fraud and non-quack doctors perform as they ought. However, all this gives the profession, and especially its more highly placed members, a very great deal of power indeed--which serve an interest that may not always align perfectly well with what is best for the community as a whole. Indeed, just as the word "profession" evokes a priesthood, and a profession as described here can be very much like a priesthood, a profession can easily become a corrupt priesthood looking out for itself at the public's expense, subordinating everything it says and does to a selfish sense of entitlement, crassness—the nastier for being wrapped up in elitism. (Indeed, "All professions are conspiracies against the laity" the great George Bernard Shaw once wrote, and I have yet to see evidence that he was wrong--with the play in which he wrote that line, far from insignificantly, The Doctor's Dilemma, where the practice of the medical community specifically was at issue.)

For writers to act as professionals is for them to behave in this way--to say that we have the right to a monopoly over the creation of fiction for the broader public. No one who is not one of our group should be doing so. And you are not right to question our judgment about who is allowed into the group and who is not.

That said, if all professions all make certain claims the professions do not all stand on equally firm ground as they press those claims, with medicine, again, an excellent example. One may argue, for example, that the American medical profession strives to limit the supply of doctors, and to keep even licensed medical personnel who are not physicians from performing duties within their capacity, simply to limit the supply of needed medical care and artificially raise its price. However, if more than a few seem to think that the business practice of the profession can and should be reformed, perhaps even very significantly reformed, few would deny the value of formal training and credentialing in medicine altogether--the more in as opportunities to learn to perform many of the requisite activities outside of them are slight. (Can you picture anyone learning to become a brain surgeon on an amateur basis?)

But authorship is a very different thing. Someone toiling all on their own may be at a disadvantage to someone who has found entree into the business, mentors, apprenticeship opportunities, practical chances to "learn-by-doing" in a genuine commercial environment while getting a paycheck for it. But it is far easier to learn to produce an at least passable manuscript (it is the passable, not the great, which pays the industry's bills) on an amateur basis than it is to learn brain surgery that way.

The result is that, for all their scorn of self-published novels, the "professionals" know full well that here is genuine competition for readers, competition not only on price (with 99 cent e-books having an obvious attraction against books going for $9.99), but competition that undermines a significant basis for their selling books at all--the "mystique" of authorship that came with the production of their books being costly, with opportunities to publish open to a very few, who are presumably somehow "special" in getting those rare opportunities traditional publishing afforded. How one goes about it seems totally opaque to most, while many who do know something about it are aware of how many visible and invisible barriers there are to being one of these Elect. And it is this mystique that we see publicists exploiting in those sanitized biographical blurbs which cut the grubby day jobs and grubby writing jobs before the big hardcover out of their biographies, in book tours that have them on TV and autographing copies in bookshops and the rest with that air of self-satisfaction that has become such a pop cultural cliché.

Resting critically on the fact that it was very hard to get one's name into print, today's print-on-demand and other self-publishing technologies change that fact and undermine that mystique--very likely making many who had not done so before look more closely at the contents of those big, expensive hardbacks, and realize that, contrary to the critical praises on the back cover, perhaps the more in as they compare it to those much-maligned 99-cent books, or even the stuff up on a site like Wattpad or FanFiction.Net, what is between the cover is not really so special after all, that far from being a genius the self-satisfied book-signer is offering up more Hollywood Hogwash, more Malarkeys, more Dreck Squad (as is especially the case when we are, as is happening more and more often, talking about some Big Name who doesn't do much more than slap their name on jaw-droppingly generic books slapped together by jobbing hacks). And perhaps after that decide that they have better things to do with their thirty-five dollars than snap up that hardcover . . .

Bad enough for business in itself, all this would seem more worrisome still in a period in which writers are seeing their earnings collapse, not least because readership is, contrary to what many a Pangloss would have us believe, in decline, with even such reliable genres as the sturdy commercial thriller apparently taking a hit this past year.

All that would seem plenty to lend a particularly nasty edge to the denunciation of those the pros see as encroaching on their turf, making already tough careers harder for all but the super-stars (who may themselves be starting to feel the heat)--while one might add that the nastiness is uninhibited by fear of the people they pick on being able to fight back. Self-published writers, by and large, lack significant media platforms. If they had them, after all, they probably would not have gone the far harder and much less remunerative road of self-publishing--while commanding little sympathy from anyone who does have such a platform--so that as the bashing of their kind goes on in the organs of the mainstream media, they can do little but offer their replies on personal blogs no one ever sees in an age in which ad revenue-collecting, "authoritative source"-favoring search engine algorithms make it ever harder to find them, or anything else of the kind.

It Isn't Always Wrong to State the Obvious

I think I will shock no one when I say that, judged as a scene of discourse most of the Internet is a sewer. If you ever suspected that the overwhelming majority of the people in the world are extremely stupid, ignorant, backward, hate-filled, a little wandering on the Web is likely to quickly confirm you in that belief.

Recently I found myself once again looking up a particular notion to see what people said about it--and after happening upon a rather useful explication of it in a Reddit thread found that the response it drew was solely the uncreative, trite, yet hurtful snarling that the person who put up the remark was (in somewhat more words) "Captain Obvious."

As is the case with so much such behavior that snarling said more about the speaker than it did the person they addressed--not least their inability to pass up opportunity to abuse a complete stranger, and the feeble nature of the intelligence that thinks itself witty when it repeats commonplaces and derives self-satisfaction therefrom.

This is not to deny that there is a superabundance of banality in the world, and there is nothing to be said for adding to the stock. Yet stating the obvious is not always that. What we all supposedly think we know is not always true, and even what seems commonplace can be worth airing, making explicit, discussing, debating, reconsidering--indeed, making many of us truly consider it for the first time. It actually seems to me that this happens too little--and those who get us to do it often render a service too little appreciated, least of all by idiots who think themselves geniuses as they inflict clichés like "Captain Obvious" on the reading public.

Thoughts on the '90s Nostalgia "Boom"

If one goes by those in the media whose job it is to keep track of such things, we are in the midst of a boom in '90s nostalgia.

I have to admit that it doesn't feel that way to me.

This is not to deny the existence of the product. Certainly there have been efforts to rework some of the movies (Jurassic Park, The Matrix) and television shows (like the 2017 feature film version of Baywatch, or the small screen sequels to Full House and Saved by the Bell) of that decade, while Adam F. Goldberg broadly attempted to do with the '90s what he had done with the '80s on The Goldbergs in Schooled. At only a short remove depictions of the scandals of the '90s seem to quite the presence, notably evident in the film I, Tonya, and the series American Crime Story (which has produced season-length arcs about the O.J. Simpson trial, the murder of Gianni Versace, and the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal). And I am sure one can point to a good deal else.

Still, it falls short of the sense of saturation in the '60s and '70s that we had in the '90s, or of saturation in the '80s that we experienced in the '00s and the '10s. Part of that, I suppose, is that, as seemed to me earlier, the pop culture of that period was never really promising for this kind of usage, its ambiguities and blandness making it hard to pick out anything distinctively '90s. Remembering follow-ups to '90s-era cinematic hits like The Addams Family, or Mission: Impossible, I wonder: looking at all this stuff are we nostalgic for the '90s, or the '60s? Or in the case of Mission: Impossible, simply continuing to enjoy a franchise that never stopped going, just as so much of what we saw in the '90s never stopped going (like the use of that awful, awful, awful word "Whatever!")? And what about Jurassic Park? One could argue for its recalling that prior monster-themed Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Jaws, but it was not very blatantly evocative of the '70s, while also not being particularly '90s--watching it now less likely than a good many other films to, for example, recall to mind the music or fashions or sensibility of the decade the way Jaws would make us remember the '70s (or for that matter, seem quite so novel an experience at the movies as that older movie did).

The recycled character of the product apart, there was what those earlier periods the '90s so shamelessly milked lacked had that it lacked--great arguments and great passions, and the way all this becomes manifest in art. The '90s may not have been the "end of history" as so many insisted in their generally muddle-headed ways, but the artists of the period certainly acted as if it was in that period of neoliberal triumphalism. The result was that what passed for "provocative" was, as Peter Biskind put it when writing of the era's "independent film," a "largely cultural" sort of rebellion that mainly consisted of a "bad boy aesthetic," with Quentin Tarantino no more than "the Howard Stern of indies," and making a far longer and more successful career of being that than should have ever been possible--nothing of substance behind the pretension and the edgelordism. And what was new and different either left us nowhere to go (as with the era's smug, ironic smirk; what can you do with Seinfeld but watch it again?) or has long since been superseded to such a degree that we are the ones now smirking at it ironically (as with the way The Truman Show became a sensation by presenting the idea of a culture of reality show addicts as science fiction--while today the extreme amplification of the idea in The Circle struck critics as already trite). Certainly I do not think I was alone in feeling that Schooled had a lot less to work with than The Goldbergs did--and was not surprised to see it sputter out after two seasons as The Goldbergs went on to its ninth, or the way in which really big success has proven elusive for purveyors of such content. (In fairness, Jurassic World was a blockbuster--but again, the role of nostalgia here seems to me weaker than in the other product on offer.)

However, if the '90s gave us little to work with it also seems the case that the sheer volume of pop cultural product being churned out now, and its extreme fragmentation--and ephemerality also a factor. Never has so much critical praise been lavished on so much work so certain to be lost in the shuffle, crowded out of the market, or, even when enjoyed, totally forgotten as an inundated audience quite casually and quickly moves onto the next supposedly "This will change the world" sensation that it will also forget in its turn five minutes later. The result is that, for better or worse, a great deal can pass us by very easily, or go over our heads, and as yet it seems that this can be said for the '90s nostalgia boom too.

Would that one could say the same of the doings of the Kardashians.

The Singularity of Indiana Jones' Success

With the fifth Indiana Jones film on its way (due out June 2023 according to the current plans) I find myself thinking yet again how one of the films that launched the Hollywood action-adventure blockbuster as we know it, while inspiring a certain amount of imitation, never really made its particular genre a staple of the form. In spite of Star Wars, really successful space operas never became all that numerous. (Avatar apart, how many really top-level hits of the kind are there? Certainly the Star Treks never came close to Star Wars as moneymakers.) And likewise the kind of period adventure the Indiana Jones films offer up remains identifiable mainly with . . . Indiana Jones. (After all, how many others can you name? Of the early '80s wave of imitators probably the biggest success was Romancing the Stone--but it was not a period piece at all, having a distinctly contemporary setting and as easily taken as a paramilitary adventure--a light-hearted Rambo--as an Indiana Jones-type piece.)

Looking back I suspect that the reason Indiana Jones-style period adventure never really became all that big a maker of hits is the same reason that space opera never became all that big a maker of hits--that an adventure in another period, like an adventure in another world, puts things at that much further of a remove from the audience's here and now. Assuming the audience is supposed to be interested in what is happening on the screen in a way deeper than purely neurological reaction to images as images in that way so critical to high concept, it is, in terms of the Goethe-Schiller way of understanding these things, "epic" when the audience today is overwhelmingly conditioned to (expect the "dramatic"--to expect to become intensely absorbed by something "relatable" rather than contemplating something they know to be "far, far away" from a distance. Hence the perennial superior salability of superhero stories--which have been a principal means by which space operas (Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel, the Avengers) and period adventures (Captain America, Wonder Woman) have managed to find audiences--but, I would argue, less consistently and easily than your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man, who with the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home (which scored a nearly $2 billion take during a particularly intense period of the pandemic) has reaffirmed yet again his claim to being the superhero most consistently able to sell a movie all by himself.

What Makes For a Nonfiction Bestseller?

Recently I have been looking at bestseller lists again. This time, though, my concern has been with nonfiction bestellers. Most of what makes up the list is three things:

1. Self-help endlessly repackaging the same unhelpful clichés for the sake of picking the pockets of credulous persons hoping to find something useful--with useful, of course, likely to be defined not as information from which they can make their own decisions (even when it is a matter of hashing out the options in a given situation), or even a lesson in how to actually think clearly and rigorously, but rather an authority figure who will sternly tell them "Do this, not that."

2. Autobiography and biography and memoir and true crime--in short, seedy, celebrity-obsessed, scandal-mongering trash.

3. Public affairs stuff consisting primarily of the ravings of talk radio and cable news personalities whose readers are less interested in analysis than in a validation of their prejudices, and delight in watching someone fling insults at people they despise.

Many of the most successful books combine two or more of these approaches--with self-help hawkers telling a good many personal stories, often about celebrities (one sees alleged Christian ministers whose sermons are heavier on the life of Bill Gates and Michael Jordan than on the life of Christ), while a good deal of celebrity autobiography and memoir is presented as if the life of the figure in question were some educative model for others to follow (like, you know, certain people who slap Chris Rock at the Oscars). And of course our public affairs stuff is heavier on gossip than anything else--on politics rather than policy.

In short, the public, when not looking for something it imagines will be immediately useful to itself, demands affirmation of its beliefs and entertainment, along very specific (very conventional) lines, and indeed an exceedingly high ratio of that stuff to anything actually informative.

It all adds up to an image of the reading public as lazy, narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and reactionary, with an endless appetite for the lowest sort of tabloid garbage--the audience that has made billionaires of the Kardashians.

It is not by any means the conclusion I would like to present--as a human being, and certainly as a writer, having written for a very different audience than that--but it is the only one that seems consistent with the facts.

Still, I suppose you can take some solace in the thought that atrocious as the situation is it is not actually new--the situation much the same in 1988, so that we may not actually be quite so much further along the road to Idiocracy as we fear, as I found when taking a look at the performance of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers on the New York Times bestseller list for a recent article.

Does Anyone Else Notice a Gap Between Reading Levels and the Years of School People Supposedly Had?

It is commonly claimed that American adults read at about an eighth grade level, with the claim often substantiated by presentations of the reading level of various bestselling books. John Grisham and James Patterson, for example, who together account for a very high proportion of the top-selling books for adults for the last three decades, each write at an eighth grade level.

However, American adults on average go way, way past the eighth grade in school as a matter of course. Indeed, with 90+ percent of Americans having high school or equivalency diplomas, at least three-fifths having some college, almost forty percent having B.A.s and a tenth or so having graduate and professional degrees, the "average" American may be said to have fourteen years of school past kindergarten; to be an Associate's Degree-holding community college graduate educated up to "grade fourteen."

Of course, genuine pleasure-reading will not have people reading at their limit for long, especially where fiction is concerned. The prevailing "dramatic" ideal in fiction has authors obliged to spellbind their audience, absorb them in a narrative they follow breathlessly as they forget themselves--a very delicate state indeed, easily ruined by their having to pause and puzzle something out. And of course, most such pleasure-reading is done when people are not at their best--when, perhaps after having had really heavy demands made on their skills as readers all day, they need a break, on the commuter train home or while trying to relax before bed (when making "the little gray cells" work overtime is not particularly desirable).

Accordingly, even if not worried overmuch about reaching the "below average," there is a case for those looking for a popular audience to write at a level safely below the capacity discussed here.

Still, grade eight is a long way away from grade fourteen, while the fact remains that even this likely understates the gap. After all, those who read much are better-educated than the average--with most books apparently bought by college-educated persons of middle age or older, implying a still lengthier formal and informal education. At the same time, when one actually surveys the bestsellers one sees that grade eight is an upper limit, with much work written at a lower level than that. Dan Brown and Stephen King write at a sixth grade level--with even more literary authors working in that range or below it. (According to the survey I am citing Cormac McCarthy writes at a fifth grade level.) And of course there is the wide adult audience for Young Adult fiction, without which the boom of the late '00s and early '10s could not have happened. The result is that we seem to be talking about people who have been educated up to grade sixteen favoring grade six or five when they look for recreation--a genuinely immense gap.

One could see that as reflecting just how stressed out people are (a thing not to be underestimated)--or how unsatisfactory the more grown-up books have become (also not to be underestimated). One may also attribute it to e-book readers like the Kindle, which may be best suited to lighter fare.

But one can also see it as a matter of a growing gap between the data we get when we quantify education (via years of school) and the actual skills those years in school are supposed to provide, especially given the abundance of other evidence for that position, not only in the United States (where bashing the education system is a highly politicized national pastime) but elsewhere. Indeed, thinking about such matters I find myself recalling that scene in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story in which Lenny tries to read to Eunice out of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and wonder how long it will be before this stops being satire and becomes everyday literal reality.

Given some of what my readers have had to say about these things over the years I suspect that some reading this will say we are already there.

Why "Expect the Unexpected" is Such a Stupid Saying

I have long disliked the saying "Expect the unexpected."

It seems I am not completely alone in this dislike. But I am, for the moment, concerned with my particular dislike of the saying.

One might as well start with the saying's origins--in a line from a play by Oscar Wilde, specifically the quip "To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect" in An Ideal Husband.

As those familiar with Wilde's work know, his stock in trade is the sort of ironic remark that made pretentious Victorians titter in their salons.

It can be very annoying. And certainly it made me annoyed with the mere mention of him. Of course, eventually I came to appreciate there was more to him than just the irony-mongering, that he did often have real insights to offer. But it was in his irony-mongering mode that Wilde was in when he wrote that line.

As a piece of Wildean irony-for-its-own-sake (of which, again, I am no fan) I think the line is just fine (if a bit shopworn and trite after so much usage).

The real problem is when--let us call them what they are, idiots--treat that saying, the provenance of which they are likely to be completely ignorant, as if it were some thoughtful, deep, meaningful, useful, actionable piece of advice (I think we can all think of examples--and if you can't, you shouldn't have any problem digging them up; just Google it and see what you get), because it is the furthest thing from that. Anyone with the most basic command of the English language should understand that by definition cannot "expect the unexpected" (or, at the very least, endeavor to offer witticisim when meaningful, useful, actionable advice is what is called for), with the result that judged by that standard the straight-faced repetition of that saying as if it were meaninfgul advice cannot be deemed anything but a confession of stupidity on the part of the speaker.

Of Hecklers, Heckling, Critics--and Bullies

I recall stumbling upon Jamie Kennedy's documentary Hecklers way back when it first hit cable.

To put it mildly it was an imperfect work that did not put Kennedy himself in a particularly good light. The title of the film also gave the impression that he did not know how to use simply words correctly. The reason is that hecklers are not just any critic, even abusive critics. Rather they are people whose criticism disrupts the performance. Many of those who appeared in the documentary (stand-up comedians like Lewis Black) really were in positions where one might be heckled, and gave their thoughts about it, but the bad reviews of a movie, published after the movie was wrapped up, do not qualify under that definition.

Still, recalling the film does set me thinking about artists, critics and why the enmity of the former toward the latter can be so intense. This is not simply a matter of how no one likes being criticized, or how artists may be more sensitive than others, or how their work is more personal than it is for someone doing workaday "alienated" labor for the money and nothing else, or the public nature of the criticism that would make it an appalling breach of civility in actual life, even if these factors are not irrelevant.

Rather what seems most important is the extreme imbalance between the two where the stakes are concerned, and where the matter of power is concerned. The artist's livelihood is on the line--and vulnerable to negative reviews, which may have a disproportionate effect relative to positive ones. At the same time the critic is likely to have nothing on the line, and indeed, to be virtually unaccountable for anything they say or write. The fact is galling enough with even the most fair-minded negative review--and much, much worse when the review is abusive, as negative reviews so often are. After all, it is in the sad, ugly nature of bullying that authority and society give the bully a pass, and judge the victim for reacting instead. (Critics' meanness can always be passed off as simply "in the line of duty," while public opinion tells their victims that they "need a thicker skin.")

Few critics wholly escape the temptation to take advantage of that position throughout the entirely of their careers--many embrace the opportunity, in fact--and as a result artists are likely to suffer this as a common experience. (Some artists may be more vulnerable than others. There is a big difference between the lot of a nearly untouchable longtime superstar, and someone at only the beginning of their career, for example, or in only a marginal place in their profession--but no one is really immune, and those to whom life has been kind can be all the touchier for it.) And I suspect that the extreme reactions we sometimes see on the part of artists to critics reflects that--people who have been bullied, perhaps a great deal for a long time, reacting, rightly or wrongly, to what they perceive as more of the same.

A Place in the Sun?

I read Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy some time before coming to George Stevens' famous adaptation of the film. The book was, and has remained, a literary touchstone for me, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers, or Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, or Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot and Cousin Bette.

Naturally I had high expectations for the film--the more in as it was so well-received in its day, and so much of the criticism since has been of the hypocritically sneering "Movies shouldn't have any social comment in them" varieties (from persons who, invariably, applaud movies that contain comment of which they approve; only the comment they don't approve counts as "comment" with them). The distaste of people who engage in that kind of stupid hypocrisy is, for me, practically a seal of approval.

Alas, when I actually did see the film I found it a deep disappointment, and predictably so. The entire book before the arrival of the protagonist (Clyde Griffiths has been renamed George Eastman) in town to take a job with his wealthy relations--the whole of Book One and early portions of Book Two, a hugely formative, and frighteningly powerful, near-fifth of the novel--are simply excised, reference to their events reduced to a few hints later in the movie. As might be guessed given the movie's being made in the days of the Motion Picture Code, the crisis into which the protagonist is thrust by his girlfriend's pregnancy is treated in highly censored fashion. Far more problematic, Dreiser's unrelenting naturalism is compromised by the transformation of his relationship with the rich socialite (Sondra Finchley is now Angela Vickers) into a "romance," which, especially light of the excision of the earlier material, makes that part of the drama more central and leaves less room for the social panorama that gave the book such force. It is even the case that the bleakness, the horror, of the aftermath of the death at the center of the book, in which the hero is not damned for what he is but what he is not, is considerably blunted.

David Walsh has called Dreiser "arguably this country's greatest novelist" and An American Tragedy "the greatest work of fiction ever produced in this country," not implausibly, and it deserved a film worthy of it. Sadly A Place in the Sun is not it--though in fairness I am not sure that a two or even three hour movie could have done it justice. Perhaps in this day and age of 10-part prestige TV series' that medium might offer a filmmaker a chance--but I would not hold my breath for a contemporary version which would get the adaptation of this extraordinary work right. It is simply too remote from the concerns animating contemporary "prestige TV."

But maybe there is hope for a Korean version. After all, Korean producers seem to be more willing to back this kind of thing these days, and find audiences for it, even as the cultural mandarins at the likes of the New York Times sneer . . .

Who is Allowed to Think of Themselves as a Writer?

When one reads about publishing one every so often runs into some statistic claiming that there are x number of writers--as in "writers of books for the general market"--in the country.

"How do they decide that?" one may wonder. As a glance at web sites like Inkitt, or even the offerings on Amazon, show, a great deal of activity and a great many people are left out. One may work at their writing, produce something, get it out there. However, even if they put in the hours, produce work of genuine professional quality, and look to their writing for their incomes--and even find paying customers, maybe as much as some of those "in the club" do (if more because of how poorly even they are doing these days)--they are generally not recognized as writers, the label overwhelmingly reserved for the very few whose names appear on the cover of books published by traditional presses, especially big New York presses. The distinction has nothing as such to do with "talent" or "hard work" (many of the most prominent "writers" write nothing at all, not only politicians and celebrities whose books are ghostwritten for them, but those actual "authors" who "somehow" have their names on the covers of six or seven fat new books a year), but rather, no matter how much the sneering, snarling elitists pretend otherwise, access to the small, closed world of Park Avenue and its suburbs to which what their generally public school-educated British counterparts would call "the plebs" simply have no entree.

You can see the exclusivity reflected in the articles and books that claim to be coming from a place of sympathy for writers in this age in which the price of "information" has plummeted even as the price of everything else just keeps going up. When they talk about protecting the interests of writers they don't mean all those people working on their craft, they mean the handful of folks in the club, whether actually writing or only pretending to be writers when hawking their mass-marketable garbage in the media--while everyone else is not merely ignored, but seen as part of the problem. Studiously ignoring all the economic, technological, cultural changes that are making it harder for writers to earn a living (like, you know, the plain and simple fact that the public in the age of the smart phone, streaming and Wi-fi everywhere all the time has so much more access to other kinds of entertainment all the time), they prefer to fixate on those plebs who refuse to "know their place," respect the industry gatekeepers who told them to forget ever having a career without ever even looking at their submissions, and keep their writing in the drawer rather than going the self-publishing route.

Considering the lot of most writers, and how they get treated, not only by the world at large but by their fellow writers, and above all that small "professional" club, I find myself remembering that bit in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter-house Five when Billy Pilgrim comes face to face with Vonnegut's longtime recurring character, Kilgore Trout. Billy asks Trout if he is Kilgore Trout "the writer." Trout is honestly, literally, confused by the question about there being a "writer named Kilgore Trout" at all, let alone that writer being him. Vonnegut explains that the reaction was a result of the fact that Trout "did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way."

So it goes for the vast majority of us who have ever put their thoughts to paper, even when what we have put down finds its way to a readership--and it seems to me that there is a great injustice in that.

Of Elaine May and Mike Nichols

Considering the career of Elaine May and especially the setback--and indeed, kind of setback--Ishtar dealt her career I find myself thinking of her old comedy partnership with Mike Nichols, and what Andrew Sarris famously said of him very early on in his career (way back in 1968). "No American director since Orson Welles had started off with such a bang"--he was speaking here of that classic, The Graduate--"but Welles . . . followed his own road, and that made all the difference. Nichols seems too shrewd ever to get off the main highway. His is the cinema and theatre of complicity."

So did it seem in the late '80s. In the same years in which it would seem that a dislike of its politics fed into the significantly exaggerated and undeserved blowback against Ishtar Nichols, after satirizing conformist careerism with "Plastics, Benjamin," followed that main highway through its hundred and eighty degree turn to exalt Wall Street careerism in Working Girl, with Carly Simon singing a benediction over it as the New Jerusalem as the final credits roll (Why does no one get how weird this was?), to a far, far friendlier reception than Ishtar got. And then when, for what was ultimately to be his final directorial credit, Nichols turned his hand to a big screen comedy about covert action in the Greater Middle East the result was Charlie Wilson's War--a very different sort of thing, which also got a friendlier reception from the critics (even if, where audiences were concerned, one not as friendly as its backers seem to have hoped). Thus does Sarris' criticism of Nichols stand a half century on--not only in contrast with Welles, but with May, whom it seems found a milieu even less friendly to going one's own way than Welles did in the years of William Randolph Hearst's rage, studio boss control, and the blacklist.

Foundation vs. Robot: Reflections on Science and Story

After recently returning to the Foundation novels I have found myself thinking about the parallels between these and Asimov's other most famous sequence, his Robot stories and novels. In particular there is the way they both concern the explicability of behavior in rational terms--indeed, quantifiable terms (psychohistory, robopsychology working from the Three Laws of Robotics)--and the possibility of experts using the knowledge of the relevant principles (psychohistorians like Hari Seldon and his successor, robopsychologists like Susan Calvin) to channel the behavior of their objects of their interest (human masses, robots) in a constructive direction (the resurrection of civilization, the rendering of robots more reliable tools).

In making plots of this theme the Robot stories tend to hew more closely to the framework of the "tale of ratiocination"--the "scientific" detective story. Thus do they tend to feature a protagonist confronted with anomalous behavior on the part of robots, requiring explanation and modification, a process the readers get to follow along, the same as they do any other fictional process of "detection."

By contrast in the Foundation stories the problem has already been solved to a significant degree (initially by Seldon, later by successors of his), even if we do not always know it (especially as we observe the development of some crisis, remember that Seldon dealt in probabilities rather than certainties, and how, past a certain point, we become clearer on how his work was not the completed "plan" it earlier seemed), and by the end of the piece we find out what the solution previously arrived at by the Movers of Events happened to be.

I personally thought the approach less satisfactory in the Foundation stories than in the Robot stories. This seems at least in part a matter of the foundations from which those who reasoned out the problem and its solution. In the Robot tales the protagonist generally dealt with a single machine behaving oddly--not a galaxy of humans--with the mystery typically reducible to the interaction of a mere three laws with their environment. The simplicity permitted a certain explicitness--those three Laws laid out for the reader early on, in "Runaround," where reasoning things out from them one character remarked that the life-and-death crisis they were in was as tidily clear "as a syllogism," and so did it often go. By contrast the reader of the Foundation novels had nothing but hints of what psychohistory contained--and the promise that Seldon had worked out a syllogism from premises no one ever showed us. Even so, the differing approach did afford the Foundation sequence a greater variety of scenario and structure, and in the end it did produce a saga whose interest has certainly endured.

Returning to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Saga: Reflections

I suspect (partly because of my own expectations from way back when) that when a great many readers pick up Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, they expect from the premise the melodrama of an empire's fall and the aftermath--harrowing scenes of chaos and destruction, the glamorous pageantry of feudalism, the brutal exoticism and exotic brutality of barbarism, and the swashbuckling adventure to which all of the above lends itself so well --and then are disappointed that there is so little of such stuff, especially in the earlier part of the narrative. To the extent that they are there they are generally alluded to rather than depicted--part of the background rather than what for him is the main event. Rather this consists of dialogue-heavy maneuverings among older functionaries in court rooms, conference halls, offices. Of course, the quotient of adventure gets higher as the story proceeds. The second book, Foundation and Empire, has its space battles, but these are mentioned rather than depicted, and when the Foundation falls Asimov does not depict his principals' escape from the invading forces, but only closes the chapter and in the next shows them in their exile, with the events in between reduced to exposition presented in a brief, chance remark. ("[T]hey say she had the most tha-rilling escape--had to go through the blockade, and all--and I do wonder she doesn't write a book about it" one character says of Bayta Darell--but Foundation and Empire isn't it.)

The comparative unimportance of the derring-do in particular is not just a matter of what Asimov writes, but the manner in which the plot progresses. "Let us leave heroics for the fools who are impressed by it" one of Asimov's characters says. Still more harshly, "[v]iolence is the last refuge of the incompetent" says another (repeatedly, to the point of its becoming his catch phrase). After all, as still another says, the Foundation's founder "[Hari] Seldon . . . did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweeps of economics and sociology." And indeed these remarks prove not supercilious dismissals of men of action by men of reason, but how things actually go over the course of this saga. Through the first book especially the plot turns on the leaders of the Foundation outthinking the barbarians, nipping their brutish resort to brute force in the bud at every turn. And when in the second book the Foundation, under a leadership whose quality has degenerated considerably, is forced to fight (the incompetent taking that refuge), the results are often less than dazzling, while those characters in the story's cast, when looking to play the hero, find themselves all too often failing or irrelevant. Thus when in the episode of "The General" Ducem Barr and Lathan Devers clonk their captor on the head and set off to save the day it turns out that their personal heroics matter less than the cunning of history, while Captain Han Pritchard's attempt to assassinate the Mule is similarly pointless. Indeed, the only really effectual piece of violence on the part of the Foundation's defenders (through the end of volume two) is exceedingly unheroic--the cold-blooded murder of a comrade on the verge of entirely innocently revealing critical information in front of an enemy--while it is later revealed (in the third book) that this, too, was not what it seemed, the physical act merely a riposte in the duel the telepathic psychohistorians fought with the Mule, whose role in its way exemplifies Asimov's principles. Hari Seldon's plan did not see the Mule coming, and the consequences of his coming were thus unpredicted and unallowed for. But the Mule's career, dramatic as it was, changed very little in the end, while the Foundation, and history, ground on, and might have managed to do so as long as the Foundation survived his coming to continue realizing the work of Seldon--which, in line with the principles of science to which he adhered as the rest of the galaxy forgot them, was never treated as finished and closed off for all time.

As might be guessed from all this--and true to Asimov's reputation (of which I had only the haziest ideas when I first picked up the books)--the novels concentrated on and the stories were driven by ideas rather than "character," with plots turning on rational problem-solving, and, like the "psychohistory" on which the Foundation was established, more interested in "men in their masses" than in individuals; in the line of events rather than the minutiae along the way, in contrast with so much of conventional literary expectation.

Still, as that rising adventure quotient implies, Asimov does, depending on one's view of conventional literary standards, either make more concessions to them, or embrace them in the course of becoming a more mature and skillful writer--as we see when comparing the first "Foundation" to "The Mule," and still more the narratives of the third book, Second Foundation, Asimov shifting from merely dramatizing his ideas with a portrayal of the climax as seen from the top to telling stories of those crucial events from a wider variety of viewpoints, more thoroughly fleshed out generally and more attentive to character--and to characters, likewise of more varied type--particularly. Indeed, in the concluding installment, "Search by the Foundation," Asimov devotes much of the proceedings to the misadventures of Batya Darell's fourteen year old granddaughter, with the opening scene leisurely beginning with the girl writing a paper for school. Still, in the end he adheres to his saga's intellectual premises and the literary approach it broadly dictates, and it is less the conventional literary pleasures than the intrinsic interest of his ideas, Asimov's skill at concocting compelling "scientific detective" stories (less satisfactory than in his Robot stories, but impressive nonetheless), and his focus and economy as a storyteller, that carried the memorable narrative. And speaking for my own part, if not finding the books quite what I had looked for on that first read, I find that I have become much more appreciative of this way of telling a story since--the more in as others seem to be appreciating it less and less than they did in the past, alas, for reasons that have not been healthy ones for the genre or anything else on the whole.