The Decline of the Thriller: Explanations

Considering recent bestseller list data it seems plausible that thriller sales have recently been in decline--not only this past year, but this past decade. Naturally I have found myself thinking about why, and two reasons come to mind.

1. Publishing was never an open field, but it is hard to deny that it has become more closed--less willing to take risks on new talent ("What's your platform like?" they'll ask before they ask "What's your book about?"), and more determined to not only stick with known writers, but exploit their names to the full so as to avoid having to look to unknown quantities in whom they would--horror of horrors!--actually make a long-term investment. (Every extra "James Patterson novel" in their schedule is one less spot they have to fill with something else.) And all this, of course, is without considering just how closed the world of the arts, media, entertainment has become to anyone approaching it without celebrity or connections (so that they do not even get into a position to be asked what their platform is like before they are told "No"). And any idiot can tell you what that means for the prospect of new ideas, or even just new properties, that might regenerate the field. Unsurprisingly the thriller genre is still pretty much where it was back in the '90s, with John Grisham and James Patterson and Janet Evanovich and the rest who had established themselves then still headlining the New York Times bestseller list with pretty much the same books, and even the same series', they were writing at the time.

Of course, in the quarter of a century since something novel did occasionally come up--the fashion for religio-historical mysteries Dan Brown spurred with The Da Vinci Code, the interest in Scandinavian crime fiction prompted by Stieg Larsson's success--but these fashions came and went fairly quickly all things considered, with Larsson's books, notably, having been first published in another country and even made into movies before American publishing brought them to a wide audience, hardly making them some New York discovery. We have also had more idiosyncratic thrillers like Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train--though precisely because they are idiosyncratic one can hardly picture a whole subgenre really emerging and enduring as a result. Simply put, the genre has gone stale.

2. Younger people read much, much less, and for obvious reason. No one under twenty has much memory of life before everyone was carrying a smart phone and its ever-growing package of entertainment options all the time, anyone under twenty-five has likely had one through all their formative years. The fact has already had its effect on YA sales (the readers who made Twilight a blockbuster were living in a more different media world than you may appreciate), and it is likely to take an increasing toll on the sales of books officially designated as being for grown-ups--all as older folk, likewise becoming more and more digital in their orientation, similarly read less.

Still, if fiction as a whole is suffering might it be that thrillers are taking a particularly bad hit? This does not seem to me inconceivable. After all, print fiction these days has a tendency to follow film--audiences, increasingly, having their aesthetic preferences formed by visual media, and expecting those preferences to be met when they pick up a book. And film itself has been changing significantly. Consider the thrillers we get on screen. Suspense thrillers, once a staple of commercial cinema, are now a rarity, supplanted by the action thriller--which these days is required to be ever more action-packed, with the action ever-bigger and filmed in ever more intense fashion. Indeed, even watching non-thrillers people seem to expect a shot to last no more than two seconds. This was not the kind of thriller that even a Grisham or a Patterson offered up--and it seems plausible that, stale or not, it simply does not hold audience interest the same way, especially when the medium delivering the content relies on words rather than a succession of images designed to strike the nerves directly rather than through the story they tell. The result may well be that, where in the past particular types of thriller have in the past fallen out of fashion, in significant part because of precisely this change (as with the spy novel and techno-thriller and paramilitary action-adventure in the '90s) the thriller altogether is suffering this fate.

Of course, that being the case one can hardly imagine publishers doing other than they have done—their current course instead of being simple stagnation a matter of resignation as they continue to trade on past successes for as long as they can rather than chase an audience that they know is not there.

This may sound overly pessimistic. But I do not doubt that publishers are quite capable of following such a strategy, not least because the editor of a noted fiction publication confessed as much to me in a private exchange. As the comment was not meant for public consumption I do not name either the editor nor the magazine, but it certainly confirmed my suspicions about how that particular magazine's staff selected its material--and how others might act in such a situation.

What T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is Really About

I recall the shock of my first exposure to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in high school. After reading it I was convinced that I had just read a pile of nonsense and that the critics who esteemed this the Great Poem of the century were, frankly, deranged. And of course, no one was able to give me an intelligent answer to the question of why I ought to think anything else about it.

Eventually I learned what those I queried did not understand, or could not explain, or could not be bothered to explain to a "mere" high school student (or college student, or graduate student)--that it was indeed a pile of nonsense (as Eliot himself confessed, "In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying") and that its being a pile of nonsense was exactly the point. As one might guess from the fact that the poem's footnotes are longer than the text of the poem itself it was a mockery of critics who would attempt to approach its neutron star-dense mass of obscurities rationally and discern in it a rational plan, a rational meaning.

In all that "The Wasteland" was exemplary of Modernism, the essential feature of which is its rejection of reason and rationality and, if there was any thought of salvation at all, its pursuit in anti-rationality. Thus Dadaism, thus surrealism, thus the nonsense of Futurism in the Marinetti sense of the term, and, among so much else, Eliot's poem. Not everyone who produced experimental work necessarily shared these assumptions, but this was nonetheless this was the impulse behind the declaration that the older, more conventional, "realistic" ways of depicting the world would no longer serve, rendering these experiments a necessity.

I, for one, have found the intent dubious. After all, the hardcore Modernists insisted that reason had "failed" in a manner that a student of logic would at once recognize as "begging the question," for it was not so obviously a settled question that "reason" caused World War I and other early twentieth century disasters. Equally it was begging the question to declare that realism had ceased to be a viable artistic approach. (Think about it. When you read a realist novel, for example, or look at a realistic painting or sculpture, do you think "Ugh! That won't do at all!"? I doubt it very much.)

Moreover, overlooking this fact leaves us less able to understand what we are looking at when we are presented with Modernist work—hence all the critics butting their heads against the rock of Eliot's poetry--while the appraisal of the work also tends to be dubious. One associates Modernism with formal experimentalism, to the point that superficial discussion of Modernism notices only that--but considering this I long ago found myself thinking that experiments are judged by their results. They validate a hypothesis or they do not. They succeed or fail. But we never hear such judgment rendered. (Does anyone seriously believe that stream-of-consciousness writing "saved literature" as a way of approaching, depicting, understanding the world?) Instead, just as there is a slighting of the intellectual premises from which such work proceeded, so is there a slighting of the actual aesthetic results (which I must admit have seemed to me a colossal failure, and strained, ugly, failure at that) as critics then rushed, and critics today continue, to, accepting the aforementioned begging of the question as if it were the profoundest of thought, champion such work as the Good, the True, the Important. And it has seemed to me ever more the case that this has been a disaster for letters, culture and humanity generally--as well as yet another occasion in which few dare to point out the all too obvious fact that THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

The Discrete Silence On Authors' Pasts

Once upon a time I was struck by how little is said of writers' pasts in those biographical blurbs on the back of the hardcover book dust jacket.

Later I realized it was because the biographical blurbs, in the interest of a sales-promoting glamorization, avoided a great many of the grimy realities of the writing life. Thus they do not bring up the crummy day jobs writers often work to pay the bills until they can get a break (teaching English, for example—indeed, I suspect this is one of the things that keeps college English departments in adjunct labor, in spite of the pay and terms).

Thus does it also go with the "crummier" writing jobs writers often do before they hit the big time. I had a recent reminder of this over at the blog Paperback Warrior, which covers a range of material (I have seen work as diverse as Jack London's classic The Sea-Wolf and X-Files tie-ins discussed there), but concentrates on older work from the "pulpy" end of the spectrum--old hard-boiled stuff and the like. Most of the items Paperback Warrior presents are books reviews, but the blog occasionally presents broader, more background-oriented pieces. The one I have in mind now served up an overview of the history of the Nick Carter franchise, extending to its Nick Carter: Killmaster incarnation--one of innumerable '60s-era reinventions of older action heroes along James Bondian lines, with the old detective become a globetrotting secret agent. The resulting series ultimately had 263 installments between 1963 and the 1990s-era collapse of the action-adventure market.

One of the more interesting aspects of the series is the number of writers who worked on it, often under pseudonyms, before moving on to "A grade" hardcover work under their own names, and sometimes becoming fairly big names. Among them was David Hagberg, who wrote twenty of the Nick Carter novels on the way to becoming a major name in spy and techno-thriller fiction with his Kirk McGarvey books. One did not find the Nick Carter books included under the "Also By" heading in the front matter of his books. After all, he was an A-grade hardcover bestseller now, and we were not to think of him as anything else.

Such facts make the eternal whine of the Park Avenue types about the public's misperceptions of the business the more ironic. They complain that the public thinks it's much easier to become an author than it really is. But they certainly played their part in creating the illusion by eliding, among so much else, the apprenticeships from the record that convert old hands into apparent overnight successes--and of course, one can hardly credit them with worrying overmuch about the existence of apprenticeship opportunities, which have been dwindling for a long time. They shrank with the disappearance of the fiction magazine market and its openness for short form fiction (as Isaac Asimov forthrightly acknowledged in Earl Kemp's Who Killed Science Fiction?), and then shrank again when the more limited opportunities afforded by the old paperback market, and series' like Nick Carter, shrank in their turn. In this way as in every other today's aspiring writer is very much on their own, with no helping hand to be expected from anyone.

Is The Thriller in Decline? A Few Thoughts on the Data

There was some talk in 2021 of thriller sales softening. Those discussing the matter gave the impression that this was some anomaly, but it seemed to me to be confirmed by the Publisher's Weekly data on the top-selling books of the year--among which thrillers were inconspicuous.

It may be that this is a temporary, anomalous development. But looking back over the top-selling fiction lists of the past decade I can't help suspect something deeper is going on here, the titles I see at least suggesting that the decline of the thriller has been underway for some time. Look, for example, at the list from 2010 (as archived at Wikipedia). Of the ten fiction bestsellers nine were novels, and six of those were thrillers written for adults (Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, John Grisham's The Confession, Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive, Janet Evanovich's Sizzling Sixteen, James Patterson's Cross Fire, and Patricia Cornwell's Port Mortuary). In 2011 seven of the top ten were thrillers. By contrast in 2012 the list was dominated by various YA authors (Suzanne Collins, Jeff Kinney, Rick Riordan) and E.L. James, with the principal thriller present Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl--notable for being a literary thriller rather than a commercial one (unreliable narrator, no built-in series potential, etc., etc.), with the trend very similar in 2013 and 2014 (with Veronica Roth and John Green numbering among the YA writers, and major films of the year generally having related works prove bestsellers, like Gone Girl, The Great Gatsby, Frozen), even if Grisham, Stephen King, Dan Brown put in appearances. After that point it seemed that the YA wave had crested, but that did not translate to a return of those thrillers to their old place here. Instead, where it was not simply a reflection of what was playing at the movies (as with Jojo Moyes' Me Before You), it was becoming a good deal more eclectic in the manner we see today.

Of course, in considering this one ought to acknowledge that PW changed its method of assembling the lists significantly back in 2012, and that it seems plausible that the decline of the thriller's prominence was at least in part a matter of changing its criteria. Still, given the other changes in the list's composition since (like how YA not only exploded but collapsed later) that single factor seems unlikely to explain everything--and leave at least room for the suspicion that there really has been a long-term drop.

The Decline of the Hollywood Western

In the early days of Hollywood the frontier, or at least frontier-like conditions in the western United States, were so historically near as to be within the memory of a good many living adults, with the effect all this had for efforts to romanticize it. Half a century on the subject matter was far remote--and increasingly problematic, the attitude toward Native Americans common to the Western, for example, less acceptable. (The confrontation between Sacheen Littlefeather and John Wayne at the 1973 Oscars--recalled to public consciousness by the Will Smith-Chris Rock episode--seems symbolic.) One might add that making so many Westerns for so long--making so much of anything for so long--made it overfamiliar while leaving artists with that much less to do with it that had not already been done innumerable times (the more, perhaps, in as it focused on a very particular period and setting, with perhaps particularly strong limitations so far as such genres go). Unsurprisingly there was less tendency to handle the material "straight," with films like The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Blazing Saddles, all bespeaking a very different, genre-subverting attitude.

Of course a trickle of such films has continued ever after, with something of a surge occurring now and then, most notably in the early '90s (with the commercial and critical successes of Best Picture winners Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, as well as more modest success with such films as the big screen version of the old Maverick TV series, and a good many other efforts like Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead). Still, it went only so far and lasted only so long, and since then the genre has, its artier, lower-budgeted efforts apart, been more often associated with disappointing receipts and critical derision (as with Wild Wild West or The Lone Ranger) that only confirm the view that popular culture has moved on.

Yet there was another, more fundamental, factor worth recalling, both in the appeal of the Western in its heyday, and the decline of its appeal relative to other forms. Consider what Goethe and Schiller wrote in their piece "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry" (as translated by Evelyn Lantz):

The characters stand best at a certain level of culture, where self-activity is still left to its own resources, where one operates not morally, politically, or mechanically but rather personally (emphasis added).

Goethe and Schiller went on to observe that Greek myths were "particularly favorable to the poet," and so, one might argue, were the conditions of the frontier, where the apparatus and inhibitions and rules of civilization were a comparatively slight thing--what made for situations like those of Stagecoach, the oft-told story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (from My Darling Clementine to Wyatt Earp and beyond), High Noon.

As implied by the situations in all these films it is particularly important that it afforded a scene for individualistic action-adventure. And it is not irrelevant to the Western's decline that audiences found other milieu for such more appealing. Among much else there was a tendency to, in an era of hysteria over unruly youth, rebellious minorities, crime in the streets and the rest to see modern urban America as not so far removed from the frontier--and in need of a gunslinger (like a Dirty Harry, who, like the hero of High Noon, tossed away his badge at story's end). The attitude may have been more consequential still with an audience that found it easier to "get into" stories with contemporary settings. (Hence the boom of paramilitary action-adventure from the '70s to the '90s, and the preference for the adventures of superheroes in Metropolis, Gotham or New York to stories in more exotic milieu--like galaxies far, far away.) The result was that by the '70s the Western was not only exploiting an exhausted and increasingly challenged nostalgia, and itself artistically exhausted, but, as a cinematic staple on anything like such grounds, it had become superfluous.

A Note on Twitter Etiquette

I have noticed a common situation on some social media web sites, and certainly Twitter.

In that situation two people--let us refer to them as A and B--have an exchange.

In the course of this exchange A says something.

B puts A on the spot, demanding support for that statement as if it were their right to have it.

A responds by linking the source of their information.

B responds by saying that citing a source does not support what they said. This is in apparent obliviousness to, or disregard of, the fact that, even in scholarship, in which the standard for not only making a valid statement, but evidentiating it, might be imagined as higher than in a casual exchange between two strangers on social media, citing a source is accepted as support, at least so long as inspection has not revealed the citation to be irrelevant to the statement, or for some other reason unsatisfactory.

B's game gives away that they--very likely, and I dare say almost certainly--have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing or understanding the issue at hand because what is going on is not a debate, even an uncivil one. Rather B is pretending to engage A as cover for an opportunity to heckle them--possibly because abusing strangers is the idea of a good time of the degenerate in question, possibly because, while perhaps proclaiming themselves a "free speech absolutist" as so many do in extreme bad faith (they regard their right to free speech as absolute, not necessarily anyone else's), they have appointed themselves policers of the Internet's discourse, and are calling to account, and punishing, anyone whose "free speech" they disapprove.

If one really does take freedom of speech seriously--and I do--then I fear there is not much to be done about B's abuse of his right, save for A to refuse to play B's rather obnoxious and transparent game.

Reading Every Man Dies Alone

The Brooklyn-based publisher Melville House has accounted for more than its fair share of the really worthwhile titles I have come across in recent years--among them David Graeber's Debt, and the issue of translations of Hans Fallada's novels Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone--the latter, in English for the first time.

Based on a true story, at its beginning Otto Quangel, a formerly independent carpenter who was ruined in the Depression and is now a foreman at a furniture factory, and his wife Anna, at the time of Germany's triumph over France in early 1940, receive word of the death of their son's death in action. It is for them the final straw in their alienation from a regime for which they had voted back in '33, and they launch their unconventional campaign of protest against the government, writing seditious statements on postcards and leaving them about their home city of Berlin.

Reading the reviews on Amazon I was struck by how many sneered at the plainness of the prose and the straightforwardness of the technique--middlebrows unthinkingly proclaiming their allegiance to the standards set by The Literary Authorities. Contrary to the pretension that a "good" writer will abide by the injunction "Show, don't tell," the reality is that a writer must often tell if they are to give us very much at all; and that good telling can be not only superior to bad showing, but extremely effective.

Certainly it is so with Fallada, as he shows in his capacity to imbue what can seem minor, trivial, incidents with extraordinary power. While I have read a great many works depicting oppressive dystopias I can think of none that so forcefully conveyed the sheer visceral terror of being watched all the time, and of even being suspected of having other than the "correct" opinions, as the scene in which Max Harteisen is flung into a panic by his discovery of one of Otto's postcards. Equally I cannot recall many occasions when a writer made us empathize with a character's sense of betrayal and wretchedness so keenly as Fallada does when depicting Eva Kluge's confrontation with her estranged husband Enno in Chapter Five. I was staggered by the swirl of intrigue he created surrounding the plunder of an old woman's rather modest apartment by rapacious neighbors--and what it revealed about the shabby life that made such trifles seem such a prize to them. The same goes for the exchanges Otto and his fellow prisoner, an internationally known conductor, have while locked up together after he is caught. The conductor actually has to explain what his job is to a disbelieving Otto in a scene that, more than any other, drove home just how little a share working people like Otto had in their country's celebrated higher culture. The result is that while the book is far from what one might expect from the blurb by Primo Levi on the front cover of the hardback hailing it "The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis," for me, at least, it lived up to the high praise as very few works do.

More Real Reasons Why No One's Reading Your Blog

Writing on the matter of why bloggers, even good bloggers, go unread I have tended to emphasize two facts overlooked by the hawkers of generic and generally useless self-helpish advice:

1. The extremely high ratio of producers to content to consumers of content here, which is likely getting higher all the time with people turning to other media as both creators and consumers; and

2. The way the search engines, social media and other key means for exploring the Internet (due to many factors, not least the pay-to-play of ad-buying) overwhelmingly channel users to a small number of top-listed search hits generally belonging to long-established, massively-resourced, mainstream platforms, at the expense of everything else. This most certainly includes the newcomer, and even the oldcomer, who toils on their own blog, unaffiliated with any bigger operation, and with nothing but their actual words to offer the world. And all this, again, is likely getting worse rather than better.

These two facts by themselves constitute a grave disadvantage for any blogger, nearly guaranteeing that no matter how brilliant, diligent, deserving of a wide readership a particular blogger may be they will not find it. Still, that is not to deny that, even within the very slim chance of finding a readership this leaves the Internet does have its biases in favor of some kinds of content over others, and it seems to me worth discussing four that get far too little attention.

1. The Internet audience, by which I mean people who spend a lot of time on the Internet following things and getting caught up in dialogues with strangers on it (rather than spending time with friends or reading books) has a very, very short attention span.
When people blog, Tweet, vlog or anything else they are most likely to get attention discussing things of immediate concern--which people may get very worked up over right now--and then completely forget about by tomorrow.

2. The Internet audience is lowbrow.
Those things to which it directs that limited span of attention are usually quite stupid--for instance, one celebrity slapping another celebrity at a major awards show.

3. The Internet audience is intensely emotional.
People may not care about those lowbrow things they are always talking about for long (in a year will anyone remember the 2022 Oscars any better than they remembered John Wayne's far more consequential confrontation with Sacheen Littlefeather before the recent silly incident made it topical?), but they care about them very intensely while they do so, and they love the intensity, theirs and other people's. They love reaction, not cogitation. They love screaming and watching others scream--not thinking.

4. The Internet audience, as you might guess from 1, 2 and 3, does not like complexity.
Thus it does not like being required to, for example, follow a chain of reasoning or cope with data.

The result is that someone who shoots their mouth off about exactly the subjects that have the stupid "atwitter" for the present five seconds or so is much more likely than someone whose thinking runs a little deeper, whose brow is just a little higher, who attempts to discuss things calmly and intelligently to command an audience on the Web. Which I guess is par for the course everywhere else.

It doesn't please me to say this, for many reasons. But it does seem necessary to be frank about the reality, for whatever that may be worth to anyone out there.

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.