The so-called blame game

I stole the subject header from Richard Wheeler, a longtime author of Westerns and newbie blogger. Wheeler (who Lee Goldberg also linked to, which was how I saw it in the first place) postulates that in looking for reasons for the decline of the midlist, perhaps the fingers out to be pointed inward–at the very writers who pen such works:

Is it possible that authors are largely to blame for the sharp decline in fiction? Most authors would vehemently say no. Most would argue that fiction is better than ever, well done, vivid, rich and compelling. It’s not the fault of authors. Not the fault of all those mid-list people who have been bumped and can no longer get contracts.

And yet, I wonder. The decline in readership of novels has been going on for years, and began long before the upheavals that affected the mass market distribution system. There was a time when this country had literary lions. A time when an author was a celebrity. A time when a best-selling novel sold in the millions. A time when even genre fiction sold in the hundreds of thousands. Are we, who create the stories, who fashion the product, ready to say that it’s not our fault that we sell in the tens of thousands if we sell at all?

Wheeler goes on to espouse the belief that too many novels today "are technically elegant, but lack flavor, like a meal without salt or spices."

Though my initial instinct is to reject his idea on the grounds that it smacks just a little bit of the "good old days" line of thinking (because certainly there were a great many novels written back in the day that weren’t just technically elegant and lacking substance, but utter crap, just like now–and some of them are even reissued as "important" works but don’t really work on pure storytelling fronts) I’m more inclined to disagree because of changes in current culture.

The reason an author could be a celebrity or championed as a literary lion was because culture was a lot less fragmented than it is now, and because society as a whole aspired to a middlebrow concept which melded arts, culture, literature and thought so that it was accessible to the majority. But that concept died out years ago; currently it’s all about niche, about splinter segments and attracting small but discrete groups to your flavor of the moment.

I think that’s why the success of the DA VINCI CODE shocked so many in terms of its staying power, because it hearkened back to those days of the middlebrow when everybody read a certain book or listened to a certain musical group or watched a certain television show. And it turns out, yet again, that the current edition of "middlebrow" is of a lot lower standard than it once was. Or was purported to be.

I don’t think the solution is to bring everyone back to a common ground; there are simply too many competing media and interests for that to occur. Even within the bounds of crime fiction, there are so many subgenres that have no means of overlapping. I may read a bunch of different types of crime books, but I hardly ever read cozies; someone who does may never touch a psychological suspense thriller or a historical mystery.

So even if an author writes the most compelling, audience-pleasing book imaginable (and by audience-pleasing I mean something that happens to do so, not necessarily one intended to do so) its potential readership’s probably going to be fairly small and stay that way.

That’s the problem with having so many choices; it means there’s just too much to choose from. In the days of the literary lion, there weren’t nearly as many books published, nor were there as many people who thought that writing a book would be something cool to try and gee, maybe I can get it published somewhere, major house, self-published, whatnot. There also weren’t nearly as many agents trying to make 15% off of zero, because there were so many writers obtaining representation for books that didn’t end up selling. And there weren’t so many books potentially available in a bookshop that to walk in is to get a form of mental claustrophobia, freezing up at the sheer number of books on shelves.

But that Pandora’s Box is wide open so there’s no point in trying to stem it shut. If the midlist is dead, call it something else or make do with what current economics or cultural changes implicitly suggest. The middlebrow ain’t coming back, and there are a whole bunch of different brows out there. Cater to a few, or even a bunch, but unless you’re a freak of nature named Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, you’re just not going to be able to cater to them all.

(for more on the middlebrow concept, I strongly suggest giving the preface to "A Terry Teachout Reader" a look-see, as it explains things a whole lot better than I could.)