The Literary Establishment Wants to Lobotomize You

How the Nobel Prize in Literature Became a Celebration of Soulless Writing

Contemporary literature is dying.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that my favorite (somewhat cheeky) claim is that contemporary literature sucks, and, in many ways, it does. Ben Lerner is an emotionless hack, Ottessa Moshfegh’s writing has no soul, and Sally Rooney never graduated from kindergarten. Even sadder is the fact that these writers represent the supposed upper echelon of literary prowess—as BookTok romantasy girls will often remind us, it only goes downhill from there. But unlike most writers who make up the contemporary literary establishment, I am not a nihilist but an optimist—I believe in the power of humanity, and this (admittedly) naive outlook has convinced me time and time again that these writers deserve a chance. That is why I’ve actually subjected myself to literary abominations such as The Topeka School, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Normal People, among others: every time I dive into these novels, I hope to stumble on a gem that might restore my faith in the contemporary literary milieu.

That’s why this past weekend, I really tried to give Anne Carson a chance.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that this past Thursday, Canadian poet Anne Carson took home the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before the big news, I’d only ever read If Not, Winter—Carson’s translations of the poems of Sappho—so I went into our newest Nobel laureate’s work with an open mind—and trust me, I really wanted to like her. Her Wikipedia page, for one, paints her as a serious literary scholar—versed in the likes of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Emily Dickinson, and Franz Kafka—and in a recent viral interview with The New Yorker, Carson even states that she doesn’t read contemporary novels—she reads old books.

For a moment, I thought I’d found a kindred spirit in the literary world—or, at least, a rare anomaly: a classically educated writer who desires to preserve rather than to destroy the literary tradition—but after reading dozens and dozens of Carson’s poems, I was not merely disappointed but downright devastated. Carson’s literary talent was not at all commensurate with her rigorous literary background, and, in fact, I’d hesitate to call her writing “literary” at all—she produces the sort of minimalist slop we might expect from the likes of Sally Rooney or Katie Kitamura, but certainly not from a Nobel laureate.

In short, I was thoroughly nonplussed. How was this highly educated, well-read scholar—a woman who rightfully looks down on contemporary “literature” and seems to hold the classics in great reverence—even capable of producing such horrendously toneless aphorisms?

Before I propose some answers, let’s take a look at some of Carson’s poems.

Our first example is a poem called “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” published in The New Yorker in 2001:

It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.

I had to read this one several times over to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but each additional read only intensified my repulsion. This poem just isn’t… pretty. In fact, Carson’s words reminded me of the telescreen announcers from 1984 who spew Party slogans just to keep the masses compliant. That’s the best way to describe her poems—empty words that don’t mean anything.

A poet’s duty is both to deepen our understanding of the world around us and to evoke a beautiful scene as we contemplate the ecstasies and pitfalls of the human condition. In summoning the image of an ocean, for one, a good poet might compel us to visualize the rhythm of its waves or to experience the taste of saltwater on our tongues. Carson’s ocean, however, does neither—it appeals only to an abstract “green room” that means nothing to anyone but Anne Carson herself. Indeed, there are exactly zero images in this entire poem—the language remains not only minimalist but abstract, and the few concrete images throughout—the earth, the ocean, the plant—pass by wholly unembellished. We don’t know where we are or, worse, what we’re supposed to feel—we’re only told what we must believe about sex and death without being made to experience these uniquely human circumstances.

Neither does “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” sound beautiful when read out loud. On the contrary, it comes off as banal and choppy—maybe that’s the point, but I’ve always been taught that good writing—and especially good poetry—must sound beautiful when read out loud. After all, poetry originated as an oral form—and still is today.

And if our literary icons don’t aspire to weave beauty from a string of words—if they privilege summarizing and reporting over feeling and evoking—then how are they any different from that pesky AI notetaker that nags you in your Zoom calls?

Here’s another example from a poem called “Clive Song,” published in Poetry Magazine in 2024:

He laughs.
His current client, a Moroccan man,
has been cleared for release
and also informed
he will never leave.
Clive, a lawyer, questions the logic of this. 
"I shouldn't laugh."
He tells more stories.
"Evidence" at Guantanamo comes often from snitches.
When the same snitch brought evidence
against 300 different people,
Clive wondered about motive
and did some research. The fact was,
each time the guy snitched
he got a free pass to "the love shack"
where the Americans show porn.

If I hadn’t told you that this poem was written by a Nobel laureate, I guarantee you that you would have concluded that you were reading the idle musings of the aforementioned AI notetaker: “He laughs.” “He tells more stories.” “Clive wondered about motive and did some research.”

I don’t think I’m hallucinating here—these fragments really do sound like an AI summary of a corporate brief—or one of those pesky AI synopses always popping up in Gmail. But poetry isn’t supposed to read like a series of meeting notes from a high school student council meeting, nor should it sound ugly on purpose. And while there’s an argument to be made for the occasional simple line in an otherwise beautiful poem—T.S. Eliot has several of them in The Waste Land—such simplicity only works when it conveys tonal variation—not when an entire poem is replete with laconic garbage. A poet is supposed to take the ordinary world and render it in terms of the extraordinary—Anne Carson’s phrases, on the other hand, are not only uninspired but downright lazy.

“Clive Song,” furthermore, contains no broader commentary on the human condition. The poem summarizes an interaction without inviting us to consider its broader implications, and unlike the great poems of the Western literary tradition, which offer a new understanding of the world on every additional read, “Clive Song” leaves no stone unturned.

If not for Carson’s Nobel Prize win, it would have already been forgotten.

Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” which also appeared in Poetry Magazine, paints a similar emotionless picture of Carson’s passionless, bland universe:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
Night drips its silver tap
down the back.
At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.

My face in the bathroom mirror
has white streaks down it.
I rinse the face and return to bed.
Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother.

I don’t know if I have anything to add beyond what I’ve already said. These poems don’t play with language in any unique or otherwise enticing fashion, nor do they compel you to think more deeply about the world around you. They’re just dull and boring—they evoke no emotion and seem to be crafted exclusively for the TikTok era—though this particular poem was, surprisingly, published back in 1994.

In a word, Anne Carson’s poems are really, really bad.

So how did Ms. Carson—out of the millions of talented writers who populate our society—win the most prestigious literary award on planet Earth?

The answer is simple. The literary establishment no longer cares for the features you or I may find enthralling in a great work of literature—in fact, it openly denounces feeling, emotion, craft, beauty, truth, and—most importantly—meaning, opting instead for simplicity and emotional restraint.

But in a society that continually writes off beauty as “relative” or insists that sincerity is “cringe,” how could it be otherwise?

Just take a look at the sort of books winning our culture’s most prestigious literary prizes—such as David Szalay’s Flesh, which won the Booker Prize in 2025:

He was sitting at her kitchen table eating Somloi galuska while she put the groceries away and then, when she had finished doing that, she asked him if he wanted to see them and he said yes, and she just showed them to him—standing there in the kitchen she took off first her shirt and then her bra. It’s the memory of her doing that that turns him on, as much as what they actually looked like.

What they actually looked like seems almost irrelevant. Or that they were weird and slightly disgusting might even have had the effect of turning him on more.

When he had finished the Somloi galuska, they went to the sofa and kissed for a while and then she undid his trousers and sucked him off again.

Then he left.

If not for the subject matter, you’d assume our narrator was a six-year-old. The excerpt above contains no subtext, no syntactic variation, and no words an elementary schooler would not understand. But Szalay’s most egregious offense is not even his minimalism but the soullessness inherent in his scenes: he describes sex—one of the most meaningful encounters of the human soul—with the same emotional detachment one might use to describe a trip to the DMV. And even if we were to suppose that he wanted to convey the total lack of emotion between these two people, then one might expect even a hint of sadness or discomfort—anything to convince us that we’re reading about two human beings rather than a pair of robots.

Unfortunately, however, this lackluster, emotionless writing style is not unique to Szalay or Carson, nor is it an accident that two of our culture’s most prestigious prizewinners have elected to write in this way—this lobotomized writing style perfectly conforms to the demands of the literary establishment, which wants you to talk about human emotions… with no emotions.

Take this excerpt, for instance, from my archenemy Sally Rooney:

It’s cool you’re playing a gay character, Bobbi was saying to Nick.

Is Brick gay? he said. I think maybe he’s just bisexual.

Don’t say “just bisexual,” she said. Frances is bisexual, you know.

I didn’t know that, Melissa said.

I chose to drag on my cigarette for a long time before saying anything. I knew that everyone was waiting for me to speak.

Well, I said. Yeah, I’m kind of an omnivore.

Melissa laughed at that. Nick looked at me and gave an amused smile, which I looked away from quickly and pretended to take an interest in my glass.

Me too, Melissa said.

Remember the penultimate scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where McMurphy’s lying in his bed, helpless and lobotomized? Jack Nicholson puts more emotion into his portrayal of a lobotomized McMurphy than Sally Rooney puts into her description of human conversation. Stripped of all tonal variation, her language feels strangely anesthetized; the prose describes and summarizes without evoking, and at no point—in any of her nearly identical and jejune novels—does Rooney ever bother to capture the ineffable experience of being human. Like Szalay and Carson, she actively rejects beauty, meaning, and the human soul—and then gets showered with our culture’s most prestigious literary accolades. That’s because the literary establishment doesn’t care for characters who feel anger or self-loathing or even rapture or joy—it cares for minimalism and emotional restraint, and it wants you, the reader, to feel similarly drained.

And that is why, this year, the Nobel Prize in Literature went not to Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami but to Anne Carson—a woman whose writing makes you feel absolutely nothing. The problem, then, with our literary culture is not that we’ve run out of talented writers but that we’ve declared an active war on the ones who dare to speak candidly of the human condition.

The literary establishment wants you to feel lobotomized. The “cool kids,” after all, have always been suave, emotionless, and unperturbed—and in our cigarette-smoking, lowercase-letter, fedora-wearing, black-and-white-Polaroid literary culture, the worst thing you can do is to imbue your writing with a bit—or even a lot—of feeling.

But great literature has always made us feel things—and many of our literary geniuses have never known a thing of emotional restraint. They may not be as “polished” as David Szalay or as restrained as Anne Carson, but they’ll remind you what it’s like to be a human—and maybe even make you shed a tear or two.

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