The Culture of Impatience

According to Rachel Donadio:

. . .These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume. In a market dominated by the big chain stores, if a novel doesn't sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim.

"The whole system is set up for impatience," said Drenka Willen, an editor at Harcourt whose authors include Umberto Eco and José Saramago. That "system" also favors the familiar name over the new voice.

That the "whole system is set up for impatience" seems to be confirmed by a recent study conducted by Lulu.com:

The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year -- according to the study of the half-century from 1956-2005.

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.

“The blockbuster novel is heading the way of the mayfly,” says Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.com, referring to the famously short-lived insect.

The plummeting life-expectancy of a fiction bestseller, says Young, reflects the way that the publishing industry is unravelling, in an age of over-production, plus media fragmentation and now disruptive new technologies such as the Internet and print-on-demand: “The publishing revolution is nigh.”

Whether the "pubishing revolution is nigh" remains to be determined, but I certainly cannot see how writers are acting in their own best interests by giving in to this culture of impatience. And they do so when they trade off the greater control of their own literary destinies they might retain by going with a smaller press or with self-publishing for the residual distinction a known-name press must still offer. It's hard to know what else aside from this boost in self-esteem the large publishers do offer, since if the above numbers are to be believed, writers are not getting any greater visibility from them. Surely the more focused attention a smaller press might give an individual book would give that book more than the two-week window it apparently now has to gain notice in the prevailing "system." Writers could also help themselves by starting blogs, but if they have to do this even when being published by mainstream presses, it is again hard to see what good those presses are doing them.

Free-standing litblogs could also work against the culture of impatience, as I suggested in a previous post. Perhaps if we got away from the model of book blog as compendium of daily book news--whereby we are inherently dependent on the publishing business and its media voices for content, and thus implicitly sanction this business even while we occasionally question its practices--and thought of it as truly an opportunity for individual and independent voices to discuss literature and engage in a form of literary criticism, there would gradually develop a new model of "promotional intelligence" that values books for their long-term relevance rather than their short-term status as commodities. As Donadio herself says at the end of her article, "There is, after all, a difference between a reader and a market."

Ralph Waldo Emerson once advised that one should wait at least a year before reading any "new" book. I don't know that I would take it that far, but the principle he is enunciating is sound. Read the book for what it has to offer as a work of seriously-intended writing, not for its merely fashionable prominence, its place in line among the newly-printed. I, for one, have resolved to discuss more new works of fiction, but to do so at a sane and measured pace. I may discuss books that were published months if not years previously but that from such a distance still seem worth readers' attention, even if the two-week window has long fogged over. I would hope that some readers would be willing to rub away a clear space for them.

Comments

[Dorothy W.]

As a new book blogger, what's exciting to me is that while I've always tried to be a slow and careful reader of a variety of things (occasionally successful), now with a blog I can write about it and (a few) people will read it and respond. Thanks for the post.

[Jonathan David Jackson]

Good thoughts, as usual!

I've always been devoted to small, well-run, independent presses, and I collect new ones into my knowledge-base almost as much as I drink tea (which is a lot), and it just so happens that I found my way back to Gilbert Sorrentino through Coffee House Press, the small publisher that has done a great deal to keep his recent work alive.

In fact, one of the ways that we may celebrate Sorrentino's lifework and simultaneously create our own more generous and discerning literary cultures against the grain of an impatient, sometimes vulgarly commercial set of book markets would be to buy his books online directly at small presses if their websites allow us to do so. We can start by buying Sorrentino's three most recent collections from Coffee House Books at

www[dot]coffeehousepress[dot]org

Just browse by "titles."

My old journal tells me that I first starting reading Sorrentino in December of 1992--the exact same month that I started reading John Barth, Stephen Dixon, Jill Johnston, James Purdy (Purdy's IN A SHALLOW GRAVE genuinely frightened me almost as much as the movie BURNT OFFERINGS did when I was a child). In 1992, Professors Barth and Dixon two were well-regarded teachers in the city where I was living and studying for my undergraduate degree at the time...there are actually quite a few truly excellent graduate level creative writing teachers: when I later took one course with Stephen Dixon I found him to be a most exacting and generous critic of his students' work: he would literally type or write out detailed (and, in my case, spot-on blistering yet well-deserved) comments on manuscripts in addition to line edits in his halting, knowing cursive; his colleague John Barth retired from the university the year that I studied with Professor Dixon).

You see, these authors' very invention will not even countenance impatience.

For me, that's one of the hallmarks of truly original fiction and poetry--the kind that resists yet stakes claims on prior conventions with such transformative force that they demand not to be considered as ephemera.

Impatience may well be one of the candified qualities of mind most concomittant with ephemera.

You must be prepared in a fashion to share with the writers whose work you so well call out in your blog, Dan; you have to concentrate--which is not to say that there is no joy, no levity to be had...I laugh out loud reading the work of a newly published authors like Donald Antrim with his dark, violent, rhetorically challenging aesthetic or Holly Link with her odd glosses on witchcraft, or Hanne Blank, one of the most original voices in literary erotic fiction that I know.

In the end, don't we make books breathe too?

[birnbaum]

Spot on Daniel

Literary journalism and thus so called mainstream culture has been hijacked by commercial concerns---as in a steady flow (which is, of course, an understatement) of titles ( I don't think they actually qualify as books until you have them in hand).

The window of attention for the new has been foreshortened - movies, the 1st and maybe 2nd weekend, and for books, maybe 4-6 weeks.

That's crazy, for sure.

[Roy Rubin]

Well said Dan.

[Ron Mashate]

I have a bit of trouble seeing the difference between the Reader and the Market. The Reader is the Market. And if anything, the expanding market in "books" caters to the niches, hence fragmentation. Further, I'm not exactly sure how this could be avoided, short of market regulation. If readers aren't reading it, if critics aren't talking about it, if people aren't championing it, then the market, at least for that book (and at least for the time being), isn't likely to exist. Art doesn't have autonomy, much as it wish it did. Louis Menand had an interesing piece in the New Yorker on something along these lines. (It seems that I can't use html in the comments so the title of the Menand piece is All That Glitters: Literature's Global Economy)

[birnbaum]

The confusion of the Reader with the Market is the bad reasoning used to justify countless sins.

Of course it is necessary for an artist's creation to be brought to the attention of its (possible) constituency and that the artist be compensated in some way (material and emotional)but these facts and others do not justify the juggernaut that exists to hypnotize (brain wash, if you will)consumers and it is not the same thing as the economic entity---the market which is neither human or in conformity with human imperatives.

It would be naive to deny or ignore the material conditions that exist (prevail?) but that does not require lovers of literature and art to do the dirty work of hucksters and vulgarians by subsuming some kind of "realitic" acquiesence to that so called reality.

EG Should one care about the weekly announcement of which film is #1 at the box office?

This infiltration into all areas of life by the Market and its flying monkeys is responsible for something as as rank and wrong headed as the recent NYT Best Novel of the Quarter century pr stunt.

Or advertisements such as "Don't be the last one in your neighborhood to get the new Harry Potter."

Need I say more?

[Ron Mashate]

Then, Birnbaum, you'll especially enjoy the Louis Menand New Yorker piece. (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?051226crbo_books)

[Dan Green]

Menand merely points out that "literature"--especially as it now seeks out "international recognition"--has become implicated in the system of "cultural capital." He does not say this is a good thing, merely that it is. In fact, his essay has an elegiac quality to it: "That ideal [of autonomous art] disappeared a long time ago. The Martians have already landed." Personally, I think the Martians should mind their own business.

[birnbaum]

Well, I think English's book on literary prizes has some passing sociological interest---I suppose Menand's take on it is accurate.

To see how the literary marketplace ---so-called--- is its own reductio ad absurdum, just have a peek at newest literary prize inaugurated last year,QUILLS.

"Of course, we like to think that recognition of literary excellence is intuitive," says Menand.

Daniel, do you agree?

[Dan Green]

Robert: I wouldn't say that it's always intuitive. Sometimes time has to pass or critics have to convince some readers of a writer's excellence. Or both. But I wouldn't say that the two alternatives are sheer intuition and rank commerce. Somewhere between is the right balance between "ideals" and the need to find readers for one's work.

[Ron Mashate]

I'd agree, though caution to add that any intuition is complicated by, or not necessarily independent of, a literary history that already informs these discussions of excellence or merit or commercial appeal or what have you. Even so, Sartre appreciated something in Faulkner that wasn't exactly informed by what was going on in the southern United States, at least not implicitly, even though it was intuitively simpatico with what Proust had been up to.