There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the Washington Review of Books?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is the Washington Review of Books?”
N.B.:
The WRB’s third birthday sale is still ongoing; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the month. That works out to $4/month or $40/year. [You figure we send out around ten newsletters a month—that’s under fifty cents a newsletter. You can’t get anything that cheap these days. —Steve]
Links:
In The Point,
on alt-lit:It’s weird that the alt-litterateurs think there’s something radical in all this authenticity stuff, but it’s downright baffling that they think there’s anything remotely subversive in being online. That’s the whole of contemporary literature! A good chunk of My First Book (2024) is taken up by “Z Was for Zoomer,” a series of mini essays on an alphabetical list of internet terms. Autism, based, cringe, doomer, edgelord. Levy thinks millennials’ memes are weak, but here she’s adopting a very distinctly millennial form, which is the sort-of introspective essay about some facet of internet culture. “Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold.” It’s giving Jia Tolentino. It’s giving all the hundreds of books of essays about growing up online by people in their thirties. There’s no lack of mainstream fiction doing the same general thing, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024). But really that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok. The recent glut of normie novels about trying to be a good person, or minor racial contretemps between professional-class narcissists, or hot girlies who don’t really do anything in particular—all of these are attuned to the sensibilities of an implicitly online public, whose sense of what might be an interesting topic for literature is downloaded directly from Twitter. The most mainstream Obama-endorsed fiction is now more like a feed than anything else: a series of sharp little lines, minute observations, quips, for you to quote on social media. The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system. You are not radical or cutting-edge because you remember Neopets.
[I had some notes on the demand for male vulnerability in literature in WRB—July 20, 2024. (Spoilers: I’m against it.)
The obsession with authenticity is doubly bizarre to me. As Kriss notes, much of this is “contrived and artificial writing that pretends to be naïve and sincere,” and it’s also a movement that should have an interest in killing its fathers instead mindlessly regurgitating David Foster Wallace. He says in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993):
[Irony’s] not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.
Saturn merely feared his children would destroy him and so ate them; he had the decency not to invite them to crawl into his stomach. The postmodern fathers—interesting word choice—used irony to achieve their position, but DFW will use sincerity, and he will encourage everyone else to use sincerity, and so he will never be overthrown. How can you kill your fathers without a bit of irony? Why is the gospel of your new movement the same as one written thirty years ago for an old one?
But even DFW’s uses of the words “irony” and “sincerity” (the latter means “positivity,” the former “negativity”) at least point somewhere beyond the self. But what can possibly be done with “deeply felt” and “sincere”? Here’s the thing: books are deeply felt and sincere. They all are. It takes a lot of time and effort to write one. Authors have something they need to convey to their readers, and that need motivates the writing. If that idea is “I really want this to get a positive review in the Times,” the book will no doubt be bad, but that is nevertheless a deeply felt and sincere desire expressed through the book. (New York Times, if you’re reading this: review my newsletter.)
And that points to the real question—not whether something is sincere or deeply felt, but what is done with that feeling. If you don’t believe me, consider that all eight billion people in the world feel many things deeply and sincerely; substantially fewer of them are going to write good books. At the furthest extreme we have what Tennyson calls
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Now this is very good (if rhyming “night” with “light” is overdone it is also unavoidable). We would be much less impressed if instead of writing these lines Tennyson produced a screaming infant, and yet the infant would have a sincerity and depth of feeling these lines cannot quite match. What raw immediacy! But once we enter the domain of language (as Tennyson says the infant has “no language but a cry”) other considerations come in. As Julia said in WRB—July 17, 2024 (there about poetry, but it applies to all uses of language):
The real issue here is that, even when a poem starts from a place of interiority, it isn’t really possible to writing a poem without “account[ing] for anyone”; language is something we always learn communally, for one, but also any craft decision that a poet makes relative to a particular tradition (which is to say, all craft decisions) is one that’s thinking about other people.
Writers are thinking about their audience, how their audience will perceive their work, how it fits in with what else they’ve read, what the decisions made in the work say about how the work and its writer should be understood; the audience knows this; the writer knows that the audience knows this; and so on. Somewhere in there irony might slip back in, but all of it is fatal to any uncomplicated sincerity. Sincerity is a pose; so is irony. Artlessness is an artistic decision; so is being artful. All of it has its uses, and neither “sincere” nor “ironic” is always praise or always blame. Don’t write something sincere. Don’t write something ironic, either. Write something good. —Steve]
Reviews:
In the Journal, Henry Hitchings reviews a book about letters (Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers, by Rachel Syme, January):
Ms. Syme offers plenty of advice: “unburden yourself”; “write more love letters”; “read your letters while eating alone at a bar.” She highlights postcards’ usefulness for “tiptoeing” back into dialogue with a person one has been neglecting. Turning to dispatches from abroad, she counsels: “When in doubt, send a list,” since “lists are the quickest way to transmit the sensory pleasures of being elsewhere.” One of her most charming ideas, perhaps a touch impractical, is to set aside a “correspondence hour” to sit, nursing a fountain pen and a cocktail, and write letters without distraction.
In the course of explaining, none too seriously, how to write a “bitchy” letter, Ms. Syme quotes words Alice Roosevelt Longworth chose to have embroidered on a pillow: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit right here by me.” More immediately useful is her tip for writing an apology: “Don’t make the mistake, à la Emily Post, of trying to be impeccably right. Just do your best to be impeccably kind.”
[As someone who eats alone at a bar with some frequency, I can’t imagine reading my letters there—although maybe people just aren’t sending me letters that are long enough. I do find eating at a bar a pleasant place to engage in long text conversations, though, and maybe that’s as close as we can get now. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Jane Austen’s monument more lasting than bronze
Ford Madox Ford looks back before the First World War
Grace on a Poem by Herman Melville about a non-whale sea creature
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]
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