This past week, the National Book Award released its 10 longlist picks—and we need to stage an intervention.
This year’s longlisted novels—ranging from autofiction by autistic trans they/thems to autofiction by gay black men (“range” is perhaps not the best word here)—not only expose some of our society’s most atrocious writing but also reveal a pattern in what our literary establishment looks for in a novel.
As I see it, there are three primary features the establishment rewards today.
The first is the abundance of vague, imprecise language. The second is the presence of overt moralizing written from the author’s own perspective. The third is shock value—especially when it comes to explicit sexual themes.
Let’s go through each of them and demonstrate why you should stay away from contemporary fiction.
The Cult of Obscurity
As a society, we seem to have become so categorically allergic to precise, imagistic prose that we’ve chosen to dole out prizes to vague, choppy writing that sounds like it was written by a high school emo kid on his first acid trip.
Many of these writers simply can’t write, but because we’ve become so averse to hurting people’s feelings, we not only allow them to continue writing but also shower them with participation trophies in the form of literary “awards,” insisting that vagueness is not only permissible but also deep!
During my short-lived tenure in the academy, I learned that people who can’t write will often hide behind obscurantism and then insist that if you have trouble following their train of thought, it’s simply because you’re not smart enough. This is the Ben Lerner tactic I discussed last week, and it’s unfortunately ubiquitous in the sorts of books we choose to publish today.
Let’s take a look at the examples from the National Book Award, starting with Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, a novel about “trauma, mourning, and joy” through a Haitian migrant lens.
The public address system, through which instrumental versions of popular tunes are usually piped, crackles as though it is the apparatus that is clearing its throat rather than the man using it.
I edit college essays for a living. The excerpt above looks exactly like the sort of sentence a high schooler might write in a weak attempt to impress admissions officers with his or her command of “figurative language.” Danticat has created what we call a pleonastic sentence, wherein our metaphor surrenders its impact to a spate of extraneous words and thereby complicates rather than elucidates our understanding of the image in question. It’s maddening that not a single editor thought to even cut the words “that is” right after “apparatus”—such an edit wouldn’t have entirely redeemed our sentence, but at least it would have made it slightly less clunky.
It would have taken Danticat about forty seconds to rewrite the sentence like this, streamlining the flow of ideas while preserving all relevant information:
The public address system, which usually pipes instrumental versions of popular tunes, crackles as though to clear its throat.
Danticat continues with the following:
A communal moan passes through the room, along with gasps and breakouts of “Oh God!” leading into Hail Marys and other liturgy being recited in more languages than I recognize, all with this cadence between desperation and hope, the oral version of rocking oneself.
If anyone has Kamala Harris’s phone number, please let me know. We need to call her up and ask her to surrender her Word Salad Award to Edwidge Danticat.
Listen, I love long sentences as much as the next guy, but a long sentence must be both focused and precise. What is “the oral version of rocking oneself” or “this cadence between desperation and hope”? No one knows other than our friend Edwidge. Her prose continually attempts to explain itself because she knows that no reader will be able to parse exactly what’s going on.
Let’s take a look at another example—this one from Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, which follows the life of a Palestinian man mourning his home following the 1948 Nakba (very original).
Later, when the French officers at the refugee camp in Syria asked about Sufien’s date of birth for his Document de Voyage (Pour les Réfugiés Palestiniens), Amal, now called Um Sufien, replied that it was in the time of year of their savior’s birthday, remembering the hills of Safad disappeared by mist that first day nursing Sufien, how the land itself looked like it was dreaming in that season, and remembering so vividly the music of those bells.
I don’t know why these “writers” believe that composing an extremely pretentious sentence automatically makes you sound deep. Like Danticat, Assadi buries what could have been a beautiful image beneath vague language bordering on obscurantism.
Elsewhere in the text, we get the following description of the same hills:
Sufien would later religiously mark the dusk, marvel at the colors of the end of daylight, and that fateful April evening, he watched it too, wrapping its hues around the hills of his city like a yearning refrain.
What does it mean for a land to “look like it was dreaming” or for colors to wrap themselves around hills in a “yearning refrain”? This woman has strung over a hundred words together in a shoddy attempt to describe a hillside, yet after reading these passages, I have no idea what her setting looks like. There’s an emphasis on colors wrapping themselves around these hills, but we aren’t even told what colors!
Great descriptions should compel us to immediately visualize a scene. The only thing I’m visualizing here are my brain cells getting ready to go on strike from being thus abused.
The Political Sermon
We now come to the second problem with contemporary writing. The few writers who actually can write use their talent to promote ideological garbage; fundamentally incapable of telling a good story, these writers turn to fiction as a means of covertly pushing indefensible ideological messages for nefarious aims. As a result, their novels read more like polemics—or, perhaps, unhinged rants on X—than actual works of art.
The best example from this year’s National Book Award comes courtesy of Morgan Thomas, an autistic man on estrogen who uses his novel Mad Eden to argue that we should be administering hormone therapy to children—and that a failure to do so is somehow an impingement on his personal “joy”:
We had decided it solemnly, we were of an age where such a decision had to be made. If we wanted to wait, things needed to be frozen, some part of us held still in time. And there was hate, of course, that constant. Or prejudice, whatever word you prefer, there was plenty of it that summer and more would come. The governor was trying to shut down R House, and we were no longer using public restrooms, and Liam had canceled a workshop at a local youth center—the organizers were worried about it drawing the wrong sort of attention—and the paper I’d cowritten with several colleagues on intersex considerations in gender-affirming care for minors was pulled from an academic journal after being accepted, edited, and proofed, a decision, they explained in a terse email, they’d made to safeguard the journal’s reputation, and this doesn’t sound like joy, perhaps it is gauche to say that joy came from this, what joy could come, but there was joy, somehow, in our surviving in this place that intended to be inhospitable to us, I felt it sometimes when biting into a slice of garden-grown cucumber marinated in balsamic or diving into the ever-cool waters of the spring, how the state mounted a threat to our joy, how the state seemed increasingly to want to destroy it, and how we, therefore, guarded the joy more steadfastly.
On second thought, Thomas is not a particularly gifted writer—the first few sentences here are also somewhat clunky—but he’s certainly more accomplished than either Danticat or Assadi. The problem with his writing is that if I hadn’t told you that we’d just read an excerpt from a novel, you’d have assumed that we were thrust into a personal essay or even an op-ed. The entire essay—we shall henceforth call it an “essay” because it’s not really fiction—tells us exactly what to believe without room for interpretation: it introduces a political claim followed by a list of supporting examples before veering into a tenuous conclusion. Even the passage’s few vivid images—the cucumber in balsamic (I’ll admit, I like this one) and the spring water—are subsumed under a ridiculous political thesis about “the state” threatening his “joy.”
But the worst part is that Mad Eden (I’m certainly mad that the sacred name “Eden” has been profaned in this way) disparages everyone who doesn’t believe that we should be administering “gender-affirming care” to minors, insisting that such a stance—shared by the majority of Americans—somehow undermines his personal capacity for joy!
I mean, if you want to tell me about threats to joy, this book might be the biggest offender.
Vulgarity and Transgression
Our last example is not necessarily poorly written—this author at least has a personality—but it’s certainly transgressive for transgression’s sake. I’ve written previously about the vulgarization of literature, and it’s a shame that so much of contemporary literature features frequent forays into our bedrooms. Such writing is not only an assault on my eyes but also a slap in the face of Beauty—and the literary establishment routinely eats it up.
Here’s one such example from a novel called The Disappearers, which The New York Times recently praised as “the novel of the decade, if not the century”:
Okay, I should put this down. One time I was in Mummy and Daddy’s room. I was sitting on the bedhead, looking straight at the mirror facing the bed. My shorts and briefs were already down at my ankles and just looking at the mirror was making me hard. I was beating off with Mummy’s cocoa butter when my sister walked in like how any little child walks into a room.
“The fuck!” I cupped my cock and balls instead of pulling up my shorts.
“What you doing?” she asked.
“I...I...Iooking for something,” I said. We both looked at each other through the mirror. I didn’t know what to say next. A cut on my inner thigh that had pus. A mole that might be a wart.
Something, some boy thing to disgust her quick. It’s not like I was babysitting, but the parents did leave me alone with her. We stood there looking at each other through the mirror until her child brain got bored and she walked out.
I can watch myself in the mirror while jacking off. Am I so gay that I turn myself on? Something about it feels nastier than porn, not self-incest, which sounds like something an idiot preacher would say.
This writer is certainly the most technically accomplished of the lot (which isn’t saying much), but let’s look at the substance of his prose. It’s just... vulgar. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing about sex, but simply making a passage graphic or transgressive doesn’t make it “deep” in any meaningful way. At the very least, I’d hesitate to call this book “the novel of the decade,” much less the century.
Maybe the point is to be repulsive, but I suspect that this person wouldn’t have scored a publishing deal if he weren’t out spouting this drivel. We learn nothing about this character from his rant other than the fact that he’s an arrogant prick, and that’s because there’s nothing deeper beneath the shock factor—after all, simply probing the depths of the human mind doesn’t automatically make you “deep.” The human mind is full of shallow garbage, and one must be selective with what makes it onto the page.
Lest you think that’s just an isolated instance of vulgarity, here’s a completely unrelated passage from a later chapter in The Disappearers:
Penis. Cock. Mine is not the only hand to have touched my cock. There have been five others, which given where I live and who I live with and what I have to live with, is damn well something. I already talked about that in this journal and I can’t think of any detail I left out. But this is an exercise, at least that is what I think it is. Watch, observe, report. This might as well be a report for social studies class back in grade school. Maybe I should talk about it like it’s somebody else’s cock. It’s darker than my palms but lighter than my face. I see shows on TV where every athlete is supposedly naked in the locker room, and can’t imagine me surviving that, especially since this is the first time I’m not being labeled one of the school fags. At the same time I wish I was at an American university to see boys walking around jiggling their American cocks while they talk football scores. Or girls. I wonder if they ignore how talking about pussy is getting them hard, or if that is just how it goes in my mind’s porn movie. It’s not the biggest cock I have ever seen, on-screen or in person. But hey, when it’s hard it reaches my navel, which must mean it’s big enough. Is it weird to say that it looks like the cock a person like me is supposed to have?
I don’t even have an analysis of the passage above. It’s just stupid. The only thing I’ve learned from it is that the author clearly wants us to know how big his cock is, which is messed up on many different levels. He deserves no more of my time.
I apologize to the gentlemen on my mailing list. I will make it up to you one of these days by writing an essay about Nabokov’s beautiful prose.
Ideological Capture in Publishing
So why are these books getting published in the first place?
It’s true that we can excuse even the greatest writers for a few bad sentences, but there’s something else going on here: the publishing industry has become ideologically captured.
The National Book Foundation describes this year’s fiction longlist in terms of queer identity, homophobia, migration, Palestine and the Nakba, Haiti and diaspora, displacement, race, and belonging. That’s not to say that books on these subjects shouldn’t exist, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a book about conservatives or Europeans or Israelis on these award lists—even if some of these books might be well-written.
But because the literary establishment rewards a narrow band of subjects—all of them relating to leftist identity politics—books that don’t conform to the status quo disappear from our shelves, and, worse, terribly written books get rewarded simply for tackling particular subjects.
Pandering to radical leftists cannot rescue bad prose, but these judges sure as hell want you to think so. And that is precisely why so many of the National Book Award picks are simply bad. We’ve started to mistake ideology for quality, and our literary culture has suffered as a result.
It’s up to us to save it by reading great literature.
Well, sirs and mesdames, there you have it—an overview of the National Book Award picks. I almost regret writing this essay because I’ve given these people free publicity, but at least my readers will know never to give a penny to any of these “writers” again (though we really need to come up with a new word for contemporary “writers” because whatever these people are doing, they’re certainly not writing).
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Something else I've noticed is the lack of rhythm or cadence in writing now. I'll see things that are "technically fine" but there's no auditory appeal to them, which, in my opinion, causes the work to fall flat. I feel as though my own writing vastly improved when I started studying syntax and applying it.
I think we should understand that an important part of the context of such contemporary writing is that its products are not, and are not intended to be, works of art: they are, and are intended to be, credentials, in particular, academic credentials. It’s highly significant that almost all the writers producing such fiction today are academics of some sort in creative writing, English, or other departments in what used to be called the Humanities. The purpose of this literary output is not to entertain, to enlighten, or even to amuse, it is to provide its author with a credential which will support that author’s career goals of getting fellowships, teaching positions, standard literary awards, and, eventually, the blissful ease of tenure.
Accordingly, the standards which shape these works are those of the academic literary class.
The situation is even worse with poetry, which I don't think it is much of an exaggeration to say is dead in our time.