Declarations of literature's impending demise, ranked
the novel is 100 percent for sure dead this time
Did you know literary fiction is dead again? I promise it’s more dead than the last time. And even more dead than the other last time. No, I mean the other, other last time. It’s also more dead than poetry was a few years ago. Reading in general is maybe being killed by the little ding-ding screen machine in your pocket but reading is also apparently really terrifying.
Sometimes I feel this discourse is too stupid to even engage in. (Except for the decline in English majors which actually does make me sad.) These days, obituaries for Serious Literature are often the exclusive province of men making weirdly gendered complaints about how literature isn’t virile enough. But the takes keep coming and they won’t stop coming.
In honor of literary fiction’s current demise, I’m rating and reviewing major installments in the opinion genre known as “literature is 100 percent for sure dead this time.” (The headline was a lie; I’m not actually ranking them, sorry, just organizing into a chronology.)
I’ll be updating this list as I find more examples, though I promise not to spam your inbox with every update, so please send your least favorite takes on reading, novels and literature.
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The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction, July 2023, Esquire.
A masterclass in pontificating about how we all are so distracted we literally can’t even book anymore. Strikes a delicate balance between condescension and pretension that would’ve been cutting-edge in 2009.
Most of the essay is worth skipping but especially the final section in which author Will Blythe constructs an elaborate fantasy about a woman ahead of him in line at Barnes & Noble. (He decides he wants to marry her because she has a flip phone.)
Rating: 1/10
Is the Novel Dead? September 2017, McSweeney’s.
“Is Amazon a portal to the underworld?”
Yes.
Rating: 11/10
The novel is dead (this time it's for real), May 2014, The Guardian.
Mostly notable for the phrase “kidult boywizardsroman,” which I can’t deny is a pretty great way to mock Harry Potter.
Rating: 4/10
Where Have All the Mailers Gone? June 2010, The Observer.
Did you know all of history’s memorable authors were men? Yeah me too but they're all dead now, so literature is dead, or at least a thriving literary culture is dead. But hey not all is lost: “Without a doubt,” writes Lee Siegel, “the next male or female Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald is out there somewhere, hard at work.”
True enough, the next Zelda Fitzgerald is out there somewhere, hard at work on her novels.
Rating: 0/10
Perchance to Dream, April 1996, Harper’s.
Jonathan Franzen would like you to know that, even though he disavows the cliché about how reading serious books makes you a better person, that’s only because it gets the whole cause-and-effect thing backwards. It’s really just that the people who read serious fiction — like himself — read it because they are better people. And those better people are dying off like the fucking dinosaurs!
This is actually one of the more interesting examples of the genre (which isn’t saying much). The analysis of digital technology and corporate profiteering’s impact on literature feels prescient rather than dated. But my god it drags on and on and then he ends by comparing himself to misunderstood-genius-in-his-own-time Herman Melville. Sorry Jonathan, but Moby Dick your last book was not!
Rating: 5/10
This list will be updated.