Making Literature Now 9780804799423

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Advance Praise for Making Literature Now “Making Literature Now is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the way the conditions of cultural creation are changing in the new economy. In a granular and highly accessible manner, Hungerford takes us into sites where the work of THRPUNKPZZLTPUH[PUNHUKYLHKPUNJVU[LTWVYHY`ÄJ[PVUHJ[\HSS`[HRLZWSHJL introducing us to the kinds of people who make it possible. An inventive blend of [OLVY`HUKJYP[PJPZT^P[OWYVÄSLHUKYLWVY[HNLMaking Literature Now is enriched by P[ZYHUNLVMHUNSLZHUKHWWYVHJOLZ;OPZPZHIVVR^P[OP[ZÄUNLYVU[OLW\SZLVM[OL contemporary literary scene.” William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education and Excellent Sheep “Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now is bold and brilliant. At once coolly analytical and ardently engaged, Hungerford reads and interprets with rigor, precision, and moral passion. Bracing, important, revelatory work.” Priscilla Gilman, author of The Anti-Romantic Child “Beneath the pleasure of discovering an unknown new book is the vertiginous sense of an entire unknown literature lying beneath the handful of titles that have come to KLÄULJVU[LTWVYHY`^YP[PUN(T`/\UNLYMVYKL_WVZLZ[OLZ\I[LYYHULHUUL[^VYRZ that channel books to acclaim or oblivion in order to rescue an alternative present. Written with Hungerford’s characteristic compassion and rigor, Making Literature Now illuminates what it means to write—and to read—in the millennium.” Michael Clune, author of Gamelife and White Out “Piercing through the oppressive roar of our online culture, Making Literature Now WYV]PKLZHUPU]HS\HISLKLÄUP[PVUVM^OH[PZHUKVM[LUwhat is not[^LU[`ÄYZ[ century literature. In identifying emerging paradigms through the literary stars who create them, Amy Hungerford blazes a new trail, going where most scholars dare not tread.” Robert Weil, Editor-in-Chief, Liveright Publishers “It’s rare for literary criticism to bring news. But Making Literature Now is that decisive book that tells you things you want to know about the circumstances and conditions of writing today, even while it guides you through theoretical issues and

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Making Literature Now

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Making Literature Now Amy Hungerford

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Support for the color image supplement generously provided by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale University. A previous version of “McSweeney’s and the School of Life” was published in Contemporary Literature 53:4 (2012): 646–80. © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced by the permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. A previous version of “How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love” was published in American Literary History 25:3 (2013): 607–24. © 2013 by Oxford University Press and reproduced by its permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hungerford, Amy, author. Title: Making literature now / Amy Hungerford. Other titles: Post 45. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Post 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2015050245| ISBN 9780804795128 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804799409 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Publishers and publishing—United States. | Book industries and trade—United States. | Literature—Appreciation—United States. | Books and reading—United States. | McSweeney’s (Firm) Classification: LCC Z471 .H89 2016 | DDC 070.5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050245 ISBN 9-780-8047-9942-3 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

For my sister, Holly Frances Hungerford 1965–2011 who lives

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6

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_P

Introduction: Writing from the Rabbit Hole

1

Making Literature Now

19

McSweeney’s and the School of Life

41

Reading Novels in the Net

71

GPS Historicism

93

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

119

On Not Reading DFW

141

Afterword: Present-Tense Archive

169

Notes

171

0UKL_

189

Acknowledgments

A scholar of contemporary literature is privileged to be able to talk in real time to writers and others in the business of making literature. In this project I embraced that privilege and turned my research to the archive of the unfolding present. In that open-air library I met many makers and thinkers who changed me and whose company made research a joy. I am grateful first and foremost to Jordan Bass at McSweeney’s for opening the door for my initial research trip to the press’s offices in San Francisco. During that visit many members of the staff talked with me about their work and their aspirations and I enjoyed a brief conversation with Dave Eggers, who had given his permission for the visit. Those interviews became the kernel of my thinking in the book; it would be a lesser thing without that core of urgent, humane conversation early in the project. Radiating out from the McSweeney’s staff are the writers, literary entrepreneurs, and editors with whom I spoke during the development of this book. I am deeply indebted to Richard Nash for several long interviews about his work, and to Deb Olin Unferth, who taught me much, both in her writing and in conversation. Russell Quinn, whom I met at McSweeney’s in 2010, continued to talk with me after he left the press. It was a privilege to get to know him and his art. Eli Horowitz, true to his vocation as an editor and creator, was generous with his time, energy, and conversation. He was willing to converse about his projects and mine over several years, always responsive and engaged when I reached out to him. Best of all, Eli always asked questions that made me see in an utterly new light some idea, sentence, or fact that had crept unexamined into my work. I am honored by the friendship he extended to me and to this project.

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Acknowledgments

I am not sure that any of these people—all makers in their own right—will either like or agree with the analyses and conclusions of this book; the opinions and mistakes here are all mine. I venture to hope that we are committed to the same thing: to a capacious vision of what it means to make literature now. The intellectual company found in my own institutional home—the university— sustained me as always. My friends and colleagues in the Post45 collective brilliantly dissected many parts of this book between 2009 and 2015. The thanks would have to start with J. D. Connor, Florence Dore, Mary Esteve, Loren Glass, Kate Marshall, Sean McCann, Deak Nabers, Debbie Nelson, and Michael Szalay, but there are so many others from our symposia—particularly Mark McGurl—whose comments left an imprint on this book. The work also benefited from the responses of audiences at Case Western Reserve, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and the University of Michigan, as well as the editors, faculty, and graduate students at the Arizona Quarterly symposium in 2011 and the participants at Günter Leypoldt’s “Acquired Taste” conference at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg in June 2013. My graduate students—especially the members of our dissertation working group—were kind and energetic intellectual companions while I was writing this book: special thanks to Tony Domestico, Merve Emre, Soren Forsberg, Chris Grobe, Len Gutkin, and Palmer Rampell. Jonathan Freedman was my intellectual sounding board on many summer runs in Vermont; those conversations were as pleasing and wild as the hills and bears. Lanny Hammer’s advice on ethnographic research and our gossipy talks about our work at the Kitchen Zinc bar never failed to recharge my thinking and my pleasure in the task. Gordon Hutner, David James, and Andrzej Gąsiorek edited pieces that appeared in ALH and Contemporary Literature; I am grateful for their commitment to helping my work (and in Gordon’s case, so many others’ work) achieve its best form. And more, it is humbling to realize that seven people have read and commented on

Acknowledgments

something resembling the full manuscript. Kathryn Lofton and Leslie Jamison read all I had at different points during the year before the manuscript went to the press for review. Their readings—personal, invested, sparking with intellectual wattage— had a profound impact on my conception of the book as a whole. My only regret is that Making Literature Now is not as brilliant as their different visions of it, visions they shared with me over summer cocktails and purple-rice sushi, respectively. The two readers for Stanford University Press—Mark Greif and another anonymous reader—gave me incisive advice to which I tried to live up. Mark, a gifted editor himself, suggested how to revise the structure of the chapters, which has made, I hope, for a much more shapely book. At Stanford University Press, Emily-Jane Cohen, supportive from the first, offered a level of attention that is rare these days, reading the manuscript from cover to cover and helping me retune my evolving prose style. Florence Dore and Loren Glass, the Post45 series editors, offered feedback and enthusiasm for the manuscript that helped push it into port. Stanford honored my wish to find two readers beyond the members of the Post45 Board (who were already familiar with my work) rather than the customary one. I think this was crucial to the book’s final growth. Closest to home, my mother, Valerie Hungerford, housed me, fed me, and graciously ignored me during several key writing retreats at her house in New Hampshire over the last few years. Those stints of concentrated work were beyond price and I treasure the memory of them. My sister, Laura Bachmann, cheered me on, made well-timed quips when needed, and helped me decide what to put first when many things demanded my attention. My children, Clare and Cyrus, endured my preoccupation and grounded me always in the pleasures of love and play. My spouse, Peter Chemery, opened up the time for me to go away for those writing weekends, and gave me the mental space to continue when at home. He has been faithful to my vocation as a scholar and writer even when I have not. To borrow some words from a favorite John Barth story: it is he who best espouses me.

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Making Literature Now

Introduction Writing from the Rabbit Hole

In the back of the cruddy basement space of McSweeney’s offices at 849 Valencia Street in San Francisco, one could find, at the end of 2010, cardboard boxes spilling stacks of postcards. These were the business reply cards sent back by readers to begin their subscriptions to the press’s literary quarterly; they were stashed among the drafts, proofs, and correspondence of the press’s disorganized archive. Many were embellished with notes and doodles, and the earliest came wrapped in letters specifying the subscriber’s choice of bonus gifts on offer—T-shirts, drawings, special inscriptions—for those who were kind enough to buy the magazine. Those reply cards exuded personality, as if they were directed not to a press’s marketing operation but to a particular someone who elicited affirmation, banter, friendship. Of course this was the tone set by the press’s founder, Dave Eggers, in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Eggers had established that tone at the press from the start. In the early years, it would be hard to call McSweeney’s sales activities a marketing operation—it was just Eggers and a friend or two trying to sell enough subscriptions to keep going. One story that could be told about what it takes to make literature now—and, more locally, about what those postcards mean—would center on a figure like Eggers. This book takes a different approach and, moreover, holds lightly to its choices about what to hold up out of the welter of contemporary writing and publishing in the effort to understand how literature is made now. In paired chapters, the book enters various portals to a story about the networks through which contemporary literature is made. The first two chapters focus directly on McSweeney’s and some writers they have published; the second two take up a handful of small-scale virtual media literary

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enterprises; the last two chapters consider writers who are successful in the largescale literary trade press. These pairs have their own shapes and arguments, but also communicate materially with one another through points of intersection touching back to the McSweeney’s network. We might use an analogy from gaming, with an assist from Lewis Carroll, to describe how these chapters work together: each account of making serves as a rabbit hole into a broader network of makers, objects, and acts. In alternate reality gaming, the “rabbit hole” is an invitation to enter the alternate world of the game. It might be a note chalked on a sidewalk, a sign on a certain telephone pole, a post or a web site or a tweet. Players follow a game’s rabbit holes into the alternate reality created by the game’s designers and, ultimately, by its players. Each rabbit hole sparks an action that pulls the player physically and mentally into a network of people, places, acts, things, consequences. Such games unfold differently depending upon which rabbit hole a player has chosen to follow, and thus what we refer to as “the game” is more like a network of linking and overlapping sets of plays. Like the reality to which they provide an alternative, such games blend the intentions of designers with the unpredictable choices of individual players and the contingencies of the material world through which they thread. The game and its outcomes are described by some complex equation encompassing all of these. Indeed, the alternate reality is not experienced as the same by each player, and fundamental differences grow from a player’s choice of rabbit hole. The postcards in the McSweeney’s basement are themselves a rabbit hole. They pull us toward a larger social network, a network that requires not one person but dozens, hundreds. Some work centrally at the press, more have passed through it as interns. Hundreds have published in the quarterly—533 different writers appeared in the first 31 issues, to take one benchmark—and thousands of others read their work, mapping the social geography of McSweeney’s distribution around the world. And then there are the overlapping networks of writers, readers, and publishers that we might offhandedly call “contemporary American publishing,” and that share space in

Introduction

the culture with McSweeney’s. Those who publish in McSweeney’s may also publish elsewhere; those who work for the press come from and go on to other jobs. For every McSweeney’s book shares a shelf at the bookstore—or a page on the web, or a table in a home or classroom—with other books and objects, and each has a story to explain its presence there. Their surfaces touch, their icons scroll, they accumulate marginalia, fingerprints, or dust, and the browsing hand continually chooses. What do their material connections tell us about our shared culture? And what follows from the browser’s choices? Across the room from the piled boxes in the 849 Valencia Street basement, just above a grouping of ancient couches, a mural brightened the mess when I visited there in 2010. About five feet square, in reds, browns, and yellows and high proletarian style, the mural showed workers bending in the fields, harvesting books that twined up on stalks from the furrows. In the sky above them a shining, smiling figure presided, dressed in Chairman Mao’s jacket. One might at first mistake that man for Dave Eggers, as I did when I first laid eyes on it. But no: this is Eli Horowitz. Who? My point, exactly. This book tells the stories of how unknown participants, workers who are largely invisible to the public—including readers, writers, editors, book distributors, and scholars—collaborate (sometimes unwittingly) to create literary worlds, including the world glimpsed in those stacks of subscription cards and affectionately satirized in the basement mural. To consider the penumbra of actors surrounding a figure such as Eggers is to question the very weight such public figures carry in literary culture, a weight that is often taken for granted by those who write about that culture. Understanding Eggers doesn’t allow us necessarily to understand why and how readers and writers connect, in material ways, with the press he founded. Precision matters: sometimes it is not an Eggers but a Horowitz who builds the road from writer to reader. This is a book, then, about literary work in its multifarious forms, about the institutions and relationships that organize and shape that work. And by work I don’t only mean works—novels or stories—but also work

3

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Introduction

in the ordinary sense: the daily labor of those who read, write, review, teach, make, distribute, design, and sell books and other forms of writing that become classed under that baggy term, literature. They do so, or try to do so, for a living. One branch of contemporary sociology has laid down a challenge that this book takes up by thinking about contemporary literature’s social worlds. It has been argued, over the last 15 years or so, that the field of sociology mistakenly assumes—as do most of us in common parlance—that something called “the social” always exists. The French sociologist Bruno Latour argued instead that social connections only deserve the name when they are acted upon, that the social only exists at all when its networks are activated, and what’s more, that social actors come in both human and nonhuman forms. Our connections to other people only constitute social organization when we, or nonhuman actors like books, apps, or delivery truck routes, act to change or shape the arrangements in which we live—be they material, cultural, environmental, geographic, psychic, intellectual. Latour’s claim is provocative for the scholar contemplating a research project: it makes the standard and the object of sociological study seem virtually unreachable by the ordinary means of scholarly inquiry, especially if the subject of study is some aspect of the past. The grain of research that flows logically from this understanding of the social is incredibly fine and of a qualitative sort that defies statistical aggregation, let alone the slow habits of close reading; a grain that can never be fully represented even by the most obsessive archival practices. The method calls to mind versions of study that are daunting and tedious and threaten to devolve into what one colleague called “a heap of facts”: being there to see the conversations that make things happen in whatever field of endeavor we want to understand; raking the archives not for recollection or record but for the actual trace of a social act as it unfolded, and not just one social act but an infinite series of them; cramming them, by force of method, into the book one writes. And indeed, Latour’s early work on the culture of the lab, in Science in Action, reads a bit this way. Latour urges us to consider every conversation

Introduction

the researcher has with people involved in the social world she is studying as itself a moment of activation, and modification, of the social network. Latour embraces this expansiveness, and this intervention, in his polemics on the subject. Playfully calling his method “Actor-Network Theory,” or ANT, he indicates the scale at which one would need to focus in order to make good on the method.1 The horizon of research suggested by Latour is something this book honors less in scope than in spirit—in its choices about what is worth seeing in literary culture. ࠮

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The twelfth issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, published in 2003, prepared readers for its table of contents with a dedication that honors those who do not make a living from their literary interests. “As always,” the dedication proclaims, “for the amateur reader.” It is not hard to imagine what an amateur reader is—someone who does not read for a living. Insofar as McSweeney’s is dedicated to the amateur reader, it is also dedicated to the amateur writer, or rather, it occupies a niche in literary culture where many writers unable to make a living from their work publish in hopes of eventually doing so. This was especially true for the issue that bears the dedication, as we will see. The early issues of McSweeney’s call for cash donations that will be rewarded variously by T-shirts, “kind, handwritten notes,” and other swag. Those issues also bear the note, “This journal has been proofread, but not by paid professionals.” No. 3 notes that the journal was “proofread, by a professional, but he was not paid.” Each of the first three issues explains the cost of the magazine’s production, and no. 3 goes into detail about how $2,330, raised at a McSweeney’s fundraising event in Chinatown and stuffed into Eggers’s small black backpack, was left in a cab on the way home, never to be recovered. The credits in no. 12 include “store leaders” in Brooklyn and San Francisco, and the educational director for 826 Valencia, an afterschool tutoring and writing program for educationally underserved children, suggesting the ways that, in this early issue, these enterprises remained connected with one another and anchored in the quarterly, which also lists hosts

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of other helpers by name in its small, copyright-page print. (In contrast, when I spoke with him in 2010 Eggers emphasized a separation between the activities of the 826 Valencia enterprises and the literary work of the press.) McSweeney’s appears at once, then, as a location of literary celebrity and professional success—in the person of Eggers and a handful of the quarterly’s and the press’s regular writers—and as the site for the black-hole opposite: for the unknown and the unread, for subsistence writers and volunteer, part-time literati.2 The symbiotic relationship between these two poles of cultural recognition can be glimpsed, on the one hand, in the sustained feelings of affection that subsistence writers and literary volunteers bear toward the quarterly that, for a time, embraced their work. On the other hand, subsistence writers and volunteers provide for the quarterly two things it values: authenticity (art made for art’s sake rather than for commercial purposes) and novelty. The love of novelty is something that the quarterly shares with both mass culture and elite literary culture (though in the elite realm one calls valued new writing experimental or avant-garde). The promotion of authenticity through amateurism similarly plays both ways in American culture, appealing to both the high and the low. Authenticity is popular as an ethos or style in American mass culture—we might think of midcentury writers such as J. D. Salinger or Saul Bellow who celebrate human authenticity as a cure for “phoniness,” or of later-century multicultural versions of authenticity that ground a valued identity in the recovery of a particular heritage or culture that is somehow, usually genealogically, one’s “own.” At the same time, authenticity has often been invoked as countercultural, especially where art is concerned. Certainly early work by writers of color and women writers that claimed to advance authentically different voices forged a countercultural path in a white- and male-dominated public sphere starting in the 19th century; we might also think, closer to our time, of the punk DIY movement of the 1980s and 1990s, with its sense of authenticity rooted in handcrafts and resistance to mainstream institutions, a movement which is sometimes noted as an inspiration

Introduction

for McSweeney’s. Or more abstractly, we might consider the modernist commitment to art’s putative autonomy from mass culture, and the way many still long for a conception of art that is defined by its freedom from commercial considerations. Some elite institutions and coteries within the world of literary culture thus venerate the innovation and authenticity represented by the idea of the unknown writer even as they depend for survival upon the success of a small number of well-known writers, success that has material effects that can go beyond the successful writer himself (as when the fame of Dave Eggers helps an unknown writer, subsisting on the occasional writing or teaching gig after graduate school, to get her unusual flash fiction published and read. That story is at the heart of Chapter 2). In human terms, celebrity writers and editors need the subsistence writer, for that writer’s work provides the proof that the literary enterprise is truly dedicated to art rather than market. The subsistence writer’s novelty and authenticity—as a figure, or by virtue of her fresh and unmarketable artistic products—can supply the avant-garde or countercultural credentials of a literary enterprise. Small quarterlies and presses famously functioned as promoters of avant-garde writing in the early 20th century, and the early-century examples such as Poetry magazine, The Little Review, Blast, T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, or the Hogarth Press have for more than two decades been the subject of scholars’ sustained interest.3 In the first place these small magazines and publishers have been studied because of the eventual celebrity of writers they debuted—which is to say, they have been studied not because their writers were obscure but because a few of their writers didn’t remain so. The modernist little magazines, as scholars have pointed out, existed to marry the disinterestedness of “art” with the interest required to make a living out of writing.4 Magazines like The Little Review and their editors became gatekeepers and consecrators, allowing, as Loren Glass notes, the fiction of writers who would come to be known as “modernists” (and thus elite, and promoted) to appear for the first time in print.

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Little magazines with their well-connected editors helped to launch many careers, but what of all the careers that died in their pages? To put the question another way: Do we see these magazines as gatekeepers of an elite tradition because they bridged the gap between the disinterested “art novel” and the need to make money from one’s work—thus making careers as such possible, in the first place, for some writers—or because in the process of occupying this particular niche of the publishing landscape, the little magazines published some of the writers who, for reasons having less to do with the niche and more to do with that larger landscape, went on to become famous? More recent work taking up the specific case of Poetry magazine and its networks in the 1920s, using larger-scale data and computer modeling, reveals the broad web of writers that such magazines organized in relation to each other and seeks to answer in some detail questions similar to the ones I’ve just asked. The data-generated view, unlike the hindsight model, allows us to see how the few well-known figures in the web are overwhelmed by the constellation of minor or onetime players. Looking at subsistence writers ethnographically as they move today through such literary networks allows us to recover literary history uninformed by hindsight and in a finer-grained way than the data-modeling approach can achieve, even when data modeling is combined with archival research.5 One of the outcomes of such an approach is that we can begin to see what it means—humanistically, culturally, sociologically speaking—for the activity of creative writing and the technologies of publishing to permeate ranks of workers who cannot make a living from literature. That is a story worth telling at a time when it has become routine to lament the end of dedicated reading and the attendant loss of a shared literary culture that historically relied on the fact that at least some literary enterprises were economically sustainable at a large scale. At many literary journals, submissions vastly exceed subscription rates. Some literary journals (Ploughshares is a current example) give special treatment to submis-

Introduction

sions coming from their subscribers, and there is much advice available to aspiring writers on the web about the importance of actually reading the journals to which one submits.6 If the lopsided demand for creative writing courses over literature courses in universities and the weakness of trade literature sales have anything to tell us, it is that there are plenty of aspiring writers who seem not to read, or whose reading is culturally invisible. What if literary culture is thriving but is simply not shared, or shared only within tiny social networks, or shared between so few people spread so far apart socially or geographically that its tangible presence as a shared culture is impossible to sense? What if literary culture is a culture of making rather than a culture of reading? What if such reading is, first and last, a private act—untraceable, undocumented, and unspoken—and not the foundation of a public culture at whatever scale?7 These questions become possible to answer only if we seek to understand how book sales, celebrity writers, and the declining numbers of students majoring in English are connected to the invisible workers—the busy and the beleaguered—who are making literature now. McSweeney’s began in 1998 with a commitment to forms that were hard to publish: humor, letters, jokes, very short or very long stories, stories that mixed high-end literary allusion with putatively low-end genre-fiction. But this did not particularly mean that the quarterly was dedicated only to authors whose work was hard to publish, though the degree to which the one is conflated with the other in the contemporary literary market is worth considering. Eggers’s early editorial requirement that anything the quarterly published be previously rejected by some mainstream venue did not exclusively translate into the publication of unknown writers. Early contributors included, famously, David Foster Wallace (in issues 1, 3), Sherman Alexie (in issue 10, after the New Yorker had singled him out in their celebration of young writers—the “20 under 40” fiction issue), the band They Might Be Giants (6), Michael Chabon (7, 10), Michael Crichton (10), Philip Glass (6), A. M. Homes (7 and 9, also after the writer was featured by the New Yorker’s Future of American Fiction issue

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in 1999), Neil Gaiman (10), George Saunders (4), and Zadie Smith (6), to name a few. But issue 12, from 2003, with more fanfare than that accorded to these individual appearances of well-known writers, was dedicated to a group of “Twelve new stories from twelve new writers,” writers announced as “unpublished, unknown, or unbelievable.” I have been suggesting that one of the main functions of successful literary quarterlies is to generate cultural and actual capital that can be distributed from the famous haves to the worthy yet unknown have-nots. If that is true, then the effort in issue 12 of McSweeney’s raises a question that was also likely on the minds of those twelve featured writers when they received the good news of their stories’ acceptance: What is a debut in McSweeney’s worth? How could its impact be measured or understood when, at a distance of a mere decade and a half, we don’t know “who” they would “go on to become” (to invoke the hindsight locution of literary history). And what would an assessment of writers’ careers after their debuts in McSweeney’s no. 12 tell us about what kind of institution McSweeney’s had by 2003 become, if indeed it could count as an institution? And further, the rubric of issue 12 raises a question about the rhetorical production of such a group: What is new about the new writers, if formal innovation and newness to the market, or to a readership, are not the same? The table of contents in issue 12 is set up to be especially auspicious. The cover, calling out “Look,” directs attention to the “Twelve new stories from twelve new writers.” None of these new writers is named here, and so the table of contents is their named debut in the quarterly, a placement that had, in the five years since its founding, become a sought-after venue for young writers. The one writer whose name does appear on the cover of issue 12 is Roddy Doyle, and the hand-drawn letters of his name are slightly larger and more distinctly readable than the other words of the cover. In one way he counted as a new writer: this was Doyle’s first contribution to McSweeney’s. He would go on (to indulge hindsight) to appear in 7 of the next

Introduction

19 issues; his total contribution to the quarterly, through issue 31, is second only to Lawrence Weschler’s (8 contributions), besting even the well-known and frequent contributor Rick Moody (with 6 contributions in the first 31 issues).8 The question of profession implied by the issue’s dedication (to the “amateur reader”) helps us understand how McSweeney’s fits into the contemporary literary landscape, and thus suggests that it can be considered representative of a significant group of small publishing ventures made possible by a radical expansion of access to the technologies of publication after the advent of Aldus Pagemaker in the mid1980s (which became Adobe PageMaker in the mid-1990s). For as the first issues of the quarterly proclaimed, “This journal was typeset with a small group of fonts that you already have on your computer, using software you already own.” The message was that anyone could publish a literary journal; Eggers’s message was the same a decade later in a gorgeous, expensive book called The Art of McSweeney’s, which documents the history and design highlights of the journal since its founding (the book was published in the summer of 2010 by Chronicle Books). Despite the glossy form of the anniversary book, Eggers makes the inspirational message of the quarterly’s story explicit, in large font: “Impossible, You Say? Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus.” The words face a facsimile reproduction of the crumpled four-page email printout in which Eggers first pitches the idea of the quarterly to his friends. Eggers’s letter to the readers of The Art of McSweeney’s, which follows the archival email, reminds us that we everywhere hear tell that the end of the book is near. “McSweeney’s,” Eggers explains, “is a small company dedicated to these physical books that purportedly have no future. This book is dedicated to readers who love books as physical objects, and also to showing young publishers-to-be how much fun can be had while making books, and how available the means of production is to them . . . in hopes new and probably—happily—small publishing houses will continue to appear and even thrive, albeit in their admittedly and perpetually modest ways.”

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The book-object here, unlike the first issues of McSweeney’s, doesn’t include a costing-out explanation of itself, doesn’t exude a shoestring feel; it is sumptuous, oversized, expensive to make and to buy. In this sense, The Art of McSweeney’s perfectly binds together two faces of contemporary literary publishing: celebrity, charisma, and professional polish on one side; subsistence, self-sacrifice, and amateur art on the other. “It should be noted,” Eggers concludes, “that no one at McSweeney’s has any formal training in book design or production. Pretty much everyone in our small company was first a volunteer or intern, and everyone considers themselves a perpetual student of the craft. We came together and remain together only out of a mutual love of words, of the neverending process of reinventing language to best help us understand the world and ourselves, and are committed to the neverending process of reinventing bookmaking to best guarantee those words live and last.” The insistence on amateur status is physically bound with the ample evidence of professional production values, just as in issue 12 the professional writer Roddy Doyle covers for the unpublished and unbelievable. ࠮

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Who are the writers of issue 12, and what has happened to them in the last decade? At one stage in the research for this book I contacted several of them, since with only one exception none had achieved any kind of visibility in the literary scene as I could construct it by other means of research. One had published a volume of short stories, had a contract to write a novel, and then had a baby. She was practical, resigned about the impossibility of continuing as a writer. Writing had taken years and had produced no income to live on; time was expensive to come by; novels take a long time to write. Hers was not going to be written anytime soon. Another of the issue 12 writers had continued to make books with an artist friend and was trying to sell these to independent bookstores, with little success. Bookstores to whom he presented these wares were put off by the difficulty of paying for them and stocking them. I reached him on the phone during his lunch break from his office job in New York; after forty-

Introduction

five minutes he was anxious about getting back to work before his hour was up. I had the impression there was a boss back there glaring at the time-clock. A third writer had gone on to do some freelancing, including writing an article about McSweeney’s for a Toronto newspaper that announced the quarterly’s importance to the literary world, an article that scholars (myself included) have sometimes cited as evidence of McSweeney’s rise. This writer, when I spoke to him, was in graduate school; he is now a member of the Philosophy Department at UC San Diego and has published a book about the global refugee crisis. The fourth writer I spoke to was full of fond memories of his interactions with McSweeney’s, and had gone to San Francisco to meet Eli Horowitz and visit the press’s offices shortly after the publication of his story. He didn’t consider himself someone trying to become a writer. He taught courses in mindfulness and nonviolence at a small school in Utah, and in conversation over the phone he exuded an eclectically spiritual worldview that encompassed the effort to write, his teaching, the social connections he’d made in San Francisco, the loving community that McSweeney’s represented.9 The only writers among the twelve to have become visible to broader audiences were Salvador Plascencia, who wrote a well-regarded novel, The People of Paper (2005), also published by McSweeney’s, and Ben Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is the son of the best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich, and after McSweeney’s no. 12 he published fiction in the New Yorker, published a novel with Counterpoint Press (a press whose story appears in Chapter 3) and another with City Lights, and became a journalist and freelance writer. I did not speak with Ehrenreich, since the basic contours of his career were available from public sources; it seems reasonable to suspect that the McSweeney’s debut was augmented by a range of other contacts in the publishing world that helped him make his way. The stories of these sometime literary workers suggest the texture of the human landscape encompassed by contemporary literary culture. While none of these writers would seem to matter to the course of literary history as it unfolds in real time, yet their work, and the work of others like them, provides a necessary fabric on which

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we might embroider in brighter thread the story of a figure such as Eggers. Without these workers, in other words, such a figure would have to be stitched into another fabric altogether. Franco Moretti, the early advocate of big-data literary study, has argued that traditional close reading is blind to the fabric: the practice skims along the formally complex surface of literary culture by examining the works within a tiny canon, when to read closely the actual literary production of a single year of the 19th century would take many lifetimes. The same is true of the contemporary literary production, in spades. The number of new novels published in the United States alone each year has risen from less than 10,000 in 1990 (a level that had been roughly sustained since the 1940s) to upward of 55,000 in 2010.10 The celebrity system provides us with a surface of reading that seems manageable and defensible. My interviews with the four writers from issue 12 suggest the alternative to such an approach, and also the downsides of the alternative. Such stories may become simply a mass of detail, adding up in this case to little more than an anecdotal survey of what happens to young, white, educated people who can’t make a living from writing and end up making a living doing something else. And such stories lack the intrinsic attraction of accounts that focus on the charismatic, the successful, and the well known. Insofar as the failed or only briefly visible writers vastly outnumber the successful ones, and insofar as it doesn’t take much in the way of disaster to stop most of us from writing our novel, their stories may lack both interest and individuality; the banality of failure doesn’t make for good reading. Only three of the issue 12 twelve published again in the quarterly; those three published twice each, and in what must be a strange clerical accident, two of those three are listed in the Art of McSweeney’s index as having contributed only once; in both cases, their appearance among the twelve in issue 12 is not recorded. One is tempted to interpret this as either the recycling of newness—new again!—or the erasure of the consecrating trail; more likely, it is just an accounting accident. The issue 12 twelve are not alone in their singularity: the vast majority of writers listed in

Introduction

the index appear only once. Only 92 out of the total of 533 contributors have contributed twice or more (534 adding in the neglected “Warlick, Ashley” whose 20-minute story appeared in issue 12). Of those 92, only twelve have contributed five to eight times.11 The majority of the one- or two-time contributors are not famous, or not famous yet, and so we see that issue 12’s callout could have been used on pretty much any issue of the quarterly: most of the writers in McSweeney’s are in a general way “unknown” to a broadly shared literary culture, and this fact raises the question of what announcing the group of new writers in issue 12 counted for. Indeed, one of them, Rachel Sherman, noted that she was not unpublished back in 2003, having placed a story already in another literary magazine. We can say that she was unknown, at least to the editors at McSweeney’s—which is also to say, unknown even to a group of people far more interested in new short fiction than practically any other sort of readership one might imagine. ࠮

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It is still true that readers’ love of great writers of the past—Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, Woolf—sustains much of the popular interest that clings to essays and books about literature. Witness, for instance, the breathless reviews that seem to greet each new book by Harold Bloom—perhaps the only popular “colossus” (as Cynthia Ozick calls him) of a critic—in which he rhapsodizes in high style on the big-name geniuses of the canon.12 Reviews of newly published work remain interesting to those invested simply in keeping up with cultural events, finding new favorites, or making choices about what to read or to buy for others. Scholarly conversations—which is to say, published articles in academic journals and university press books—continue to coalesce around a small group of figures, and recent analysis of scholarly work on the field of modernism, to take one example, shows that this has been true even during decades when expanding the canon was the aim of many scholars.13 Scholars thinking about the second half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st are, it seems, busy trying to accomplish a similarly narrow selection to serve that

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later period. Building a canon of more recent work allows us to talk about books we have read in common—always a pleasure—and helps scholars to publish, and thus to move along in their careers. Literary culture may be alive but not shared among those who cannot make a living from their participation in it; it must be shared in order to make that living, and literary scholars, making their way, promote the sharing required in order to have an object of study called late-20th- and early21st-century literary culture. The last two chapters of this book, about how and why Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel was received as a literary sensation, and about the rise and persistence of interest in David Foster Wallace and his work, question the ongoing activity of making “literature” in the canonical sense. In the latter example, I make the case for selectively refusing to participate in that activity; the question there is how one might make an explicit argument about not reading a body of work. Explicit refusal asks us to be mindful about our choice of investments—of time, of attention, of money and teaching and writing—in the face of the routine obliteration of contemporary writing as it recedes into the recent past. How these investments are shaped by gender, in particular, is an abiding interest of this book. If scholarly descriptions of the early part of the 20th century produce a field of few winners, as Andrew Goldstone has put it, it is also the case that, as the index of McSweeney’s first 33 issues shows in small, literary production at the end of the 20th century is also a field of few winners. I have mentioned the downside to telling the stories of the crowd of writers who no longer write, or of writers who are culturally invisible. What is the upside? Why swim against the canonical tide? The now traditional answer to that question is often framed as a point of social justice: fight the canon because the canon excludes whole categories of persons and experiences. Admittedly, resisting the process of canonization in this book has no social justice payoff of that sort. My focus on McSweeney’s produces a story about a cultural network of white, middle-class writers, most of whom are men, most born in the 1970s

Introduction

and 1980s—hardly a group underrepresented in mainstream American culture or a group thrown back on their heels by demographic disadvantage. In documenting and thinking with the probably ephemeral writers, readers, books, and literary institutions of the present and the recent past that these chapters take up, I aim instead to resist the relentless creative destruction of some ideas that deserve thought. These are ideas about literature that are not just pondered or written about but bodied forth into individuals’ efforts to make literature and make a living, efforts that in the cutthroat world of international capitalism must come and go as quickly as streaming headlines. One could have chosen many of the small-scale networks of contemporary writing thriving today and would have been able to make good in some way on that aim. The massively impressive historical work by Lawrence Jackson, for instance, in The Indignant Generation accomplishes something similar for a network of African American literary making from the 1940s through the 1960s, setting the standard for what an archival—as distinct from an ethnographic—version of recovery and preservation might look like. Literary and cultural ideas can be wiped into the invisible region of the recent past when any literary enterprise fails to gain customers, when commercial rent goes up, when a conglomerate cuts costs, when a grant is not bestowed, when a job is lost, when love or friendship or illness or birth or prejudice disrupts the social circumstances upon which a project depends. And so this work conserves a recent past that doesn’t qualify as history and yet has already been dismissed from our urgent present: yesterday’s news that is more recycling bin than archive, waiting only for a trip to the curb. This is what Franco Moretti calls, more viscerally, the “slaughter house” of literary history. In Making Literature Now, we visit the abattoir while life still kicks in it.

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The editors of McSweeney’s literary quarterly and press have long assumed we want to know how their work is done, have assumed that their readers somehow cannot help but ask. And these editors, which include most prominently the writer and book designer Dave Eggers, have been right. At first, culture watchers were curious about how the literary quarterly came to be, because the enterprise seemed far-fetched at its founding in 1998: McSweeney’s was to be a quarterly that would thrive without compromise with the market; it was initially focused on humor writing, a nearly nonexistent market in print; and Eggers required that early submissions be explicitly rejected by mainstream venues, making the quarterly a home for writing that was experimental or sometimes—we should admit it—simply raggedy. The retro book design and increasing elaborateness of the quarterly’s bindings and graphic art, and the ever-changing literary ideas that surge through issue after issue, have made questions about how it did its work relevant in new ways as the growth of the internet has raised predictable worries about the future of the book. How was it possible to lavish these objects with editing and embossing when the ebook was making paper itself look antique? So the question about how Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the books that soon joined it under the McSweeney’s colophon are made has persisted throughout the enterprise, and the editors have been obliging in answering it, dedicated to showing, in loving detail, how books—or at least, their books—are made. Those accounts have been focused on the practicalities of book production, and have often taken the form of detailed cost breakdowns, like this one from the first issue: TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION: this journal, of which 2,500 copies were made, cost $4,109 to print (approx. $1.64 copy). Shipping to and from Iceland, where this was most assuredly printed, was about $1,400, bringing the total bill to about $5,509.

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Issue 5 reprinted an invoice from the printer in Iceland showing what all the different elements cost, right down to the optional shrink-wrap. The December 2009 issue, no.  33, an old-time, one-off broadsheet newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama, had a whole section devoted to “print runs and costs.” And a deluxe version of this impulse rolls out in full color in The Art of McSweeney’s, a coffee-table retrospective published in 2010 (Figure 1.1). It features drafts of cover designs, commentaries about paper stock, and discussion of the technical details associated with die-cut covers and the French flaps of issue 12. We even see the Oddi print shop in Iceland, the staff there, their machines. Each of these examples can be unpacked: the

Figure 1.1 Art of McSweeney’s, the sumptuous coffee-table book of artistic highlights from the first 33 issues of the quarterly.

Making Literature Now

early costing out justifies, and implicitly apologizes for, the price charged to readers in an effort to rinse the transaction of commercial traces; The Art of McSweeney’s documents the highly regarded book design work of Dave Eggers and also honors the other kinds of workers—factory workers, writers, editorial staff—who play a part in making beautiful books; the Panorama’s accounting implicitly argues that the newspaper can flourish as a medium even in the virtual age. But from first to last, despite the varying aims these descriptions of process serve, they have been framed by a DIY exhortation: it is possible to make the books you want to read and hold. “Impossible, You Say? Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus,” declares a splash page at the front of The Art of McSweeney’s, and a personal letter from Dave Eggers goes on to encourage the faint of heart. It is a message rooted in the anticommercial DIY ethic of punk in the 1970s and 1980s, and in its spin-off, the zine culture of the 1990s. That’s where Eggers, McSweeney’s founder, got his start making the short-lived cult zine Might, based in San Francisco, downstairs from the offices of another little start-up called Wired. And there is anecdotal evidence that these accounts of the bookmaking process did in fact inspire others to make books that would transcend the subgenre of the zine world, just as Wired did and McSweeney’s has. Notably, Mark Greif, one of the editors and founders of the journal n+1, acknowledges that he and his collaborators studied the accounting statements in the early McSweeney’s issues before they launched n+1, and decided that making a journal was financially within reach on the basis of the evidence they saw there. But of course the “making of ” story is a feature of contemporary media culture that transcends McSweeney’s and these materialist versions of it. The rise of the DVD film release, with its deleted scenes and director commentary, has made a stand-alone documentary genre into the expected side dish at any home viewing. The “making of ” story answers not only the film geek’s love of craft but also the star hound’s love of gossip. Its literary forms are less ubiquitously packaged with the literary object itself, although we see them sometimes in the “P. S.” guides appended to paperbacks aimed

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at the book club market. More frequently, the “making of ” story emerges from Terry Gross’s or Oprah’s interview couch, from the little prefaces before book-tour readings, and from the industrious work of reviewers and academics. And McSweeney’s doesn’t neglect this version of the “making of ” story for its own books, either. Alongside the numbers and invoices and stories about cardboard, we find another kind of process described in McSweeney’s: the process of how the content of the magazine comes to be and who is writing it. In this respect, the quarterly’s self-representations become more vexed, and to understand them, a little background will help. The foundational fact is that Eggers became famous as a writer by writing about himself and his family, which is to say, he became famous by revealing, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the process by which he himself was made. Pushing Back on Backstories Eggers built a successful career on the platform of stories about process, stories that at the beginning were identical with self-revelation of various kinds; early responses to that debut have conditioned his subsequent relationship with the media, with an animus reminiscent of Philip Roth’s decades-long response to Iriving Howe’s critique of Portnoy’s Complaint.1 Eggers became wary of people interested in him as a person, especially after a family tragedy made his public life even more fraught.2 The experience has made Eggers’s relationship to the memoir, and to nonfiction writing more generally, especially “complicated”; in writing about living people now—in What Is the What and Zeitoun—he takes a Hippocratic approach: First, do no harm.3 Despite Eggers’s undeniable suffering, a certain schadenfreude was also projected toward him as his success grew, and he was often accused of fostering a coterie of insiders in the journal. That vague resentment persists: in December 2009, frustrated customers on the street trying to buy copies of the Panorama at announced locations, and finding none, complained online about McSweeney’s insiderish operations and exclusivity. Descriptions of that morning from the McSweeney’s staff make

Making Literature Now

clear how distribution problems defined that chaotic day—delivery trucks were an hour and a half late, and when they did arrive, publicity was such that the paper sold out within hours, sometimes straight off the truck. The perception that McSweeney’s was merely playing hard to get bespeaks the resentment that drifts around their public image like the native fog of their city. An awareness of distribution systems—part of the material backstory that will crop up again later—allows us to see how the aporias of market structures are transformed by public responses into the cultural capital of scarcity. Late delivery trucks, and more generally the corporate structuring of book distribution and sales, do not so much explain away or correct such public perceptions but allow us to see how the market, rather than the personalities or beliefs of individual actors, might produce them. All of this is to say that curiosity about the human elements of how books are made, about the lives that go into them and the lives that come out of them, is something McSweeney’s has both acknowledged and deflected, that its editors have both invited and defended against. And again the examples appear at the start of the quarterly and in retrospective moments: issue 5 includes a table of contributors to the quarterly up to that point for the convenience of media watchers who want to summarize what the quarterly is about without actually reading it, and adds a handy graph to explain just how much of a coterie publication it is—or is not (Figure 1.2). More elaborately, and more entertainingly, issue 11 includes a DVD of authors reading their work from the volume (called “Deleted Scenes” and “Extra-Deleted Scenes”), which in turn includes a documentary on “The Making of the Issue No 11 DVD,” as well as the “The Making of McSweeney’s Issue No 11 DVD (with Director’s Audio Commentary,” “The Editing of ‘The Making of McSweeney’s Issue No 11 DVD,’” and so on. Here the self-consciousness about making becomes parody and deflection (an homage perhaps to the parodic rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap). The message is that to be interested, as a reader, in the human contexts of art making is, in a word, silly. And more: in playing with that human backstory, McSweeney’s

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Figure 1.2 Graph of McSweeney’s submissions as a social network in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, no. 5. Reprinted with the permission of McSweeney’s, from Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, no. 5, edited by Dave Eggers. Copyright © 2000 by McSweeney’s.

protects texts like A Heartbreaking Work from such inquiry, implicitly rereading that book so that what applies to the project of McSweeney’s, what seems to connect the personal story with the story of books, is not the memoir’s anger and tragedy but rather its self-conscious joking. Reading A Heartbreaking Work back from issue 11 of the quarterly, we get the portrait of the artist as funnyman. A more substantive deflection of the desire for backstory—one that, like Eggers’s memoir, simultaneously extends and withholds the story that would satisfy such desire—can be found in There Are Many of Us, published by McSweeney’s in 2010, a glossy book about the “making of ” Spike Jonze’s short film “I’m Here” (the DVD tucked stylishly into the book itself). We might first note that the book is published by but also displaced from McSweeney’s itself: it is about Jonze’s film, a film he made

Making Literature Now

while working with Eggers on Wild Things, a more elaborate commercial project which Jonze describes as the negative impetus for the smaller project. Inside this book we find nested another “making of ” story, one that emphasizes the democratic underpinnings of the film. The implicit argument is that we need “making of ” stories, we need the book of the film, because without them art is not so much hard to understand—this is not commentary, really—as hard to imitate. Jonze wants to tell us about “the people we worked with who hadn’t worked in film before” (21); “I think I am drawn to nonprofessionals,” he writes, “because I feel like I am a nonprofessional: there’s no right way or wrong way, there’s just the way that feels right” (Figure 1.3).4 The book includes short first-person essays on the experience of making the film by nonstars like David Kramer, a bookstore owner who was asked by a friend

Figure 1.3 Spike Jonze’s celebration of the amateur, There Are Many of Us. Reprinted with the permission of McSweeney’s, from There Are Many of Us, by Spike Jonze and the Editors of McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2010 by McSweeney’s.

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to be the rock star character in the film; Meryl Smith, a sculptor of paper animals that live mainly in her apartment; Aska Matsumiya, a newbie songwriter; and Sonny Gerasimowiez, a robot designer. We even get the facsimile of Aska’s penciled song draft (Figure 1.4). All are friends of Spike Jonze, or friends of his friends, and yet none, the book suggests, is a Hollywood insider. Setting this project next to the “Making of the Issue 11 DVD” documentary, we can see that this book skirts our curiosity about how art is made in a different way. It suggests that if we want to know about the people who make art, we ultimately need simply to look inside ourselves. And in this way the book offers another kind of antidote both to the resentment of artistic insiders and to the power of celebrity. The book itself relies on the celebrity of Spike Jonze—it belongs to a whole set of projects that emerge from Dave Eggers’s contacts in the industry and in mainstream publishing, including the nine-hundred-plus page novel by director John Sayles (A Moment in the Sun) that the press published in 2011. But within the logic of There Are Many of Us, celebrity sits invisible behind a mirrored surface that flatters those who gaze into it. The implicit exhortation—an extension of the DIY message—is that “there are many of us” already making art, many of us writing and making books; and if we would embrace the DIY ethic there could be many more of us.

Figure 1.4 Facsimile of handwritten lyrics, with caption. Spike Jonze, There Are Many of Us. Reprinted with the permission of McSweeney’s, from There Are Many of Us, by Spike Jonze and the Editors of McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2010 by McSweeney’s.

Making Literature Now

How are books made today? From what social world does literature arise? In all of McSweeney’s attention to process, are they telling us what we want to know? Of course not, despite all that these examples do tell us about a fantasy version of artistic production. In reading the essays in There Are Many of Us, certain untold stories all but clamor for our attention: How did the network of “friends” out of which the film was built come to be? How did this particular amateur songwriter come to count Spike Jonze among her friends? What can we say about that network, about the social world of this art? How does the work happen in the traffic between people, their formation into a group, a coterie, an office, a class, an institution, a public, a counterpublic, a school, a neighborhood, a network? These are the terms of contemporary debates about method in literary studies, words that turn us toward sociology, toward the theory of public life, toward systems theory. What I want to do in the remainder of this chapter is open up the kinds of “black boxes” that Bruno Latour gives us in his study of lab culture, Science in Action. There, he shows us the facts and equipment of science—for example, the double-helix structure of DNA or the computers that allow scientists to image that structure—in the process of becoming true, of becoming something unthought that we simply use.5 In the case of McSweeney’s, the black boxes are both the aesthetic artifacts that the press produces and the networks through which they are distributed. Scientific facts and computers don’t come packaged, like There Are Many of Us, with making-of books (though these are spawned in the market when facts or certain technologies become interesting enough to the general public); aesthetic objects that do come with such stories attached provide us the opportunity to see the story of production as something that has become part of the product itself. Making a True Thing The remainder of this chapter tells its own such making-of story, of how McSweeney’s came to have an iPhone app called The Small Chair.6 Why is that a story to illuminate the world McSweeney’s inhabits? One answer, the simple one, is that Russell Quinn,

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the maker of the app, is a human being embedded, like all of us, in a socially and materially structured world, and because he is part of a group of people who collaborate to make art that reaches thousands of people and connects them to each other. And how is this a critical story, a scholarly story; how does it differ from the stories of minor artists in Spike Jonze’s book? Because in learning it, and then telling it, rather than reading it out of a representation already embedded in public cultural production, one is up against some of the most vexing questions that face anyone thinking hard about literature today. The work of learning and telling this story is an effort to move beyond the DIY ideology of the artist-in-all-of-us to a more nuanced sense of what happens between writers and readers. The idea that we are “all” writers, and fewer of us readers, is already a depressing fact of life for those who teach in departments where creative writing is taught; Matthew Wilkens’s demonstration of the massive rise in the publication of novels in the last two decades gives us some data to back at least the production side of that intuition.7 And as Chapter 3 will show, the relationship between production and consumption of the aesthetic is where the cutting edge of publishing is staking its claim: it is the social, in other words, that the publisher is in the business of selling. ࠮

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And so, if you want to understand the world of McSweeney’s, maybe you should look not to the set of Spike Jonze’s little movie, but to a place invisible to celebrity, say, the Spheres bookshop and café in Kreis Five, the immigrant quarter of Zurich, in the spring of 2009. There a young man named Russell Quinn, who grew up in Cheltenham, England, sat at a table with his laptop, reading the latest technology news from America: Apple had launched a new version of their iPhone operating system which for the first time could accept payments within apps. That day in Zurich, at the Spheres bookshop and café, Russell Quinn was feeling disillusioned with the social world defined by his work. In 2005 he had decided to quit his job to start a new design firm in Denmark with a friend, Casper Hübertz Jørgensen, a Dane whom he’d met in Bristol

Making Literature Now

when Jørgensen was studying graphic design in the UK for a year. The two had worked on some art projects together (short films, record covers), and when Jørgensen was to return to Denmark, Quinn left England with him. Their new firm, Spoiled Milk, was based in Denmark, a place far from home where Quinn did not speak the language. Quinn had pursued a computer science track in his education, and had no formal training in art, though he had pursued artistic projects in any spare time he had— and he had a good deal, since computer science came easily to him. Artistic projects were a way to supplement what he describes as “a very solitary, lonely, soulless experience” of the pre-web and early-web era of computing, which he found “fascinating, mind-blowing and addictive, but empty.” He “craved the ability to forge emotional connections with people.”8 He brought these skills and this orientation together at a time, and in a place—Denmark, known for its elegant design tradition—that made the combination, and thus the new firm’s web design work, instantly marketable. Within a few years the firm was thriving, and he left Copenhagen to start a Swiss branch—living again in another country, another language. Still in his midtwenties, Russell had twice shed home, language, and nearly all his possessions to circulate within greater Europe’s economic currents. With each move he sold most of his belongings, traveling with five small boxes as he left. But one thing that had followed him consistently through his changing addresses was a subscription to McSweeney’s. The issues kept arriving no matter where he was and what language he was speaking or learning or hearing. Its art rewarded the eye and its paper invited the hand. That day in Zurich, to the young man in the café, the world felt hollow but the sun felt warm. Russell’s pleasure in beauty is apparent when you speak to him, and when he says, “I love my iPhone”—a phrase many of us have uttered—he means it in this sense, in the same sense that he loved, and remembers, the warmth of that sun, and in the sense that like the quarterly, the phone, as an object, embodied connection. If we accept the idea of the nonhuman actor, the subscription and the phone seem like prime examples of such actors, and Quinn’s lived relationship to these

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things unfolds, day to day, in just these terms. That day in Zurich he imagined art and technology and his personal existence merging. “I thought, I love McSweeney’s, I love my iPhone,” he says. He sketched out a plan for a subscription-based app, and from the café emailed the quarterly’s customer service address with his idea. Within a half hour he had a reply from San Francisco, from Eli Horowitz, who next to Eggers was McSweeney’s longest-serving editor. Before we follow the conversation that unfolded from that first email exchange, it is worth noting the language Quinn uses to describe his relationship with the iPhone: “love.” Recent research suggests that such language is more than the banal idiom of popular conversation, but that it reflects a neurological reality. Trying to answer the question of whether devices like the iPhone are addictive in the way alcohol and drugs are (another feature of our habitual idiom about phones), neuroscientist Marin Lindstrom initiated a small experiment to determine which parts of the brain are stimulated by the iPhone. The researchers determined that among their sixteen subjects (eight men and eight women) the iPhone produced synesthetic experiences (when they saw a silent video of a phone vibrating, their brains also appeared to hear it, even in the absence of audio). “But most striking of all,” writes Lindstrom, “was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.” They responded to the phone-related images “as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend, or family member. In short,” Lindstrom concludes, “subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.”9 Though Lindstrom’s research is obviously preliminary, has a tiny sample size, and was conducted by a firm (MindSign Neuromarketing) that makes its money from the idea that fMRI scans can help companies market their products, it nevertheless suggests that science, too, has a story about the peculiar power of the iPhone as a humanly connective device, a story that tracks the kinds of stories that McSweeney’s projects out to its subscribers, and that they in turn reflect back to the publication itself. Russell Quinn’s

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experience, his feeling of connection through the twin devices of the subscription and the iPhone, is not his alone, and (here I am speculating) marks the difference between how we experience the web on a computer (a platform that McSweeney’s has only partially embraced) and how we experience apps on a phone. The phone, then, is the sort of black box that Latour considers in the context of the lab (he details the making of the Eclipse MV/8000 computer), though not so much as a device whose “making of ” story needs to be told (we have the Steve Jobs biography as a start in that direction) than as a device whose “using of ” story is as much of a black box—as fully loaded with unthought assumptions as the device itself. ࠮

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Quinn’s email message that day found Horowitz in an equally unsettled mood. Having worked at the quarterly and press in a variety of roles, ranging from carpenter to editor to publisher, he had been a nearly constant presence in the decade since Eggers moved McSweeney’s from his Brooklyn apartment to the West Coast. Starting with Salvador Plascencia’s novel People of Paper, Horowitz became the hands-on editor of fiction that contemporary writers dream of, and that we read about now only in the memoirs of retiring editorial greats like Jason Epstein and Diana Athill. This role put Horowitz at the center of the artistic and literary vision of McSweeney’s as it transformed over its first decade. The quarterly was identified mainly with Eggers and was associated in the press—often inaccurately—with Eggers’s own writing. But 31 issues into the venture, the quarterly alone had published the work of 534 writers; by the end of 2010, the staff had expanded to a dozen in San Francisco, plus Vendela Vida and two other offsite editors (Ed Park and Heidi Julavits) for The Believer magazine; the enterprise included three periodicals (including Wholphin, a DVD quarterly for showcasing short film) and published about 25 books a year, some of them standing alone, some under the imprint of the various series established at the press—Voice of Witness, McSweeney’s Rectangulars, various series for children including the Haggis-on-Whey fake science series, and a cookbook series.10

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Horowitz’s business acumen helped McSweeney’s survive its most difficult financial straits in 2007, when their distributor’s parent company went bankrupt. And his combination of magnetism and kindness has made him the beloved center of the small society of staffers who pour themselves into the daily work of the company. The mural in the basement at the 849 Valencia Street offices in San Francisco celebrates Eli’s role. (Figures 1.5 and 1.6). It’s hard to know where Horowitz might have been, exactly, when Russell Quinn’s message hit. Though he had a desk in the open room that serves as McSweeney’s office, one might find him around the place—angled off the managing editor’s massively piled roll-top desk, or folded onto a basement couch, feet on the coffee table, the laptop tilting off his thighs. Or he might have been offsite—at the apartment he had shared, dormlike, with other McSweeney’s staffers for nine years, or at the foreclosed house he bought and was rehabbing in the Russian River area of Sonoma County, or he might have been “in the woods,” which in those days meant northern Idaho, near the compound of novelist Denis Johnson. One senses that this restlessness has always been a feature of his presence at McSweeney’s; Eggers, in passing, remembers that in the press’s formative years Eli’s kinetic energy matched Eggers’s own: “No matter where he was,” Eggers says, “I knew he was working.” Horowitz’s physical restlessness by 2009 was also restlessness of another kind. He wanted to change his role at McSweeney’s, move away from the quarterly, which he had been helping to edit since issue 4; he was looking for more autonomy from the imperatives of the office. That doesn’t mean, though, that he wanted solitude or something like sole ownership of discrete projects. He is intensively connective as a person even though one can sense a whole private thought-world animating his existence. A comparable figure might be the poet Gary Snyder as we see him in the character of Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums: Japhy is a man steeped in reading, writing, and thinking, embedded without reserve in a social web of talk and

Figures 1.5 and 1.6 Andy Warner and Steve Fromtling’s mural of Eli Horowitz, in the basement of McSweeney’s offices on Valencia Street, San Francisco. Photographed in December 2010. Mural painted by Andy Warner and Steve Fromtling, 2006. Reproduced with permission of the artists.

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work and meals, frugal as a monk and yet attuned to the senses, able to live utterly alone on top of a mountain for months at a time (as Snyder did as a fire lookout) but able, too, to entertain a steady stream of friends and strangers at his buddha shack behind a friend’s house in Berkeley. Whatever it was that Eli Horowitz was seeking that spring, it entailed a new relation to the quarterly, and Russell Quinn’s idea, too, imagined how a new medium could change one’s relation to McSweeney’s. Within an hour Quinn and Horowitz were Skyping; Quinn started on the app the next day, working under the promise of fifty-fifty profit sharing. Horowitz, he remembers “was a joy to work with.” By contrast, Quinn felt that “working for clients at Spoiled Milk was frustrating.” The process “was always bogged down with design-by-committee type decision making, client-company politics and, to be blunt, clients that thought they knew how the web worked, but didn’t.” Rarely did they get the chance to implement what they believed was the best solution to the client’s needs.11 Working with Horowitz, he found someone reflective, savvy, inexhaustibly analytic. Nine weeks later the app was finished; it launched in September 2009. It was the first subscription-based app to be written within the publishing sector, one of the first subscription-based apps in any sector, and, Quinn will say with some pride, it came in at number seven on Time’s list of the best apps of the year. For a while, he could live off his share of the profits. To Russell Quinn, burned out on his work with Spoiled Milk, McSweeney’s seemed like “a true thing, a constant.” He didn’t know what to do next, didn’t want to work for a company as an employee; he remembers, “I didn’t believe in anything, I was worn out and everything seemed kind of fake. I was looking at the copies of McSweeney’s on my bookshelf and at that moment, it seemed like the only thing I owned that still held mystery and intrigue and I didn’t really understand its workings. In that sense, it seemed true and full of feeling. I wanted to work with those guys.”12 And before long, he did.

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Networks of Presence In March 2010, Quinn came to San Francisco for a month. He lived in Horowitz’s house and worked in the McSweeney’s office on his own projects. This is not unusual: Eggers and his staff have been generous in allowing people a seat in the office from which to work, even though neither the person nor their work is otherwise sponsored by the company; it is a way of pulling new projects into the physical and conversational orbit of the place, usually projects someone in the office—often Eggers—feels a connection to. It’s one way that the feeling of connection becomes a cascading set of social interactions. In this way McSweeney’s offers itself as something like a lab or a think tank, but there is a payoff for the generosity: it allows the staff to get to know a person, their mind, work and habits, and sometimes, as is the case among the interns who work there, Eggers finds a person the organization needs and with whom staff know they can live. This is key to the health of the enterprise: staffing can be tricky at a place as intensely collaborative as McSweeney’s. “When people don’t work out,” one of the editors notes, “they spectacularly don’t work out.” Quinn was working out: conversations evolved with Horowitz and others about how to use virtual media but retain the feel of McSweeney’s books. Quinn had been surprised to find that although San Francisco was a tech hub, the staff at McSweeney’s weren’t well connected with the tech world that surrounded them. “They generally have a wide social and ‘business’ network,” Quinn notes, but there were only a few staffers who were even somewhat distantly connected with tech workers. “Even though the coffee shops on Valencia Street are full of startups and tech celebrities,” Quinn found that “the worlds just didn’t seem to cross over at all.” Indeed, McSweeney’s had long resisted the endlessly repeated truism that screens were the future. Eggers is justifiably impatient with the inevitable question, in interviews, about the fate of books. In June 2009, he wrote a mass email to “Person[s] Needing Bucking Up” about the state of print specifically and reading more generally.13 And until December 2010, McSweeney’s web presence was deliberately primitive, even though their humor site—

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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency—is popular and well known, especially among high school and college students. An anecdotal case in point: in the spring of 2009, the Yale Daily News saw fit to include in their front-page news summary a notice that the Internet Tendency had published a piece by a sophomore named River Clegg. The two worlds, of paper and screen, seemed to Quinn too far apart. “I just want to reach more people with content I believe in,” he says. Quinn himself lives a life in which art, human relationships, and digital technology are organically interwoven, and it is perhaps in this part of his story that we can hope to see him as both exceptional and representative of his generation. His father, a computer scientist, died before he was born. His mother wanted to give her son something of his lost father, and she gave Quinn his first computer when he was just four years old. By the time he was sixteen the language of programming was just another language at his disposal, as natural and flexible as his native English. His web site invites us into his projects with this self-description: “I enjoy design, human-centric technology, social ventures, handcrafts, computer science, art, and wildly speculating about the future.”14 That catholic outlook drives multiple projects he has going. He started a project where a hundred people could sign up on the internet to receive one of ten copies of ten different sketchbooks; they were asked to draw on a page and send the book on to another friend. A web project called “Being Abroad” reaggregated the sketchbook project, and he built a web site to include it and other artistic projects about the experience of cultural dislocation. Quinn reads widely as a form of self-making: “Fiction,” he says, “builds you as a person slowly over time; nonfiction gives you an epiphany.” For him, “99 percent of the work you do is irrelevant if the 1 percent of human connection isn’t there.” The work of connecting McSweeney’s to readers is, for Quinn, that 1 percent. At McSweeney’s, this way of thinking was oddly countercultural, and Quinn’s work at the company may mark a shift away from a model traditionally associated with little magazines—which their editors profess (as the n+1 editors have) are made mainly for themselves and their friends. It’s a model to which Eggers, especially,

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clings, despite McSweeney’s growth. Quinn’s logic suggests a model that presumes a larger potential public formed by some other means that lies waiting to be reached. Eggers consciously resists this way of thinking about their readership. He resists the urge to poll his readers and figure out who they are demographically; it seems to him an intrusion on their privacy and smacks of the marketing focus of mainstream media. Eggers thus functionally implies that the magazine itself produces its public in a fluid and possibly ever-changing way over time; Quinn’s logic suggests that the magazine’s public is formed by some other means and lies waiting. It might be “reached” rather than created. In the spring of 2010, Eggers and Quinn agreed on a job description for McSweeney’s first Digital Media Director. Quinn went home to Zurich, applied for a work visa, continuing to work for McSweeney’s as a freelancer. On 29 September 2010, he moved to San Francisco, shedding once again a life and a place. By December he was absorbing the experience: “It was much easier,” he says, “than starting a company in another language.” Still, what he brought with him was an iPhone and a literary quarterly. When I first interviewed Quinn he was 31; every three years, across nine years, he had divested himself of one culture and entered another. “It’s addicting, it’s energizing,” he said, and he wondered if he would feel the need to do it again. But in 2010 he was starting to miss having roots, and worried that constant movement would leave him with “no coherence.” “No one from the last place knows you in your new place. The only constant is inside your head.” “If it’s possible to move every three years, why shouldn’t you do it? I feel a kind of moral duty, to see what that other kind of life is. If you stop, have you given up?” What Quinn represents is perhaps a generational view: a view of global mobility driven by work and a sense that to resist that mobility is a form of failure—if not moral weakness, as Quinn fascinatingly has it, then at least social weakness. There are others at McSweeney’s who use the language of constancy to describe the literary quarterly: the publisher Chris Ying and circulation manager Adam Krefman

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also used this language, and for them it represented material constancy, the constant revenue stream that enables all the many projects the office takes on. So it seems fitting to conclude this making-of story with the very idea of the subscription, as a social structure, a material fact, a market structure. The subscription makes books and reading into events; the quarterly in particular is both released from timeliness—the timeliness of the daily or weekly periodical—and becomes the instrument of marking time. Considering the world assembled around a quarterly like McSweeney’s, we can watch the book itself make work, reading, income happen, giving its readers the sense of its having been made, by someone, for them. It’s a physically elaborate surprise, different every time, arriving in the mail just often enough that you both forget and remember to expect it; in this way it keeps the sense of communicativeness, of dynamism, alive. On the small screen, the material fact of interactivity—of holding the quarterly on an aesthetically satisfying device, seeing it arrive periodically like a small gift, making it move and unfold with your finger—keeps a whole social world in motion, the world of its making as well as the world of its reception. In his book on the rise of the literary prize, James English argued that “figures such as the manager of the major arts endowment, the vice president of the local film club, the chief administrator of a poet’s-birthplace museum, are practically invisible within the prevailing optics of cultural study.”15 If indeed “there are many of us,” he seems to suggest, the solution to understanding cultural production of literature is not to look for the artist inside ourselves, or to read the celebrity’s memoir, but rather to become as specific in our knowledge of the seemingly functionary figures as we are in our knowledge of the visionaries. Such “neglected agents” of cultural formation not only play a crucial role in the cultural field but also constitute a set of actors for whom literary or artistic production matters beyond the moment of ordinary consumption, and that in being such, they suggest answers to that elusive question of what literary art can be said to “do” in the world. This is also an assumption underlying Janice Radway’s work on zines. Wondering what effect zines have had on culture, Radway admits

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that it is difficult to discern any effect at all beyond the small circle of young people who make and read them. But she goes on to argue that their effects across time—and this is why she casts her study as “longitudinal”—emerge as those who made or read zines in the 1990s act, as adults, to change institutions in response to their youthful involvement with zines. This radiates out into archival effects, into acts of collecting, cataloging, and preserving zines in libraries, writing about their meaning and their significance, and encouraging others also to make, enjoy, or study the form. Radway, like the makers of zines, sees these acts as political. She suggests that they count as political because the “voices” that speak in zines belong to those who are, or who see themselves as, outside the pale of public discourse.16 This is essentially a demographic understanding of the political, and perhaps in the larger study Radway proposes it will become clear in what sense the individual persons included in public discourse, along with their zines, change the face of our political arrangements by virtue of the fact that they have a forum in which to speak. On the face of it, however, it seems to replicate the Spike Jonze conclusion, that there are many of us, and that this must be good, and good in a way we would count as political, or progressive. My question about the participation of people like Russell Quinn in the production of culture stems from a skeptical position: what difference does art-making make to a world full of strangers and to the smaller worlds its makers inhabit? One of the mysteries McSweeney’s presents is exactly how art evokes the feeling of connection now, and what the consequences of that feeling might be. Russell Quinn’s story suggests a whole world of circulating labor structures that had to align alongside a singular kind of personal investment in order for the very medium that enabled such structures and investments—the iPhone, as distinct from the book—to be folded into the aesthetic and social networks we know collectively as “McSweeney’s.”

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McSweeney’s and the School of Life

What does school have to do with life? Are writers made today by classrooms, or by what we might call “the school of life”? Scholars have talked about “the culture of the school” in recent work on the history of American literary production since the middle of the 20th century, an analytic idea that suggests deep ties between actual schools—with their particular historical conditions—and works that invoke school as a metaphor. “My thesis is not,” writes Mark McGurl, one of the most prominent critics to write about the role of the school in literature today, “that creative writing programs preclude all other forms of literary patronage or venues for a career, but that these programs are the most original production of the postwar period, its most interesting and emblematic—and, yes, increasingly hegemonic—literary historical transformation” (31).1 If we take this disclaimer seriously, and not as the merely decorous gesture of a scholar who already senses between em dashes the unstoppable engine of an argument, we can begin to do the work of thinking about how the outside and inside of this particular institution, the school, are negotiated at a time when the university does seem like the hegemonic institution of literary production. I want to begin that work by considering how Dave Eggers, one of the most successful builders of nonacademic literary institutions in the early 21st century, imagines the school as a place for writing and reading. My task will be first to demonstrate exactly how and why classrooms are represented as failing in Eggers’s first book, and then to suggest how, and to what varying effects, McSweeney’s itself represents an alternative institution for writers making their way in the world. The cases of particular writers—in the second half of this chapter, I will focus on the novelist Deb Olin Unferth—can reveal how the literary enterprises of McSweeney’s come to shape

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both literary works and the careers of their authors, and how in this particular case the dynamics of gender play out in shaping the content of new work. My ultimate concern is with how contemporary institutions like McSweeney’s might be said to form writers and readers in, and for, the contemporary literary marketplace, and to do it in a way that is distinct from the methods and history of writing programs. It is sometimes by looking for the differences between actual schools and what we might call a school of life—or between school and its metaphors—that the workings of literary production can be perceived. Eggers’s Vision of the School If one reads the long acknowledgments leading off A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, it’s clear that Eggers is aware of the fact that books like his sometimes end up being read in schools, and he doesn’t seem to mind that prospect. A footnote observes to the reader that “you may be reading this far, far in the future—it’s probably being taught in all the schools!” If that’s the case, Eggers points out, the reader is too late to avail herself of a promise he’s just made: to send $5 to the first two hundred readers who write to the author with proof that they have “read and absorbed the many lessons herein.” The joke is of course a jab at the reductive way literature is sometimes taught. Isn’t our assignment in school always in some sense to demonstrate that we’ve attended to the “lessons” of our readings, no matter how sophisticated our perception of those lessons might be? Eggers places his first readers in the imagined space of the classroom, then turns the institutional relationship between teacher and student on its head: instead of students paying for his instruction, or buying the book as a coursebook, he proposes to pay them for their willingness to see a book they presumably bought for pleasure as a course-book, and to become the students of his novel. Eggers in the “Acknowledgments” thus acknowledges a special kind of help his readers can give him or, more specifically, acknowledges the cultural capital that the student, by virtue of reading like a student, is able to dispense. That capital is dispensed

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to the work and through the work to its author. Eggers posing as teacher collapses the institutional scene in which literary value is produced with the private scene of the author’s personal need for readers. He thus thumbs his nose at the decorum according to which these positions are held apart—that unspoken rule of the creative writing program, that the author-teacher should not be assigning her own books. In doing so, Eggers suggests complete acceptance both of literature’s debt to the school and of the fact that its cultural capital—its social distinction—has ultimately been devalued on account of that debt. The production or appreciation of literary value is no longer, for Eggers, a class marker, and nor does he want it to be. The classiness of literature—its claim to answer to imperatives other than financial—requires the decorum regarding self-promotion within actual schools. Eggers’s populism indicates why he doesn’t mind violating that decorum, why he isn’t afraid to invoke the classroom as the engine of sheer sales. But this is perhaps to misunderstand the way that buying books—or more generally, reading—is related to the social scenes from which Eggers’s various ventures arise and to which they seem often to return. We would think here not only of his own books, written over the last dozen years, but also of the projects of McSweeney’s, including its publishing ventures (the press, the eponymous quarterly, the Wholphin DVD quarterly and the monthly magazine, The Believer), its web site (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency), and the literacy and educational projects associated with Eggers and the press (the nationwide 826 tutoring centers, the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, and Scholar Match, a program to link underprivileged students striving for college with donors who can pay tuition). This is a social context in which to read and be read is not just to buy books or sell books but, in a more literal sense, to act with generosity, to give and feel the love.2 Caroline Hamilton has shown how McSweeney’s books present themselves as gifts rather than commodities, to be received and cherished rather than consumed, to be literally unwrapped when they arrive, somewhat unexpectedly (because by quarterly subscription), in the mail. Reading Eggers’s

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second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, whose protagonists travel the world trying to give away a million dollars that one of them has earned and of which he is ashamed, Hamilton shows how the novel explicitly considers “how a pile of cash can be understood as a symbolic gift of friendship” (79).3 This social context, or rather its failure to survive within the school proper, is responsible for the failure of the institutionalized writing program as the scene of reading and writing in Eggers’s earliest work. The failure of the classroom in A Heartbreaking Work is asserted and described in the voice of Dave’s younger brother, Toph. Dave, Toph, and their sister Beth have moved from the northern suburbs of Chicago to San Francisco in the wake of their parents’ deaths, one after another, from cancer. There Dave and Beth, both in their twenties, are raising Toph—who is eleven when their parents die. Beth is in law school; Dave works as a graphic designer while he tries to found a magazine and work on a memoir about his family; Toph goes to school. In this scene, well after Eggers has described the end stages of their mother’s illness, Toph takes Dave to task for trying to write about their parents’ deaths: Remember when you were a senior in college? You were in that creative writing class, and you were writing about those deaths, not two months afterward; you were writing about Mom’s last breaths, and the whole class kind of not knowing what the hell to do with you, they were like, “We-hell now . . . ,” didn’t know whether to talk about the story, all of them sitting there nervously with their Xerox copies of it, or to send you to counseling. But that did not deter you. You have been determined, then and since, to get this down, to render this time, to take that terrible winter and write with it what you hope will be some heartbreaking thing.4

What Toph describes is the failure of the classroom to structure the emotional, libidinal, and intellectual investments that accompany reading. He takes this awkwardness for a sign that Dave should give up the effort to write “some heartbreaking thing.” His attempt to break hearts breaks (according to Toph) a peculiar pact about read-

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ing particular to the institution of the creative-writing (and literature) classroom: that reading be kept separate from the “heart.” This pact, after all, keeps the constant threat of workshop therapy at bay. It is a fantasy that such an orientation toward reading can be maintained with complete success, but in Toph’s rendering it must be done, and done in good New Critical fashion, in order to produce proper literature rather than sheer embarrassment. Toph’s effort to discipline his brother’s writing is part of a bedtime conversation, one in which reported dialog shifts into self-conscious literary device. At the close of a day Eggers has been describing in a realist mode for the previous few pages, Dave comments about the day that it was a “big day,” that “a lot happened.” “Yeah,” Toph says, and goes on to review all they did, commenting that it was “as if a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or rise) to actually pacing the story out.” Toph has apparently swallowed whole the schoolroom lesson about critical reading. He has become the reader trained to receive the well-made story. And like any workshop reader worth his chair-desk, he has some criticisms, which he voices coyly. “What are you getting at?” Dave asks, leaning on the doorjamb. “No, I think it’s good, it’s fine,” Toph replies. “Not entirely believable, but it works fine, in general. It’s fine” (114). Dave has tried to reeducate his brother, to break him from such conventional modes of criticism. Dave tells us: Though he has often been resistant—children so seldom know what is good for them— I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time—Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy—and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twentyfour-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! (49)

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Some of these lessons are, of course, directly counter to those you learn in the writing program. For example, the “groundbreaking musicmakers of our time” teach cliché just as surely as Dave’s characterization of them does. In general, Dave’s failure to function in the workshop suggests he stuffs Toph with something other than writing program doxa despite the fact that Toph’s brain is a “twenty-four-hour classroom.” So how is he preparing Toph to read, and what is he preparing Toph to read? What does Toph learn in Dave’s program? And what does that tell us about what we might learn in the Eggers program? The Institution of McSweeney’s What one learns in Dave’s program is that reading and writing are inseparable from the emotionally freighted relationships of love and friendship. His is the school of what Michael Warner has described in another context—and with some sympathy— as “uncritical reading,” the place where students “read in the ways they aren’t supposed to” in the classroom.5 The hint, in the memoir’s vision of education, is in the “heartbreaking” thing Dave is trying to write and for which he is somehow preparing Toph as a reader. After dropping Toph off at school, Dave “muse[s] idly about home schooling . . . I calculate that his teachers see him, on a daily basis, as much or more than I do, . . . a jealousy creeps over me, of his school, his teachers, the parents who come in and help” (85). This is the lover’s or parent’s desire to possess the beloved; it is the extreme version of the kind of emotional connection that is in fact the human undercurrent of the consumer relationships implied in the offer of $5 for a reading of the book. What is important in the memoir’s offer to pay its readers is the mail, then, not the reading or the need to pay $5 for it. The transaction serves to construct what Eggers elsewhere in the book calls the “lattice” of people with whom Dave wants to feel connected, and with whose support he can survive the serial deaths (not only of parents but of friends, and of their parents) that drive the narrative forward. The

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importance of mail returns in the “letters” aspect of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which includes letters that are commissioned from friends and writers as well as ones that are simply accepted and printed from among unsolicited submissions. One letter reprinted in the first Better of McSweeney’s collection is a request that the magazine facilitate a woman’s reconnection with a former lover; her letter to the lover is printed under her request. That expectation, that McSweeney’s is in the business of human connection, can be seen even in the stacks of subscription cards stored in the press’s archive boxes: many are annotated with jokes, arrive with highly wrought letters, or are adorned with drawings—all communicative expressions that anticipate a personal reception for even the most bureaucratic exchange. The critique of the workshop we see in A Heartbreaking Work is distinct, then, from other critiques of the school, which range from the eager defense of creative freedom against the formal requirements of school and its conventions, to the indictment of school as the representative of racist science and culture.6 For Eggers, it is not that school squelches creativity or that it instantiates a corrupt regime of knowledge, but rather that school is not structured by love and friendship, and in fact interferes with the togetherness essential to love and friendship. These human connections are marked as the affective outside of the classroom, banished by the formality of pedagogical authority, by the commitment to impersonality as a literary-critical good and as an intersubjective norm among the strangers sitting together in the classroom. I want to be clear: this is not to claim that Eggers is not supportive of schools or hopeful about their effects on children. He has advocated for large pay raises for teachers (in Teachers Have It Easy), and the 826 tutoring centers collaborate regularly with schools. It is rather to say that Eggers’s representations of school, and of the fate of creative writing within that institution, highlight the fragility of the social context ideal for writing. In McSweeney’s publications and its reader networks love and friendship is the affective tenor of the interpersonal links that McSweeney’s calls into being. Since the publication of A Heartbreaking Work Eggers has established a constellation

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of alternative institutions for reading and writing that thus embody social networks of a different kind. With social connection comes social risk, and in the context of aesthetic production at McSweeney’s, that social risk is tied up with aesthetic judgement. To wit, McSweeney’s on one occasion published someone’s cutesy cover letter for a submitted manuscript, a letter that had requested that the editors publish the cover letter if they wouldn’t publish the story. This makes the cuteness of the letter’s publication a little chilling and suggests the psychological risk entailed in making publication serve as the medium through which the human lattice is constructed, a kind of risk of which Eggers seems painfully aware. The question of quality hauls the potential for emotional rejection out into the light. It reveals how an insistence on aesthetic standards and the sheer necessity of selection threaten the social glue petitioners expect from McSweeney’s as a cultural institution. (I think this is why McSweeney’s attracts a special kind of animus, too: when people sense themselves rejected by the quarterly it seems more personal in proportion to how personal the expectation of connection had been in the first place.) In the character of Toph, Eggers reeducates his reader to see the aridity of workshop reception and addresses the part of himself that might still, mentally, sit in those workshops and covet the approval of craft that they are designed to parse out. And perhaps the reeducation worked. After publishing his second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), Eggers noted a change in his writing process. When David Amsden asked him if he had “started loosening up”—noting that he now seemed “willing to just put [writing] out there at various stages and see how it sticks”—Eggers agreed.7 You Shall Know Our Velocity for instance was republished with a different name, Sacrament, and a different middle, and a different author name (Frances Hand), thus allowing the general reader, like Eggers’s community of reading friends, to see apparently unfinished work, a novel in two drafts. (The pseudonym even suggests two drafts of literary persona sitting in the seat of author.) In McSweeney’s, Eggers creates

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a context in which others can also exercise some degree of freedom from the obsessively well-made. According to Eggers and authors who have written about writing for McSweeney’s, the magazine doesn’t have a particularly involved editing process, even though editors like Eli Horowitz and, more recently, Jordan Bass are attentive to craft and work closely with authors.8 “McSweeney’s has never been a tough place for a writer to get edited, really,” Eggers says; “the m.o. here is really to let writers be, to fool around a little, take a chance.” Though he may allow the craft requirements of the creative writing classroom to hold some sway over his own writing—“As an editor,” he says, “I think I’m definitely much harder on myself than I am on anyone else”—McSweeney’s generally represents an effort to remake the world of publication so that it doesn’t replicate the classroom.9 One effect of this, in addition to the press’s openness to formal experimentation, is to create a world in which writers can emerge without the psychic risk of the classroom’s cold criticism. The seriousness of that psychic risk is on display in A Heartbreaking Work. Eggers chooses Toph to voice those workshop-style critiques, and there is no one’s approval and love Dave needs more than Toph’s. Such a setup suggests both the power of the classroom’s hold and what is at stake in getting beyond it: nothing short of the promise of unconditional love and genuine sympathy. And more, Eggers has seemed invested in getting beyond the classroom while yet preserving a central feature of school: its youthful demographic. At the most general level, this is reflected in an editorial and writerly tone that, whatever its intention, reads culturally as youthful. It is worth noting here that Eggers resists the suggestion that McSweeney’s bears any special relation to the subject or preoccupations of childhood or youth; in conversation, he quite reasonably asks whether themes of childhood are proportionally more evident among the things they publish than in the list of any other publisher.10 It’s a question that no researcher to my knowledge has taken on or answered, but the sheer volume of writers the quarterly alone has published—as noted, 534 in issues 1–31—suggests the diversity of the work that Eggers sponsors.

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One can understand his objection; the idea that McSweeney’s has a special relation to youth has a vexed history. Notably, the journal n+1 featured Keith Gessen’s essay “Dave Eggers, Teen Idol, or The Education of Gary Baum” in its inaugural issue in 2004. While the essay rolls along for a while as a fascinating look at celebrity culture from the point of view of Baum, a particularly driven but basically goodhearted young man who ran an Eggers fan site, Gessen’s narrative morphs into a more personal critique of Eggers and his work, a critique fueled, we discover in a postscript, by Gessen’s effort to publish the piece as commissioned by The Atlantic. He writes that the piece was killed because Eggers and a posse of his friends, “like fictional villains suddenly sprung to life,” set out to pressure the editor to cancel it after Beth Eggers—who had publically ranted against her brother on Baum’s site—committed suicide.11 Some of those friends apparently implied that Gary Baum bore some responsibility for what had happened. Gessen sees the campaign against his piece as proof that Eggers is a “phony”: not a noble publishing renegade but an entitled and string-pulling insider in the New York publishing scene. n+1’s editorial voice elsewhere in the first issue identifies McSweeney’s as one of the journals it is positioning itself against, calling the readers of McSweeney’s “Eggersards” and labeling their aesthetic “a regressive avant-garde” in contrast to the editors’ own intellectual project. “Eggersards returned to the claims of childhood. Transcendence would not figure in their thought. Intellect did not interest them, but kids did. Childhood,” the editors wrote, “is still their leitmotif.”12 Though I don’t wish to participate in the activity of typecasting Eggers or McSweeney’s pejoratively as juvenile, it is worth thinking about the role youth plays in the alternative institutions that Eggers has founded. He describes youthfulness as central to his first foray into magazine publishing in A Heartbreaking Work—a magazine called Might that is “created by and for twentysomethings”—and he returns to youth worlds in What Is the What (2006). In establishing Might, for example, Eggers and his friends advertise for, and get, “a cascade of resumes. Most

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just out of college, some with pictures drawn above their names, designs in the margins, transcripts from their years at Bates, Reed, Wittenberg attached. We call everyone, can’t call them quick enough, we want to marry every one of them, are thrilled to have found them, to have made this connection. We offer work to everyone” (173, original italics).The frenetic effort to forge connections with one’s peers is echoed in the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the genocide in Southern Sudan. Telling Valentino’s story in What Is the What, Eggers discloses another version of the hyperconnected youth world Dave inhabits in San Francisco. This one is preyed upon by lions, driven from one refugee camp to another, subject to starvation and despair, orphaned by murder rather than cancer; but in the US, where Eggers sets the frame of the novel, the social world of young Sudanese men looks a lot like the world Eggers describes in A Heartbreaking Work. It is a world of young people living together in dormlike apartments, calling each other on cell phones day and night, subject to various American tragedies, and talking, talking, talking to each other. Pulling the vision full circle, the proceeds from the sale of this novel have been used to build and run a school in Deng’s hometown of Marial Bai, transforming the story of a brutal school of life back into its redemptive institutional form. As if to highlight the youth of these worlds, dramatized exceptions are to be found: on the one hand, McSweeney’s made a point of publishing Bowl of Cherries, the first novel of Millard Kaufman, whom promotional literature described as “a 90-year-old debut novelist who’s also an ex-Marine, a two-time Oscar nominee, and one of the co-creators of Mr. Magoo,” whose book contains “all the joy, derangement, terror, and doubt of adolescence and everything after.”13 On the other, in A Heartbreaking Work the eleven-year-old Toph Eggers unconsciously thinks of himself and speaks of himself as being—like his brother and his brother’s friends—in his midtwenties.14 The exoticism of Kaufman or Toph speaks the norm, much as the nontraditional student does sitting in the seminar room at a table of 20-year-olds.

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McSweeney’s day-to-day operations are still managed by a good number of those twentysomethings—both employees and a steady stream of interns—that Might magazine courted, even as Eggers and his original collaborators push past forty. Suggesting how hard it is to stake out this ground outside the school, critics speak of the influence of McSweeney’s and Eggers on contemporary writers in terms belonging to the mass-modernist writing program. Writing for the Guardian Review in 2004, Gordon Burn reports that “Eggers’s influence on young writers coming out of the creative writing departments of the universities (and posting things on the McSweeney’s website in their hundreds) is as pervasive as Raymond Carver’s was in . . . the 1980s.”15 Reporters and reviewers have touted McSweeney’s as “the little press that matters.”16 The quarterly and The Believer read as part of a long line of little literary magazines like “T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, and Stephen Spender’s Encounter” that debuted future greats of the academy such as “Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt and Dwight Macdonald.”17 Rick Moody, a friend of Eggers, frequent contributor to Eggers’s publications, and critic of writing programs, in turn imagines a new kind of workshop that would not so much be subject to Eggers’s influence but would already, as a program, fit the model of McSweeney’s outlook: What would happen if we understood the workshop to be not tidy and orderly but large, unpredictable, and uncertain? What if long monologues about German metaphysics could sit right beside arguments from the stylebook of Flannery O’Connor? . . . What if no one turned in a story for three weeks, and all you did was sit around talking about the ugliest kid you knew in childhood, or the worst job you ever had? . . . What if everyone got a chance to be the instructor, and everyone got a chance to be the student?18

Heidi Julavits, writing in The Believer, goes so far as to defend the writing workshop from detractors, laying the blame for the sameness of New Yorker–style stories on the tastes of publishers rather than the environment of the workshop.19 Her implication

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is that publishers like McSweeney’s allow us to see the variety that is in fact already at play in the writing program. If McSweeney’s world is thus, even according to some of its own denizens, industriously realigned with the writing program, we might want to ask how such an effort changes, or pushes against, the terms of McGurl’s Program Era itself, or indeed how it exceeds them. For Eggers’s twenty-four-hour classroom extends from Toph’s brain to Might magazine, to McSweeney’s, to San Francisco, to the decimated plains of Southern Sudan and the refugee camps of Kenya. What remains of the Program when all this becomes the Program; what remains of the school when it becomes the school of life? How much of the actual school, as an institution that organizes social life, remains in an alternate institution like McSweeney’s that keeps up a practical and imaginative conversation with the school? One Writer, Many Institutions The totalizing quality of systems theory—the theory that makes all ground outside the school part of the school itself—makes it difficult to see the push and pull of discrete institutional forces on individual writers who pass through multiple institutions and who must forge their careers within a field and, perhaps more importantly, a market defined by the flux of such forces. McSweeney’s is an institution operating among others; its discrete forces can be discerned by demonstrating how one writer, Deb Olin Unferth, has been shaped by it as she has made her career. Women writers are of particular interest here because, as many readers intuit, the world of McSweeney’s—its literary field—presents as a boy’s world. While demographic information about who reads new literary fiction is hard to come by, and McSweeney’s more specifically has declined to survey or tabulate their readers in these or any terms, the nonprofit VIDA organization has tallied the sheer presence of men and women as authors and reviewers in major venues that discuss literary fiction (including, along with others, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker,

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The Atlantic, The Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review) and has found significant disparities that skew in the masculine direction. For most publications they counted in 2010, the percentage of women writers reviewed or contributing as reviewers constituted a quarter to a third of the total.20 (What is missing, of course, is hard data about the relative numbers of submissions to these publications, relative numbers of male and female reviewers seeking reviewing jobs, and relative numbers of men and women in MFA programs; where in the process of making does the imbalance begin?) For all of McSweeney’s effort to buck the mainstream, the masculinity of the field is evident there, too, even though some of Eggers’s first collaborators were women and women constitute a significant portion of the quarterly’s contributors over time. In the context of a literary enterprise that is thus marked by the gendered features of the field despite its commitments otherwise, a woman writer may serve as a useful case study precisely insofar as gender does not match her to this institution or to the most influential mainstream literary gatekeepers (though gender does seem to suit women well in the context of the school). Even in the absence of the full data picture, we might expect that women’s professional lives, as they unfold in relation to this literary field, can highlight the ways that multiple institutions shape a life. This is true in Unferth’s case. ࠮

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Unferth identifies herself as having been something of a McSweeney’s writer even before she published her first stories in the quarterly. As an MFA student at Syracuse, she says, she and her classmates “all wanted to be modernists.”21 And, she says, “we all wanted to publish with McSweeney’s.” She graduated from Syracuse in 1998, the same year that McSweeney’s was founded, so I understand the “we” to mean the group of writers she met at Syracuse and remained connected to as they, and McSweeney’s, got going in the following years—that is, they must have come to want to publish in McSweeney’s. Unferth took a little longer than the quarterly to get going. She recounts a dis-

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couraging start: she sent her collection of short-shorts, Minor Robberies—a 250-page version of it—“all over,” which produced only a mailbox stuffed with rejections; she completed a whole novel, then sent it to an agent, who, she says, “hated it.” She now calls it a “terrible” novel.22 She set the novel aside; twice she gave up writing and vowed never to take it up again. A few stories eventually made it into NOON and McSweeney’s. At NOON she found a mentor in the editor and founder, Diane Williams, but it was McSweeney’s that gave her her major break. On the strength of having placed some stories with the quarterly she sent Minor Robberies to McSweeney’s; Eggers saw it, and liked it, and wrote her a brief note to say that he had been writing some short-shorts, too, and had an idea about publishing them together. He later proposed what became in 2007 One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box. It is a beautiful thing, a gilded and boxed set of three volumes, each a small collection of flash fiction. These include Unferth’s Minor Robberies, much reduced in size; a collection by Sarah Manguso, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape; and Eggers’s own collection of shorts, How the Water Feels to the Fishes. The promotional blurb on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency sets the three volumes amidst cultural coordinates that define the literary field in which McSweeney’s seems to operate. The site announces that “in the grand tradition of Neapolitan ice cream, ZZ Top, and Cerberus, the tri-headed guardian of Hades, this set brings together individual short-fiction collections by three talented practitioners of the short-short form.”23 For the universe of readers who might be looking at this site, the editorial voice serves up triple-themed retro pleasures of childhood (the Neapolitan ice cream, which most of us haven’t eaten since third-grade field day), a 1980s adolescence (ZZ Top), and the classical tradition (Cerberus). The coordinates are mainly generational but in such a way that they use Gen-X childhood as a foil against Gen-X adult pretensions. Cerberus, well known enough as a Goth pet, poses little risk in the pretension department but signals that an elite classical tradition has a place—if a multiply coded one—in the field McSweeney’s constructs for itself. I should mention

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that this blurb seems tailored for the internet sector of that field; the boxed set’s insert, explaining the collection, has a slightly different version of this language: “In the grand tradition of snap fiction, flash fiction, and Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of Hades, this set brings together individual short-fiction collections by three first-rate practitioners of the short-short form.”24 When these are taken together we note that the reader imagined by these blurbs may be literate, but needn’t be; her taste for avant-garde fiction exists in a nonhierarchical relation to her taste for retro ice cream, 80s bands, and bad dogs. She’ll know there’s a tradition of snap fiction and flash fiction—or, which is just as good, she’ll know it by the time she owns the box of stories. It’s a distinction she’ll carry with her going forward now, just as she might follow the editorial injunction, on the insert, to “carry these books with you at all times.” One might use the particularized pronoun “she” to describe this reader in order to highlight the question of gender and audience in these moments of the press’s selfpresentation. This choice may seem to manufacture a coincidence between packaging and content, since Unferth’s stories in Minor Robberies often rely on gender to generate immediate narrative tension in their tightly compressed spaces. In the story “Frank Lloyd Wright,” for example, we learn of the architect’s tempestuous love affairs and multiple marriages, and explore such questions as: “Was he ever not married? Answer: yes. When he was a little boy.”25 We find the wonderful and chilling story “To Be Honest,” which recounts an obsessive argument about language that develops from the narrator’s opening speech act: “I tell him he needs to be more honest about his emotions” (25). And we are told at the outset of the story “Maybe a Superhero,” “She had an affair—not because she didn’t love her husband or because he was unkind or uninteresting, but because she was transforming into a machine sort of thing or maybe a superhero” (37). At the level of form, the short story as Unferth practices it depends upon abstraction, the relational structure of actions and dialog rather than their evocative potential. Characters rarely have names, and what remains of specificity is most often

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gendered through social category or pronoun: these protagonists are “she” or “he,” “sisters,” “brother,” “father.” It is the “I” that is sometimes hard to pin to gender. The opening story, “La Peña,” for example, describes the experience of the narrator and the narrator’s boyfriend, a story whose “climax” comes not at the top of the mountain but at the bottom, where the couple “couldn’t find a Jeep to bring us back to the buses.” “We were alarmed and sweaty. What will we do? I said to my boyfriend. There were no restaurants, no hotels, no concrete. It was a small crisis. He held my hand and we were brave” (10). At last a Jeep comes and they are saved. In “La Peña,” one supposes the couple could be two men; there is nothing to tell us otherwise except perhaps the hetero-romance stereotype implicit in “He held my hand and we were brave.”26 Eggers sandwiches his own collection between those of two unknown women writers, it seems, as an act of professional generosity as well as genuine artistic interest. We can understand this as the epitome of how Eggers has so often used McSweeney’s and art more generally to produce the social connection, the reciprocation, the lattice that fails to materialize in the classroom. It is the happy recto of the published letter mentioned earlier from The Better of McSweeney’s, the letter whose publication serves as a rejection. Unferth acknowledges that her stories might never have seen publication as a collection—even a reduced one—if it had not been for Eggers’s personal interest in the form. His own new stories would sell the collection to many, since the collection was coming out on the heels of What Is the What. That novel changed readers’ sense of him: no longer simply the clever boy, he had become a social activist; the story of self, which made his name in A Heartbreaking Work, was now the story of another, and what’s more, the whole event of the book, in readings and interviews and in Eggers’s commitment to donate all profits to school construction, suggested how profoundly and for how long Eggers was willing to put his creative life at the service of another person and a global cause. Eggers had cultural capital to use in 2007, and he chose to use some of it to publish, and attract readership for, the oft-rejected work of Unferth. He encouraged

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Manguso to write the shorts that became part of One Hundred and Forty Five Stories and in this sense became a sponsor of her work, too. Though What Is the What is still in many ways a boy’s story, on the American literary scene it made Eggers finally a writer that book clubs—populated so predominantly by women—would pick up. Boxed with Unferth and Manguso, he was hanging out with the girls on the playground. And I don’t use that metaphor lightly in the case of Eggers: literature, and more broadly, writing, reading, teaching, publishing, making books, is for him a kind of play.27 The sponsorship of this collection was not just an act of kindness—it promoted a hard-to-market literary form in which Eggers was invested—but it was also an act of kindness, inviting Unferth and Manguso to benefit from the space he had managed to clear within a market hostile to odd forms. Writing and Market As always, however, cultural forces—here, the gendered quality of the literary field that McSweeney’s had so successfully entered and rearranged around itself since its founding—cannot be so easily laid by. For that quality had already had its effects on the work produced by and for McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s as an institution exists within a literary field that has already schooled writers, and so it (like any such effort) exists to some degree as an adjunct to or refinement of the cultural forces coming to bear on writers like Unferth in the broader market. The key resides in Unferth’s 2008 novel, Vacation. She describes it as inspired by the traditionally masculine genre of the quest narrative, and more specifically by Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, which in addition to featuring pointless quasi-touristic peregrination in place of a classic quest, dares to kill off its male protagonist and continue on for another third of the book, following the protagonist’s wife. The point of their wanderings is probably most accurately described as self-knowledge, though in the case of the man his death comes first, and in the case of the woman it is unclear what self-knowledge, such as it is, is worth to her.

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Vacation is, Unferth says, a story about leaving. It tracks the journeys of three characters: a married woman, unnamed, who is living in New York and who every evening follows a man she doesn’t know as he walks around the city; Myers, her husband, a man with a dent in his head who discovers her odd habit, and whose oblique confrontations with his wife over it unspool the marriage; and Gray, the man Myers’s wife has been following, who though he doesn’t know Myers’s wife, happens to be Myers’s old roommate. The novel’s drama centers on Myers’s efforts, upon leaving his wife, to follow Gray himself, first to Syracuse and then to South America. Gray, we discover, is slowly losing himself to brain cancer, and dies anonymously in Mexico. Myers, shorn of passport, money, and everything else, is finally stuck in Grenada and cannot get home. Interleaved with these stories is the story of a young woman, Claire, who is trying to find her biological father, an “untrainer” of dolphins, a man who kidnaps aquarium dolphins and returns them to the wild. Like the stories in Minor Robberies, the novel’s structures and language are abstract; the engines of narrative gain torque from the gendered dynamics of the central problem of the novel—why Myers’s wife followed Gray in the first place. We never get a satisfying answer to this. Though we do get an eleven-part confession (called “The Wife’s Confession, Part I,” and so on), by the end we sense only evasion in her odd emphasis on the idea that Myers had once jumped out a window (hence the dented head) as the cause of her complaint against him. The last we hear from her is this confession: I think I can be comfortable with you thinking the worst of me. That is all I have to say. End of confession.28

These contours of the fiction seem all the more saturated with meaning when we consider that six months into writing Vacation, Unferth made two major changes to her novel as it was then: one was to change the setting from her native Chicago

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to New York, where she lived at that time. The second was to change her protagonist—the character who would end up as Myers—from a woman into a man (it is not clear how much of the rest of the setup of the final novel was in place at that point).29 In an initial interview in which I discussed the novel with Unferth, she had said, off the cuff, that she made the latter change “for marketing reasons,” and that the character finally “seemed less pathetic doing these things” as a man. Unferth’s comments, like her short-shorts, distill complex cultural realities into a few words, and in subsequent conversation she elaborated on her motivations for that change. Tracking the timing of the change in detail, she notes that “Minor Robberies wasn’t accepted by McSweeney’s until 2006,” and that she did not send the manuscript of Vacation to Eli Horowitz until late September 2007. She had thus made the decision to change the protagonist into a man “long before the novel was accepted by McSweeney’s.” Indeed, it is clear that the change in Unferth’s book was not made for McSweeney’s, or even with an eye toward the possibility of McSweeney’s publishing it. Internal and external forces of many kinds come to bear upon creative work, and to ask what gender has to do with those forces is not to reduce them to that thread. Unferth has an eloquent account of her comment about “marketing”—a word I remembered and wrote down the moment she uttered it, but that she later did not remember using. It is worth quoting her reflection at some length: I can only imagine that I used the word glibly and somewhat self-effacingly, as if my artistic vision and my artistic confidence and my artistic insecurities came down to marketing. The fact that I spoke glibly about my artistic choices at all shows a lack of confidence, which gets more to the root of one reason (not all the reasons) I made the change. I imagine it was a bit fun for me to dismiss my choice to you as one of marketing— that’s much easier than facing the truth: that in the majority of the reading I had done, in the works I had admired throughout my life and in my favorite movies, the man was the quester or the anti-quester or the failed quester. The woman was the follower.30

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The very abstraction of Unferth’s formal vision belongs to an avant-garde literary tradition, typically gendered male, and her choice of a quest narrative to structure her first novel put her equally within a quintessentially masculine line of writing. Reflecting in 2012 on her decision in 2005 to make her protagonist male, she says that her choice “speaks to the long, long tradition of male protagonists in literature, starting with the Bible, and how I was formally brave but perhaps not being brave in other ways—perhaps I was not being brave enough to express my female experience.” Using the idea of “marketing,” she goes on to say, may be a way to avoid being “forced to look to harder questions about whether I was ultimately valuing female experience as much as male experience, whether I found it suitable for artistic representation, and what did that say about me?” “You could say it was just marketing, but you could also think of it as someone having deep artistic and self-doubt.” Unferth’s deeper analysis of her reasons for choosing a male protagonist suggests that Virginia Woolf ’s view of the situation of women writers as she describes it in A Room of One’s Own—and Woolf ’s own contributions to its remedy—remain relevant to women artists nearly a century later. Unferth’s comments suggest, too, that the market reflects or reinforces or recreates that reality at the final point of the process we think of as literary production.31 And so for all the complexity of what Unferth might mean by glossing her creative choice as a concession to “marketing,” we cannot set aside the market. It was the market’s cold response to Unferth’s work that was at least partly responsible for her self-doubt, and the market continued to withhold encouragement through 2007. In August and September of that year, just before Minor Robberies was published by McSweeney’s, Vacation was rejected by over twenty New York publishers. When she sent it finally to McSweeney’s in late September, it was welcomed: Horowitz read it “quickly” and their conversation about it began—a process that ended with its publication a year later. Unferth suggests that the novel got his attention because the press had just published the stories. She was known to them and her work had already gained Eggers’s significant endorsement.

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Although women from Gertrude Stein to Lydia Davis have made careers in this abstract mode, Unferth’s reflections on her choice of a male protagonist remind us that masculinity has a deeper historical connection to that mode and to the readers who are attracted to it. What is fascinating here is the way subject matter and genre play off one another: when Unferth wrote in a formally innovative way, in a way that was interested in the possibilities of abstraction, and did so under the genre banner of the novel, then the tradition, the market, her imagination, her family, her influences—what we might call more generally the school of life—offered her the masculine protagonist as a grounding choice in a sea of artistic self-doubt. The masculine protagonist she created for Vacation was a “familiar” character to her in both literary and personal registers. He was the “bumbling” male protagonist of John Cheever’s short stories, which she had read “to the point of absurdity” as she was learning to write. He was a version of her father, of her beloved former teacher at Syracuse, the writer George Saunders, a version of her partner—and a version, she writes, of herself.32 That last identification suggests of course why it is hard to talk about gender in a way that faces both the hard fact of women’s underrepresentation in literary fiction and the impossibility of matching individual subjectivity with the culturally built genders that play like lights about our differently sexed bodies. In the end it was Eli Horowitz at McSweeney’s who encouraged Unferth to develop the sections on Claire and the few other women who speak in small sections of the novel. Why did he do so? Perhaps Horowitz was aware of—and also concerned about—the masculine drift of the field. Maybe he was making another assumption: that because Unferth was a woman, those portions of the novel could be the sites of deeper development. Or maybe he just thought the novel needed these characters to be more substantial in order to produce a formal, aesthetic balance in the novel’s structure. Without his own account to speak to this question, we might simply note that as the agent for the institution of McSweeney’s, for whatever reason he became the person who encouraged Unferth to write more about the experience of female characters.

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Despite what Horowitz has advocated as an editor, it would be hard to blame Unferth, or any writer for that matter, for feeling that she meets an audience looking for the masculine when she meets an audience looking for the quest, or for the avant-garde. The early McSweeney’s issues themselves—published prior to Horowitz’s involvement, one might note—had done their part to announce an affinity with that aspect of the field. The first issue of McSweeney’s signals over and over on its cover that it is a masculine play-space, something we might see in hindsight as a literary precursor of the hugely successful The Dangerous Book for Boys (2007) (complete with 19th-century nostalgia and the embossed, gilt-flecked binding that McSweeney’s, by issue 11, showed was still possible to produce affordably). Among other jokes about the quarterly’s name to be found on the front cover of issue no. 1, we are told that the journal also “answer[s] to the names” (in order) “The Starred Review,” “The Mixed Review,” “The Grim Ferryman,” “The Primitive,” “McSweeney’s: Diamonds Are Forever,” and “Condé Nast McSweeney’s for Women.” Why does the satire rely on gender to supplement the jokes about literary review culture? The question seems the more genuine when we recall that the magazine that Eggers had just left—because it was commercial and soulless—was Hearst’s Esquire (for men). Somehow what the quarterly was founded against required regendering at the moment of the new venture’s founding. This is not the only gendered joke among the dozen or so fronting McSweeney’s no. 1. In the manifesto portion of the cover, the writers announce what they are “Believing in: Indulgence as its own sticky, strong-smelling reward.” They are “Eschewing: The recent novels of Saul Bellow.” Those recent novels of Saul Bellow, in 1998, included most immediately The Actual (1997). (Bellow’s next previous novel, The Bellarosa Connection, had come out in 1989.) The Actual is the story of an old man and his idealizing love of a particular woman from his past; Bellow’s earliest significant novels, of course, are the stories of younger men, most memorably Augie

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March and Charlie Citrine. We might reasonably intuit that these early novels are important to Eggers himself by virtue of his avowed love of Bellow’s work when he speaks, in interviews, of the models that inspire his prose.33 We are soon welcomed by the voice of the journal’s cover into “our bunker”; that voice seems to emanate from a boy playing fort. It’s an evocation that returns much later in Eggers’s novel Wild Things (2009), an adjunct to his work on the Spike Jonze film of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. And so although the quarterly consistently publishes a steady stream of work by women writers, the ethos as well as the majority of contributors to the flagship quarterly was male at the start and, in some respects, remains so, both in fact and in the perception of readers. Christopher Monks, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, has noted that this slant reproduced itself in that branch of the venture: men have submitted to the site at a rate of about four to every one submission from a woman.34 The journal n+1, founded in part to counterbalance McSweeney’s, was similarly a boy’s club at the beginning even if it did define itself as serious and intellectual against what it described as its rival’s infantile playfulness, and even if it does, like McSweeney’s, promote women writers. n+1 cofounder Keith Gessen’s quasi-autobiographical novel about three young men trying to be writers, All the Sad Young Literary Men, epitomizes—or perhaps simply embodies—the way these coteries present as male enclaves. None of this last is very surprising; Michael Davidson, in Guys Like Us, has argued that masculine homosociality is a feature of various American artistic enclaves in the second half of the 20th century, even while the women’s movement was radically changing the professional possibilities for women. If institutions like literary journals change over time—recent issues of McSweeney’s evince far less, if any, of the masculine play-space than the first issue did—the contrasting stability of public perception of such journals over time reminds us what it means to have an institution, rather than a particular person (here Eggers, or Horowitz), as the subject of study.

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And it reminds us too that founding manifestoes are sometimes sticky, indeed, even as the institutions founded upon them change. What is rare then is the opportunity to track, almost in real time, the specific ways these coteries or institutions help reproduce structures of gender in the literary field within the writers aspiring to be endorsed by them. Unferth changed the gender of her protagonist not so that she could be published in McSweeney’s specifically, and there is no evidence that McSweeney’s published her novel because it has a male protagonist. Rather, Unferth made this change because she perceived and responded to a gendered slant in the literary field in which she was trying to make her way—a field that included McSweeney’s itself as well as a lifetime of her own reading. McSweeney’s early self-positioning would give any writer reasons to believe that she was not wrong in this perception, even as the journal changed its ethos and its staff across time, even as it continuously sponsors women’s careers—and does so, in the case of Unferth, against gender-inflected imperatives of the market. Outside McSweeney’s, and Not The final movement of this story about Deb Olin Unferth’s development as a published writer reveals the limits and possibilities of McSweeney’s intervention in the field of literary production. When Unferth speaks of the San Francisco launch party for Vacation she evokes it as a pure literary and social affirmation, recalling how a friend leaned over to her and whispered, “You’ve really made it now.” The debut of the novel into the literary field characterized by McSweeney’s fulfilled her early dream of literary value and consolidated her initial position within the field. Her next move, then, has been to write another story, this one a story from her own life. An adventurer herself, Unferth wrote a memoir about her experience as a young woman, dropping out of college at eighteen with her boyfriend George to join “the revolution”—or revolutions—in Nicaragua and other Central American countries. She was still in the “conversation stage” with Eli Horowitz at McSweeney’s when three other presses put

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bids on the book.35 She did not wait for, or ask for, a commitment from McSweeney’s. For the first time, Unferth says, her book proposal generated significant interest in mainstream publishing houses. There was a bidding war, and she chose Holt. And she chose it in part, she explains, because the editor, Gillian Blake, was encouraging her to make her story more specific to her experiences as a woman. Revolution is remarkable in several ways. Like Unferth’s fiction, it proceeds by way of short forms (here, short chapters that read like her stories) and through an abstract quality in her very language that allows persons to become larger than themselves, not representative so much as conceptually far-reaching, like philosophical propositions. What is different from Vacation is that although Unferth’s character in the memoir is a follower, like Myers, like his mysterious wife, and like the abandoned female protagonist of the early drafts of that novel, in the full telling of her story we get something still somewhat rare in the more formally experimental reaches of American literature: the female bildung. The naïve impulse to join first a person (her boyfriend George), then his religion (Evangelical Christianity with a heavy dose of liberation theology), then a variety of socialist revolutions in various Central American countries, reads at first as superficial tourism into the lives, beliefs, and wars of others. Deb seems insubstantial as a self, her tone offensively breezy. As the memoir progresses, and as Deb’s body begins to waste away under the rigors of constant poverty and low-grade illness over the many months of their travels, we begin to see how the pared-down language that signals superficiality at the start is in fact a compelling language for self-knowing, ascetic in the best sense. The descriptions of her multiple returns to Central America even after their initial trip and after she finally ends her relationship with George suggest how the urge to follow was both larger than George and part of an inquiry into existence as such. Following with one’s body, mind, and time—in Unferth’s case, giving over whole swaths of her twenties—produces a different sort of development for the individual, one that Unferth refuses to cast into the conventional narrative of a woman’s brainwashed conversion followed by heroic

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rejection and self-repossession. Her journeys and her attachment to George do not end decisively. Self-making, for her, does not require the repudiation of these things but rather their slow integration. That’s clearly the harder work. The formal increments of the narrative reflect this: moments accrete and their shape and meaning over time emerge in retrospect. This memoir’s place in Unferth’s career, and the narrative of Revolution itself, have consequences for how we read Unferth’s previous work: what we might say was vacated from Vacation—and indeed in the formal structures of the short-shorts— was the actual feeling of experience, leaving us only words about experience or a sense of the structures of experience. But we can also see the hollowed-out shape of the personal as we look back at Vacation, the outlines of its space: the outlines are there in Myers’s flight to Grenada, in his lost marriage which echoes a lost marriage of Unferth’s own that she will describe, in conversation, as the book’s buried subject of thought. What is vacated, then, is a particular woman’s experience and also, when the male protagonist is substituted as a way of responding to artistic self-doubt, the very category of women’s experience as a central subject. Revolution reveals how the story of a woman protagonist following a man around can become more—much more—than pathetic. ࠮

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In the wake of her endorsement by an institution of the avant-garde (in the form of McSweeney’s), and with the artistic self-confidence she had earned internally by the very fortitude of her writing practice over the long haul, Unferth had turned from the novel to another genre (memoir) with the same tools of formal innovation, but with the experience of a woman at the center. And for such an effort the avant-garde as a market niche was not needed. Judging by its ease of publication, we might assume that to editors who know how book markets work the memoir made sense in a way that her novel did not. One way to sum this up is to say that Vacation is about formal abstraction and its relation to human experience; Revolution is about

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a woman’s extraordinary experience and her thoughts both during and after that experience, told using formally abstract structures. There is a deep pool of male writers who have done something like the former over the last hundred years; few women have become part of that pool, and it was incredibly difficult for Unferth to publish in that realm. I cannot say whether the contrasting success of Revolution is best explained by the traditional alignment of genre (memoir) with gender (of both author and protagonist), by the popularity of memoir in the market more generally, by Unferth’s McSweeney’s credentials (the publication of Minor Robberies had undoubtedly had a role to play in the attention that McSweeney’s gave to Vacation), or whether its success with publishers can be explained by criteria we might be tempted to imagine as separate from these things—which is to say, aesthetic criteria. Maybe Revolution is a better book. Even though I, as a reader, would call Revolution aesthetically “better” than Vacation (but also equal to the best things in Minor Robberies) for reasons I could go on to name, the business model of mainstream publishing does not as a rule privilege such criteria, even for editors who value them highly. A sharper view of the contrasting stories of the two books’ successes would be complicated, would reside in some mix of these reasons. There is enough evidence, however, to suggest that market expectation and its intersection with gender provides at least a shadowy outline of that view. Unferth’s career story shows how memoir became safe as a professional choice for Unferth—that is, for someone aspiring to the literary seriousness signaled by her and her MFA friends’ desire to “be Modernists”—when McSweeney’s had fully certified her work for the smaller “literary” audience. The literary field that fosters modernist fiction gendered male has its related mother-field, the field of mass-market books, in which middlebrow women readers exert power as the mainstay of memoir sales. Like Oprah, whose stage in 2001 was capacious enough for the ambitious Jonathan Franzen (even if he was not capacious enough to accept the invitation), Unferth becomes herself a node of contact between these fields.

McSweeney’s and the School of Life

What does it mean to write from this position? It is one shared, indeed, by Eggers himself, who made a name in memoir, funding McSweeney’s with his advance for A  Heartbreaking Work. Unferth’s entry into memoir is not then a departure from the world of McSweeney’s in a generic sense or, as it turns out, professionally. The “early praise” for Revolution excerpted on the back cover includes blurbs from, in order, Eggers, Heidi Julavits (a founding editor of The Believer), and John Brandon— Brandon being an author whose first novel, like Unferth’s, was published by McSweeney’s and whose second, Citrus County, also under the McSweeney’s colophon, had made the cover of the New York Times Book Review a few months previous, an event the McSweeney’s staff were still talking about in December of that year. The cover of Revolution might be said to extend the colophon through coterie, setting out names associated with McSweeney’s on the jacket of a Holt book, but it is also the sign of something larger. It reveals how a set of forces that transcend specific institutions of cultural production are channeled variously through them. In the traffic between the multiple institutions of the literary world, in their overlap and the paths running between them, we might discern how the school of life—so much larger than the school itself even if the school can seem like its best metaphor—comes to bear on the imagination of the writer making literature now.

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Reading Novels in the Net

Why does the novel migrate between media today, and what happens to the form of the novel when it enters a new medium? What forces bring it into the virtual, and what forces accompany it from the paper world? Chapter 1 offered a set of answers to all but the second of these questions for a particular case: McSweeney’s entry into screen-based publishing. The social networks and shared aesthetic sense activated by the quarterly in paper form brought Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz into collaboration to create an electronic version of the quarterly, a media shift that had previously been seen by the press as counter to its aesthetic commitments. This change of heart laid open the range of forces that might move literary projects from one medium to another, but did not immediately suggest how the media shift impacts literary form itself. Indeed, as we will see, the shift was embraced because of the continuity it promised with the press’s established aesthetic. One project of literary study is to think about the interface between what happens inside the work of art and what happens outside it. To follow the novel as a form, as it moves along with the workers who write, publish, and ultimately read a literary work, is to acknowledge the social texture of aesthetic decisions—a texture that we saw in Chapter 2 in the creative and professional decisions made by Deb Olin Unferth. This chapter expands beyond these two cases to understand further the medium specificity of the novel as a genre. Rather than reading out from the form of the work to intuit how the medium affects that form, this chapter follows workers and works as they move and change together. What this approach reveals is not only a set of formal consequences for the novel that may arise from its location in a new medium, or a set of social forces that end up reflected in literary works, but

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more tellingly, a larger story about the forces at work, both artistic and social, that are shaping our practices of reading. One way to understand the contemporary evolution of reading begins with a bankruptcy. On January 1, 2007, 130 independent presses woke to empty mailboxes. For over 30 years, the indie book distributor Publishers Group West (known as PGW) had been reliably delivering checks to smaller presses such as Grove/Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Soft Skull, and New World Books. More than any editor, no matter how brilliant, PGW ensured that these enterprises could continue to do their work, for distribution is the bugbear of the small press. Without a sales force fanning out across the country to stock bookstores with their wares, small presses can’t reach beyond the local market. Without a distributor, the writer must become a traveling salesman, selling books from the trunk of his car.1 Since the 1980s, PGW had done this job, placing books from small presses even in the large chains of the day like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and PGW was known—and beloved—for delivering its clients’ earnings promptly on the first of each month, providing the revenue stability that made these marginal businesses sustainable.2 What’s more, PGW understood the ethos as well as the business model of the small press. Founded by Charlie Winton in 1976, the distributor originally had the countercultural feel that the presses themselves embraced: drugs in the backroom, a freewheeling office culture, a product list that ranged from soft-core porn to experimental fiction. Winton and his staff understood the vision of small publishers and promoted their books with vigor. Collecting many small batch presses together in a single distribution system, PGW allowed the presses to continue to print books and reach their audiences, whatever their size or however peculiar their individual lists. All that changed when Charlie Winton sold PGW in 2002 to Advanced Marketing Services, a large company that sold goods to major discount outlets like Sam’s Club and Costco. Indeed, it was not PGW itself but AMS that filed for bankruptcy on December 29, 2006, unable to recover from SEC and FBI investigations and from

Reading Novels in the Net

a class-action suit on behalf of shareholders.3 Three of its executives went to prison. Salon.com reported that PGW had been having its best year ever in 2006, and the period for which it was to deliver checks on January 1, 2007—the three months prior to the December holidays—was the most profitable quarter of the year. Many of PGW’s presses relied on the monthly infusion of cash to meet payroll, pay current bills, and begin the year’s new projects. Some folded immediately, others were sold, many postponed or canceled their spring lists. The empty mailboxes of January 2007 remind us how novels (and other kinds of books) are suspended in the net of large-scale capital, and reveal how the reader’s landscape is altered by failures that have nothing substantially to do with publishing. Those insights are not new or surprising, and have been recounted by veterans of the publishing business such as André Schiffrin, who tells of the disturbing transformation of Pantheon in the 1990s after Random House was bought by Bertelsmann.4 But the empty mailboxes—the effect of changing structures of capital—in this case also show how an upheaval in a crucial element of business pushed the novel and the workers and readers associated with it out into the virtual network. Tracking the aftermath of PGW’s collapse and its serial effects on two presses and their workers, one can look inside these transformations to see their aesthetic effects alongside their effects on the public stock of knowledge, voices, and ideas. There are, of course, theoretical and formal ways to think through the arrival of the novel on the internet. As in the preceding chapters, I unite a number of contextual approaches to literary study—the sociology of literature, media history, and the entwined histories of the novel, of reading, and of the book—with an account of what happens inside novels. Novels have taught us how to read The Novel in the past; they teach us differently upon their arrival in the virtual world. Surprisingly, the latter is perhaps best demonstrated by writers who are not experimenting only or primarily with the new medium’s interactive possibilities as part of their aesthetic project (as we might see in various born-digital fictional forms such as the hypertext novel).

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The literary projects that we can track on the other side of the PGW bankruptcy repeatedly traverse the divides between screens, paper, and the material world of geography and objects. These projects sharpen our sense of how the novel fares as a form through such migrations. Making Literature and a Living In the aftermath of PGW’s collapse, in the spring of 2007, an editor named Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press sold his press to a somewhat larger press called Counterpoint. Though he was appointed as the executive editor for the Soft Skull list at Counterpoint, Nash began looking for a new independent venture. His first such venture was a workshopping and publishing web site called Red Lemonade, and the surprising element of the project was his decision not to sell content at all but rather to give it away for free. Red Lemonade tested a vision of the book business that involves publishers in a much broader swath of the process through which fiction enters the culture. Nash envisioned publishers facilitating, and drawing profit from, the writer’s work from earliest drafts through the design, printing, and distribution of books, all the way to the process of cultural uptake. As Nash puts it in a plug for online writing workshops and reading seminars hosted by Red Lemonade authors “and their sympathizers,” “We believe that a publisher should offer the reading and writing community the fullest range of experiences and services.”5 It is these experiences and services, not just books, that Red Lemonade set out to sell. Nash staked his career on a transformed understanding of the book business, an understanding that veers away from the physical object of the book or the rights to its content as the central engines of profit, an understanding that tries to monetize not books or what they contain but all the things books do and stand for in our culture. As Nash’s very grammar implies, these experiences of reading and writing matter to people if they perceive themselves as belonging to a community of readers and writers. And so a large part of the site’s work is to produce community feeling.

Reading Novels in the Net

Nash’s tweets, his postings on the site, the behind-the-scenes editorial work, and the public comment feature of the site all serve this aim. A few dozen manuscripts are mounted on the site’s library page. All have a blurb and many have virtual covers— the site explicitly encourages authors to strive for an appealing presentation. Two at the top of the page are set apart as “featured”; here is where Nash’s editorial hand is palpable. He chooses these on the basis of manuscript quality and in light of the author’s participation in the commenting culture of the site. In other words, writers must earn the featured position not only by writing well but also by promoting the community conversation. The case of one novel featured on the site demonstrates how and to what effect Red Lemonade enters into the process of literary production. The novel is called Happy Talk, by Richard Melo, and it was featured for several months on the site, after which it was chosen by Nash, in 2013, to be published in paper and ebook form by Red Lemonade press. Melo had published a novel with Soft Skull before the PGW bankruptcy, and so it is clear that the connection between Nash and Melo was not site generated, but generated in the old world of paper books. The comments on the novel are sparse, the vast majority minor, many glossed with simple encouragement. The short chapters of the novel, of which there are about a dozen, take up several scrolling pages each. Some chapters have no comments; wherever comments do appear, Melo answers them. Melo has said in interviews that “One of the reasons [he] wanted to become a writer is that it’s one of the rare art forms where you can flourish as an introvert.” But he laments the need to market his wares: “Once you get work out there . . . you need to . . . become a self-confident attention grabber.” It is, he says, “a cruel fate to a writer who’s shy.”6 The Red Lemonade model allows Melo to evade cruel fate for a while, to begin the marketing process in the written form where he is most comfortable. His responses to comments are unfailingly grateful. The physical book exists artistically as a horizon for Happy Talk even as the novel appears in virtual workshopped form. A good bit of the criticism, sparse as it is,

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focuses on the Beat-era spellings Melo uses to try to create atmosphere for the story, which is set in Havana in the 1950s and follows a motley assortment of American expatriates. In a response to a question about the idiosyncratic spellings of words like “tonite” he explains that “while writing” he had “this crazy thought that if the book were ever published in print, it should look like a used Grove or New Directions paperback from the mid-sixties.” The spellings were meant to “further the illusion.”7 Melo’s virtual manuscript is haunted by the paper form, and indeed by the very books PGW had long distributed—those Grove paperbacks. This nostalgia for paper suggests the ways that the novel comes to need the physical book to communicate artistic vision. Is the effect achieved when Melo simply explains that vision? Is the appended comment doing the work of the imagined cover? Whatever the answer for any individual reader, it is true that web publication narrows the sensory tools through which a novel can communicate when it is committed to the written word—rather than, say, mixed media forms involving text and video, or immediately interactive forms exclusive to the digital. But it points up something else specific to the history of the physical book: those used Grove paperbacks represent the very social fantasy that is supposed to power Red Lemonade. The Beat sociality that pushed those early Grove paperbacks from hand to hand holds out the promise of what online community can be. This is the vision of socially motivated readership that is built into the site’s software. Once you buy an ebook from Red Lemonade, you are expressly encouraged to forward it to someone else. “The primary reason folks don’t read a particular book,” the site explains, “isn’t because it costs money . . . it’s because it takes time, and brain power, and emotional commitment. And you don’t give those things up lightly. You give them up mostly when a trusted friend advises you to.” It is Nash’s job as publisher to “give you the tools to get that friend of yours . . . to actually read” the book. The payoff, Nash suggests, is that “if they do, and love it, somewhere down the turnpike they buy a paperback, or another digital download or a limited edition or the next book or

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a previous book or a class. And here’s my gauntlet thrown down,” Nash continues in bolded font: “If, as a publisher, you don’t believe your writers can motivate readers to do that . . . then you shouldn’t be publishing.”8 The triumph of the Beats was to push experimental work into a market initially hostile to it through a social network of exceptional human intensity; this model of a friendship sales force is Red Lemonade’s model for online publishing. But just as the lack of a physical book cover narrows the conduits for artistic vision, the lack of human physicality radically narrows the tools for social connection. The Beats had food, sex, travel, drugs, shared flats, shared finances, and a big blue Hudson to ride in. Red Lemonade has online commenting. It is no surprise that Melo and Lynne Tillman, another featured author, are friends of Nash’s and authors he had previously published and promoted. They came to the project with affect added, affect generated in the physical world, not the virtual one. We see the writing on the wall, as it were, when Melo caves cheerfully to his commenting online readers: “If the spellings are more distracting than atmospheric, I’ll change them!” The response is in keeping with a commitment to “put the reader first,” a bit of wisdom he offers when asked in an interview for writing advice.9 “When you put a piece of writing out there,” he says, “it’s no longer about you or about the writing itself. It’s about the reader’s experience.” Responding with “thoughtful revision and an underlying attitude of appreciation to those willing to take the time to read your work” is all part of the writer’s secondary work, the work of “build[ing] an audience.”10 This is the transformation of work enabled by the new distribution system: the author has traded the work of traveling salesman for the work of professional ingratiator. Listening to humble Melo, one actually begins to miss an author like William Gaddis, who apparently was in the habit of attending readings of his work without actually reading it himself. Instead he would sit on stage while someone else read his work, his back to the audience, scowling toward the podium, refusing to answer questions at the end.11 Strength of vision has

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historically been fuel for writers and readers both. The Beats didn’t fall in love with each other’s minds, after all, only by agreeing, only by loving the same things; read the early letters between Ginsberg and Kerouac and it’s clear that they fell in love through lovers’ literary arguments. ࠮

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What you wouldn’t know from the Red Lemonade web site is that Nash was also trying to sell something other than the full spectrum of literary experience: he was trying to sell software. Indeed, it was selling the software that powers Red Lemonade—a product called Cursor that he had developed with a partner who did the programming—that was Nash’s greatest dream. It was an aim inspired by a chilly economic fact: in the decades of his twenties and thirties Nash reports that he averaged an income of $24,000 a year. He calls it “penury in service to the big coup.”12 In the dot-com startup world that defines the fantasy of internet entrepreneurial success, the big coup is a four-step process: first, you come up with an irresistible idea and build a prototype of your product; second, you recruit venture capital to your idea; third, you give away the service cheaply, or for free, while attracting impressive numbers of users; and fourth, you sell your newly buzzing startup, ripe with addicted users, to Google. Nash’s vision for a publishing business that would evade, structurally and forever, disasters like the PGW bankruptcy was not itself the big coup he was hoping for financially. Cursor was to be the printing press of the 21st century—but also the writing workshop, literary agency, editorial office, design shop, advertising service, distribution system, and reviewing venue. Venture capitalists couldn’t see it. Nobody bought it. Nash couldn’t make a living. On the West Coast especially, legions of startup founders toil in poverty hoping for a break. And they do it because in the world of tech the avant-garde product or skill, even if confined to a narrow band of elite users as avant-garde literature is, proves its hipness by its potential to have many users and thus much revenue. In the eyes of venture capital the startup is both the hip secret of the elite few and a nascent

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mass market product. That’s why it’s a good investment—its hipness as a little-known product is not its achievement but rather the leading edge of future growth and profit in the market. And the coolness, the cultural distinction of the startup for the tech workers who give their lifeblood to these enterprises is similarly linked to potential marketability. Even when startup founders work and suffer like traditional avantgarde artists for the sake of their concept, in the eyes of their peers their cultural value soars when the startup is bought, the founders get rich, and the elite, coterie product enters the mass market. The cultural value of the avant-garde artist still pertains for these workers—the ones who go from the sale of a startup to another, different startup retain a certain surplus value as “innovators”—but that cultural value does not inversely track marketability in the same way avant-garde literary value does. Novelty and creativity, not resistance to the mass market, underwrite the cultural distinction tech innovators gain over the startup founder who loyally follows his small-cap startup to its large-cap purchaser. Innovation in technology, unlike innovation in the literary field, is confirmed rather than compromised by market success. Nash, as a worker, tried to occupy simultaneously two models of cultural capital: the hipness economy of tech, and the hipness economy of literary culture. These came together explicitly in the venture he turned to next. Unmaking the Novel When Red Lemonade failed to generate profit and Cursor failed to interest investors, Nash was pushed once again out into the stream of capital flows, and he brought the novel as a form along with him. He seized another literary vision, another way to monetize novels in the net, a vision that angel investors had already embraced, a vision called Small Demons. Small Demons was a web site where you could explore all the “people, places, and things” that appear in novels (and other books) (Figure 3.1). It was a lit-geek paradise, a fully clickable concordance: you could go to the page for a novel—say, Juno Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—and start clicking links

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Figure 3.1 Small Demons homepage for The Maltese Falcon. Reprinted courtesy of smalldemons.com.

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from the text to its referents: to The Watchmen, or Trujillo, or the Rutgers dorm Demarest where Yunior and Oscar live. You could go from Diaz’s mention of Bob Marley to the constellation of other novels that mention him. What so-called literature labs produce in the form of data sets, Small Demons offered up as consumer bliss. The scent of consumer bliss attracts capital. What the Small Demons model sells is style and distinction, and here, as we follow Richard Nash through the narrows of the literary business, we see a second version of the novel in the net. This version also sells experience, but here the experience is consumption rather than the sort of reading and writing community feeling that Red Lemonade aimed to foster. Want to drink the cocktail that Sam Spade likes best? You could track it down on Small Demons. The site’s developers aimed to produce an app: one click and you buy a book and all the songs in it. Or Small Demons might, as Nash put it, “spider” your playlist: tell you what books are referenced in all your songs. Want to know how a brand—say, BMW—is accruing memes? Small Demons could tell you, or more to the point, Small Demons could tell BMW’s marketing department. Culture is not formed by taste, Nash says, but by “arguments about taste.” And Nash sees narratives themselves as “arguments about taste.” “Can we make money,” Nash asks, “out of the relationship between Prada and The Devil Wears Prada?” The answer of course is a resounding yes, as we saw in the summer of 2013 in the massive presence of Gatsby movie tie-ins such as the luxurious Tiffany jazzage jewelry advertised everywhere in upscale US publications. Small Demons aimed to do the same not just with one iconic novel but with a whole library of them. What drives the buyer to look to a novel for shopping advice rather than turning, say, to Details or Vogue or Pinterest? It is of course the cultural capital of the novel itself, the social meanings that cluster around its forms and subgenres. Nash testifies that working with Small Demons changed his thinking about novels. Novels, he explains, cast a “weighted vote on the meaningfulness” of things: Each narrative offers varying degrees of heroism [to create]; a song takes you a few weeks, a day in some cases. Movies have a lot of money wrapped up in them, many hours, but you

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have to divide that by the number of people involved. But the amount of time, energy and commitment of an individual for a novel is huge—3, 4, 6, 10 years of someone’s life, with no certainty [of it seeing the light of day]. There is no act more heroic culturally than this, except maybe writing a symphony orchestra. This is something that a reader picks up on. There is also a certain openness to it: only one of the five senses is involved; films supply two. With a book you have to put yourself into it to complete it all. And so it is a heroic act by the creator, but also a little bit of a heroic act by the reader. It takes ten hours of your fucking life—it’s unlike anything other than going on a Wire binge. Making meaning of your own self, your own life, understanding what things are talismanic for you: I see the individual book as having a remarkable ability to function as a manual for living and also potentially a catalog for living.13

Small Demons aimed to retail not only esoteric knowledge about novels, or the pleasures of owning things that appear in novels, or a sense of constructed meaningfulness that can be both respected and adopted as one’s own. The site also built its product on assumptions about the value of such an orientation to an aesthetic form. And so it hoped to retail the social roles novels and other aesthetic forms generate: the role of curator, editor, aficionado, connoisseur. Small Demons and Red Lemonade suggest you can earn these roles, and you earn them, conveniently, by donating your labor, by becoming what has recently been called a “prosumer.”14 Labor was much needed at Small Demons (and the freer the better), for the task of linking the things in novels to their counterparts in the world outside novels is not completely mechanized. Small Demons was banking on the fact that some people’s self-conceptions are built around cultural expertise of the kind Small Demons both relied upon and reproduced (Figure 3.2). The community aspect of Small Demons would cater to the person who considers the title of curator akin to the title of king (note the crown icon), offering a ladder up which the user could climb by providing his or her services to the site. Imagine how cool it would be to

Figure 3.2 The variety of activities and incentives Small Demons intended to offer to those willing to help sort data for their online concordances. These were still in development when the site folded. Reprinted courtesy of smalldemons.com.

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be able to say you were the Curator of New York City or Berlin or James Joyce or Highland whiskey. ࠮

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What is the source of a novel’s cultural value and what does the literary entrepreneur do with that value? What kinds of workers does the novel, by virtue of its location in the net, assemble around it? What happens to the novel as such—as a genre, as a cultural object requiring the work of both individuals and institutions—when it is embedded in this particular medium? Small Demons sought to make the aura of literary taste attach itself to the objects touched by that aura, not only—or even primarily—to the novels themselves, which is to say, to the objects that produce aura for distribution to drinks and records and vintage weaponry. The capacity to design an interface and a social network that will distribute that aura efficiently and in targeted ways was the company’s creative innovation. Small Demons made an online game, finally, out of what has long been a social game—the game of positioning oneself in the cultural field. Nash’s biography offers numerous examples of his success in the social games through which art moves, and his professional self-presentation shimmers with that kind of special knowledge. Nash had begun to keep office hours, for instance, at the Norwood Club at 241 West 14th Street in Chelsea. Up a flight of stairs to the unmarked red door of a lovely old townhouse, if you know to buzz, you will be let in. Membership is by application. The waiter wears a small fedora and skinny black jeans and fetches coffee. The membership fee is, Nash says, far cheaper than the cost of office space in Manhattan, but it’s clear that the very style of the place is also part and parcel of his cultural practice. Nash’s CV is brimming with experience in the sociality of the aesthetic, and his practical use of coterie cachet runs deeper than the need for cheap but excellent Manhattan office space. Growing up in rural Ireland, he was formed by the oppressive version of tight community, what he calls “squinting windows”: that network of sightlines that makes one’s every move visible to a gossiping community and its norms, and that

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makes one’s social choices always available for judgment. Arriving at Harvard in the late 1980s, he sought a different kind of community and found it at Adams House, where he lived. He remembers the house master there creating the atmosphere of a literary salon. Time has made good on that master’s effort: Adams House graduates from the early 1990s (and Nash’s personal circle of acquaintances) include the novelist Colson Whitehead; poet, curator, and scholar Kevin Young; novelist Lev Grossman, a Time book reviewer and the son of the writers Alan and Judith Grossman; and Emily Barton, a novelist, book reviewer, and writing teacher at Yale and Smith. After college, Nash’s academic interests in theater led him to intern with Richard Forman at the Wooster Group, a community of artists he describes as “Adams House on the Hudson.” It was here that his ideas about the social networks of art coalesced. Working at Small Demons, Nash helped to sell style. Whereas Red Lemonade offered a path to coterie status in an online “community”—by posting good comments on others’ manuscripts on the site, people might earn their way to publishing their own work—the path offered by Small Demons was a far easier one. One need only be skilled in aesthetic connoisseurship, that is, skilled in consumption rather than production of style, but nevertheless willing to chip in the unskilled labor to produce the basic data without which Small Demons could not function. Small Demons aggregated and made available for purchase not so much commodities themselves (though it aimed ultimately to do that) as the shimmer that the novel and its related nonfiction narratives could confer upon commodities. The Small Demons model produces cool, as Alan Liu has described it—as the small mark of distinction that allows the knowledge worker to imagine something like personal expressiveness within the massive wash of information. This incarnation of cool is not so much a style of clothing or headphones or music, but a style of knowledge itself. The novel is, in essence, stylish knowing. And what happened to narrative itself, the bread and butter of the novel as a form, as it moved to the Small Demons library? Narrative, for Small Demons, was

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Figures 3.3-3.5 Stills from the promotional video for Small Demons: catching bright things that spring from your favorite books. Reprinted courtesy of smalldemons.com.

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a medium in the classic sense: the site’s visionaries seemed to see it as a block of ice, in which are preserved and suspended all sorts of bright things. Their programmers’ algorithm dissolved narrative so that these objects could float out to us in the river of literary meltwater, where we swimmers, heedless of the currents, might reach out and take them (Figures 3.3, 3.4, 3.5). This is the novel unmade. Bankruptcy’s Other Roads To return to history with which this chapter began: we can see how the implosion of PGW launches a series of effects that in turn launch people like Nash, and with him the novel as a form, out of their standard networks and into the space of the internet in such a way that Nash could begin to reimagine the very structures of literary production. (And of course he was not alone in this; others were working to similar ends.) But it is worth noting that this event launched another independent publisher, McSweeney’s, into the networked world in a very different way. For McSweeney’s, the internet also came into play in the hungry spring of 2007: it served as a neighborhood support system that Dave Eggers used to raise money through a “a garage sale of sorts.”15 With a single email, Eggers exhorted McSweeney’s supporters to buy books direct from their web site at a discounted price and to bid on eBay for items from their archives and for items donated for the purpose by betterknown contributors.16 These included “an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of ‘The Daily Show’ guided by John Hodgman,” or a “one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July.”17 Eli Horowitz, their managing editor at the time, represented the difference between the indie press and the conglomerate as a difference of community: “I don’t think Bertelsmann can send out an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, guys, we need to sell off some books so we can put out some more.’ In a way this feels like a whole town coming together.”18 McSweeney’s use of the internet in 2007 pointed up two things: first, how social networks built with paper and personality can be activated effectively through the

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internet, and second, how owning the means of distribution, even partially, is made possible through the internet and comes to matter to the survival of a business. What is less obvious, however, is the way this use of the internet marked out a path that came to include McSweeney’s first foray into the ebook market, with its Small Chair iPhone app, launched in the spring of 2010. Which is to say: this use of the internet reinforced the press’s commitment to the physical book—indeed, it focused attention on the objecthood of books through the sorts of artifacts that went on sale to tide the press over. This recommitment to the book as object unfolded even as circumstances pushed the press to put its novels on the net. As I argued in Chapter 1, McSweeney’s came to have an app at all because of the personal connection that subscription to the quarterly—an elaborately, emphatically paper product—had come to inspire in a particular reader, a reader whose response to McSweeney’s and feelings about it mirror the impulse that made readers flock to the web site to buy books and swag at Eggers’s request in 2007. The form and purpose of the Small Chair app is utterly unlike either Small Demons or Red Lemonade, pointing up the unpredictable array of consequences any given change in the novel’s medium can produce. Instead of interactivity at the level of content and reader response, it offers traditional but limited reading experiences: this is the land of the teaser. To take one example: Small Chair offers an excerpt from Evany Thomas and Amelia Bauer’s The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-nine Positions. In e-form, as opposed to the paper version, it comes with a special introduction: to help raise money for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, McSweeney’s is running a contest for readers to invent the 40th sleep position. The winning entry, which can be submitted online or at the Walker’s benefit event, will be illustrated and described by Bauer and Thomas. What the introduction doesn’t say is that readers intent on winning will need to buy the book, since only ten positions are offered in the Small Chair version. Only the paper version will tell you if your sleep position is really the new 40th, or just a knockoff of number 27.

Plate 1 Small Demons homepage for The Maltese Falcon. Reprinted courtesy of smalldemons.com.

Plate 2 The variety of activities and incentives Small Demons intended to offer to those willing to help sort data for their online concordances. These were still in development when the site folded. Reprinted courtesy of smalldemons.com..

Plate 3 The Silent History, screenshot showing GPS location of reader and progress through the volumes of the novel. Sections of the circle are shaded to indicate which Testimonials have been accessed and read in that volume and which have not. The “M. Lafferty” Testimonial can be tapped and read from this screen. Semicircles visible to either side of the central circle indicate the previous and following volumes. Field Report in Guilford, Connecticut, shows as marker on the map. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–13 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Plate 4 Design detail from The Silent History; when read at night, the map changes color. Maps can be zoomed in and out with the standard touch-screen gestures. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Plate 5 Stills from The Silent History’s trailer showing decaying warehouses and proliferating circles design. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Plate 6 The Silent History, screenshot showing an active field report and the reader’s location. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Plate 7 The Silent History, screenshot of the opening text of the Field Report for the Henry Whitfield House, Guilford, Connecticut. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Plate 8 The Silent History, screenshot showing map of UK Field Reports. The numbers in the hexagons indicate how many reports are clustered in a particular area. As the reader zooms in, the reports differentiate into individually marked locations on the map. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

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Other content comes in the category of tastes—an excerpt from John Brandon’s novel Citrus County; an “exclusive selection” by Elmore Leonard from McSweeney’s issue 39, at the conclusion of which we are directed to their online store. Endedness is the point—promised but not delivered until you buy the whole book or enter the contest or buy a subscription. McSweeney’s is still selling paper books as the engine of social connection, the objects becoming the occasion for physical encounters or for some other social act that will pulse through the social network on which McSweeney’s was built and which, sustained and elaborated over more than 15 years, represents its distinctive achievement. Reading the Novel in the Net For McSweeney’s, the aftermath of PGW’s collapse brought about a turn to a new medium for both fundraising and the distribution of their published work, but one would be hard put to argue that their turn to the internet would do much to change the practice of reading their books or the content they provided through the Small Chair app. (Chapter 5 shows how Horowitz and Quinn came to experiment later on, and on their own, with a networked novel that does invite new reading practices.) But Small Demons and Red Lemonade do suggest how changes in production and consumption of novels in the net may have effects on the form of the novel and on the habits of reading that have dominated our expectations since the rise of the genre in the 18th century. These two interfaces build formal affinities between novels and their various internet locations. In McSweeney’s case, the advent of the Small Chair app simply miniaturizes the same linear reading habits taught by the realist novel. Red Lemonade’s interface, on the other hand, is particularly hospitable to fiction that embraces fragmentation both of narrative and the physical page. Melo’s Happy Talk and Lynne Tillman’s featured short story collections both fit this model. In Tillman’s case the fragmentation is celebrated in the limited edition of the collection that Red Lemonade began offering on the site in 2012. For $198 you could buy the collection

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as a set of 21 small bound books designed by the sculptor Jim Hodges. The edition came with a display case sheathed in plexiglass so that you could arrange and rearrange the books inside. Hodges’s “artist edition of Tillman’s short story collection,” the site explained, “thereby tests the boundaries of the bound book by unpacking and repackaging it and freeing the reader-cum-viewer to do the same, offering a shifting, kaleidoscopic grid of color as one possible incarnation, one moment in the interplay of text and image.”19 Formal fragmentation is here burnished into beautiful abstraction as broken narrative, or narrative multiplicity is transformed back into visual wholeness. Small Demons staked its wholeness on the wholeness implicit in the “people, places and things” that are said to “live” inside books. The site’s logic favored the encyclopedic novel, genre fiction, urban fiction, historical novels, and characterfocused nonfiction narrative, but these larger-scale narrative forms existed within the Small Demons database for the purpose of postproduction fragmentation. This leaves us, first of all, with a reaffirmation of the fairly banal point that internet reading is distracted reading, that long narrative forms—or even mediumlength narrative forms—don’t thrive there. Through the Small Demons algorithm those forms are dissolved. The forms of reading that Small Demons in particular advocated make narrative analysis and other kinds of critical consumption prohibitively difficult, for narrative form was difficult to recover from their data mining. For a time, its simpler consumer orientation allowed it to thrive where Red Lemonade’s production emphasis proved unprofitable, but both efforts highlight a problem with literary production today: oversupply. We could consume happily and forever on the Small Demons model without adding any new novels to the library. But the history of reading gives us another way of seeing these last two developments in relation to the novel’s history. Robert Darnton describes the history of reading as the transformation of readers’ habits from the process of extraction to the process of more passive narrative assimilation. The scholarly study of 17th-century commonplace books reveals, Darnton suggests, the critical habits of readers who

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selected, categorized, and copied what they considered important passages from their books into a single composite book. Their commonplace books become what Darnton and other scholars see as a map of the discursive field in which readers lived—a field whose contours and organizing logics are visible in the manipulations carried out by the reader compiling his or her commonplaces.20 The habit of commonplacing has had a revival in the internet age. We might think most obviously of Pinterest, where the user is told she can “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.”21 The personal pinboards, like commonplace books, can be used by the assembler and also read by others; Small Demons at one point was developing a version of this feature called a Storyboard. But such commonplacing is only one instance of what happens on a much larger scale across the web. How many times do searches turn up the same text about a certain topic or place or object in multiple, seemingly unrelated web sites? Reposting and retweeting, not to mention simple cut/paste plagiarism, are mechanisms through which individual users—like old-fashioned readers—select, sort, and copy passages that matter to them. Sometimes these borrowings occur in one place as with the pinboard, bound as it were within a personal or corporate web site of commonplaces. More often the cutting and pasting is simply what we might call rhizomic: a description or review of a video, for example, is composed and used and replicated on sites that serve all kinds of purposes, that are not announced as a collection of commonplaces though that is what they are. The effect is something like Massively Multireader commonplacing: the commons here being all the material available on the web, and the filtering consciousness not one person but thousands, each intent on some narrower purpose, a mass that together is responsible for the dissemination of a given chunk of text. What kind of reading does this practice suggest? Is this the critical, “digestive” reading that Darnton admires in the commonplacers of the 17th century? Sometimes, but I would speculate that the majority of chunks don’t require extraction, which means that they don’t require the critical reader to break up narrative (or some other

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formal structure such as argument, or explanation, or list) in order to handle and pass on a packet of text-bound thought: the chunks are produced as chunks. They then circulate in that form rather than as gems to be extracted (the old-fashioned habit of calling such extracts “gems” suggests the logic of mining and the judgment of value that mode of reading entailed). And perhaps this is where the “weighted vote” of the novel, as Nash imagines it, asserts its cultural power: these extracts carry with them the mark of the cultural labor required to produce them both originally—in the writing of the novel—and in the form of favorite quotes, just as they carry with them the name of the novels they come from. This chapter has gone from following the single actor—Richard Nash—to the mass of actors who can be said to create the commonplace book that is the internet. But the perception of the mass does not obliterate the interest of the single actor. There is a sinister form of agential assertion in which something like the singular commonplace compositor reasserts himself, or itself, within the web structure—as when firms are hired to whitewash executive or corporate reputations by populating blogs with repetitive positive pap about a client, producing innocuous Google hits that drive scandal down into the nth page of a search result. In a different vein, the mark of a person like Nash remains palpable in the ways that the paper book, and the book business, is evolving in relation to the new commonplacing. Nash, as an expert in older forms of the social capital that converge around the aesthetic, is both innovator and conservator, clearing one of the paths by which successful forms of in-person aesthetic collaboration are carried back and forth between virtual and material worlds, between the digital and paper forms of the book, through practices of writing and reading.

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GPS Historicism

When a novel knows where you are standing while you read it, how does the act of reading change? The question is something more than a thought experiment, and it is so because of the collaboration between Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz that began with Quinn’s subscription to McSweeney’s. Two years after they began working together on the press’s first screen-based productions, their collaboration resulted in a significant formal innovation for the novel: the first novel entirely integrated into an app, a literary product that Wired magazine called “Entirely revolutionary.” For by 2012, both Quinn and Horowitz had left McSweeney’s to start their own publishing and design services company with a third McSweeney’s alumnus, Chris Ying. Horowitz, always busy with creative projects of his own, hatched the idea of a novel contained in an app, a novel that would attempt to shuttle between the virtual and material worlds. (In this sense, the project shared a certain vision with Small Demons.) Horowitz wanted to produce, he says, “a novel you could explore,” and he meant that in a literal sense as well as an imaginative one: that by traveling around the country and around the world a reader could experience the novel more and more fully and discover different parts of its narrative.1 The idea became a work called The Silent History, which was released in daily installments through the app’s delivery system beginning in the spring of 2012. And while not “entirely revolutionary”—Wired may have overstated the case, given the novel’s commitment to classic forms of storytelling—The Silent History, by its very design, invites us to consider not only how reading might change when the novel migrates to a new medium, but also how the methods and claims of literary history might change along with the practices of reading.

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The interaction between novel and reader that GPS-enabled devices make possible has interpretive implications—that is, implications for how we read The Silent History’s meaning and significance as a novel—but it also affects method: the conjunction of literature and new technology makes it possible to know things about readers and their behavior that have rarely been known and have thus rarely been included in accounts of literary history. The use of space in the novel urges the reader to take up a set of concrete practices that differ in important respects from traditional novel-reading, and compel readers to produce traces of their reading practice in an entirely new kind of data. Or rather, a kind of data that became central to business and social networking platforms with the advent of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, but that had not yet been harnessed to the form of the novel. That delay, and its meaning for the future of the novel as a form, is something I consider in the second half of the chapter. Across the arc of the whole chapter, I argue that building a novel into an app, among its other interpretive consequences, allows one to observe with unusual clarity how New Historicist modes of reading—which take the form and content of a work to reflect, or even to allegorize, the deep structures of the historical moment in which it is made—might collide both with a sociological mode of reading and with other, more dramatically critic-centered, ways of constructing literary and cultural history. The Silent History speaks to its historical context in two distinct voices: the voice of narrative and the voice of data. The narrative and its GPS features answer my opening questions in ways that suggest the limits of both classic New Historicism and emergent big-data approaches to literary study. At its most venturesome, this argument gestures beyond what I will suggest is New Historicism’s decline to a bifurcated methodological future. On the one hand, historicism may mean something more scientific than we have assumed in the past—exemplified by the use of largescale data—and on the other hand, historicism may be abandoned in favor of a more old-fashioned reliance on the critic’s unique mind, creativity, and voice; in favor, that

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is, of the critic’s explicit participation in ongoing literary history. The critic may tell the history of a specific phenomenon (something closer to the history of ideas) or narrate acts of reading for their own sake in hopes of modeling a transformed experience of reading for others. Silent Reading The Silent History borrows significant formal features from the 19th-century novel. First released as a serial, its installments were timed, and composed, for each day of the week. But unlike its Victorian progenitors, the parts of The Silent History were not written by the creator of the work, Eli Horowitz, but commissioned, assembled, and edited by him in collaboration with the writers Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby who produced the days’ stories according to a detailed plot outline that Horowitz drew up in advance. Russell Quinn developed the app itself. This is not to say that his role was similar to that of someone who designs a book’s cover and chooses paper and fonts. It is more like saying that he’s a specialist who provided structural services to the novel, as if someone other than Joyce had determined the chapter divisions of Ulysses. From the start, the novel’s content and its digital form developed symbiotically, with the story in some ways reverse-engineered from the sense of how it would be produced and structured in the app (Figures 4.1 and 4.2).2 Set in 2044, the novel presents itself as a chronologically organized archive of transcribed oral histories that track an epidemic beginning in the United States in 2011, when suddenly, occasionally, children are born without the capacity for written or spoken language. These children come to be called “the silents” and the archive is a government-funded project intended to produce “some understanding, or at least a clear record, of [the] ever-changing phenomenon” of the silents. It contains contributions, we are told, from “teachers, classmates, little league coaches, government officials, faith healers, cult leaders, militia members, pilgrims, imposters.”3 As we learn over the course of the novel, the silents do communicate with one another,

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Figure 4.1 The Silent History, screenshot showing GPS location of reader and progress through the volumes of the novel. Sections of the circle are shaded to indicate which Testimonials have been accessed and read in that volume and which have not. The “M. Lafferty” Testimonial can be tapped and read from this screen. Semicircles visible to either side of the central circle indicate the previous and following volumes. Field Report in Guilford, Connecticut, shows as marker on the map. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–13 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Figure 4.2 Design detail from The Silent History; when read at night, the map changes color. Maps can be zoomed in and out with the standard touch-screen gestures. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

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through complex facial expressions, and their formation into communities of various kinds triggers responses in the mainstream culture over time—responses ranging from the violent to the mystical. It is telling, I think, that The Silent History imagines its own project—the project of documenting the history of a public health epidemic—as requiring an institution much larger and even less individually controlled than the four-person team that is in fact responsible for most of the novel. The fictional conditions of the novel’s existence are laid out in the introductory materials of the work. This begins with “The Archives,” a video of just over two minutes, that explains the structure of the story. As the camera slowly pans across the Georgian façade of an institutional-looking building, a voiceover in a faintly British or Indian accent explains that “In 2011, 32 years ago, we began collecting stories from families and medical professionals who were first encountering a strange new silence among our sons and daughters.” The label, “The Archives,” is superimposed on the shot of the library-like building, a scene that dissolves into a panning shot of the file drawers housed inside. A second segment of the app’s front matter, titled “The Condition,” opens with the emblem of the US Department of Health and Human Services. It offers a PowerPoint of graphs and maps documenting the growing population of silents, diagrams of the institution for silents where their communication was first observed, MRI scans of silent and nonsilent brains, and black screens with pithy quotations from doctors, teachers, and concerned citizens about the condition and its social implications. The novel’s ambition, then, is cast in terms of institutional forms of knowledge: the novel imagines a story so extensive, so important, that only a governmental agency has the reach and resources to tell it. Indeed, there would be no story, in the logic of the novel, if silents had not been institutionalized—and thus gathered together. This is why “The Condition” takes such pains to note the role of the Red Oaks Academy in the emergence of communication between silent children. An institution for the care and education of

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the children, it was simultaneously dedicated to collecting information about them; thus the emergence of the silents’ collective life occurs entirely within an institution already prepared to structure knowledge about silent life. That said, it is worth noting, for reasons to which I will return, that neither the market nor a shared national culture is imagined in the novel as capable of containing the development of that collective life or shaping the development of speaking culture’s treatment of silents. Indeed, the pharmaceutical industries associated with treatments and implants don’t enter the story in any robust way—we hear from just a single entrepreneur marketing a device that caters to silents’ existing capacities, and we hear repeatedly from the doctor responsible for inventing the implant device that, later in the story, allows silent children to speak. His reflections focus on his own thoughts and feelings about his work rather than its cultural uptake. The market is imagined as incapable of addressing a population that does not use language. Silents take up residence in the brownfields and abandoned warehouses of postindustrial America. We can see this in the novel’s video trailer, which prominently features such sites—the detritus of the global manufacturing economy that no longer pulls goods from American factories (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). For those in the nonsilent mainstream who are drawn to these places, the silents are in fact cultural producers, producing something the world needs: an experience and a life outside the shell of American mass market cultural production. In a striking scene, a curious boy, a silent wannabe, follows a group of silent teenagers into an urban street attraction where customers can have the virtually induced sensual experience of falling out of a plane with a bunch of gorillas. The silents cooperate as they fall out of the plane, forming a human chain in the virtual air, taking the boy along with them, and once on the virtual ground, they slip through a hole in the skin of the entertainment (as John Barth’s Ambrose does in his own porous fictional funhouse) where they hang out together on a dune until they are discovered and kicked out by the amusement’s operator. It is as if the silents are producing an alternate world

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Figures 4.3 and 4.4 Stills from The Silent History’s trailer showing decaying warehouses and proliferating circles design. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

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from a tear in the seamless surface of American consumer capitalism, a tear through which physical and collective human presence can penetrate a culture centered on increasingly private virtual experience. Government power, then—the power to archive, and later in the story the power to make and enforce public health laws, the power that steps in where the market fails—remains the driver of The Silent History despite the silents’ alternative forms of culture making, and the novel imagines that state power as faceless. We do encounter the mayor of a small town in California, where the silent commune called Face to Face is located; we see him at first protecting and then sacrificing the commune to federal enforcers as public sentiment about silent people shifts across time. And we come to know some doctors who treat silents, particularly Dr. Theodore Greene, who pioneers the implantation device and is father to the silent Flora. We come to understand the device as a misguided product of his longing for connection with his daughter. What we don’t see is the political movement to mandate implants for silent children; we never know who advocated for this idea or why, or how its proponents persuaded the public to go along. We are left with the feeling that the law was inevitable, an expression of the double hegemony of language and the American “normal.” The mandatory implantation program is the dark complement to the regime of knowledge that the Archives represent, and the implantation program is itself implicitly represented as a collective initiative powered by a hive of persons even more anonymous, and less differentiated, than those responsible for the Archives. In other words, government steps in to reinforce culture structured by a shared language, acting as the regulating institution in a region where the market can’t function— because the silents are not effective consumers—and where money can’t be made. Quinn and Horowitz together have created an institutional narrator that acts as the counterpart to this governmental function: the app’s algorithm, which parses and controls the information we read, which places the story on the map, organizes the narrative, and orients us to our physical and imaginative location within it. Like

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the archives within the novel, the app’s design is a faceless narrator, a narrator created not by that recognizable literary personage, an “author,” but by the quiet technical “developer” and the bureaucratic “editor”—the sort of actors who, as I argue throughout this book, remain like the silent culture-makers within the story, culturally invisible within the production networks of the contemporary novel. ࠮

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Given the comprehensive institutional frame of the story itself, it comes as a surprise, in the third section of the front matter called “The Prologue,” to see a report from “Hugh Purcell, Executive Director, Washington, DC,” dated 2044, which departs strikingly from the institutional decorum of the other two segments of the novel’s framing introduction. The distinct voice of Purcell, his humor and his philosophical musings, suggests the very flexibility of this imagined institutional frame and the institutional structure that is the app itself. Purcell opens his introduction to the archives with the colorful memory of his first day as a junior epidemiological archivist working to document the phenomenon of the silents, a day that included wandering around seedy neighborhoods, “getting mugged and dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms,” and discovering a hidden community of silents thriving within an abandoned building. Eighteen years later we find him as the executive director of the project. Purcell’s reflections suggest his fascination with the very idea of a region of human experience shut off from language—and he thus cues the reader to the Big Questions that the novel grapples with: “Are words our creation, or did they create us? And who are we in a world without them? Are there wilder, more verdant fields out beyond the boundaries of language, where those of us who are silent now wander? Each of us will come to know the answer to that in our own way. We all enter and leave the world in silence, after all, and everything else is simply how we make our way through that middle passage.” Even if Purcell is in charge of the archives we read, the quirkiness of his introduction—he does not speak in a recognizably institutional voice—separates the individual human voice from that

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structure’s conventions. In a way this is the product and the thematic echo of the work’s production: the writers, Moffett and Derby, are playful and funny, attracted to an absurdist strain of contemporary literature exemplified by the work of George Saunders. “Dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms”? Falling out of a plane with gorillas? They take Horowitz’s central directives and seed them with the quirky traces of their writerly autonomy. Reading on Site The preceding account of The Silent History is meant to introduce readers to the novel’s basic themes and structures in such a way that one can begin to see how the work interacts with the world we know and how it reflects back on the unusual way the novel was made. Enter, now, GPS tracking: there are certain sections of the novel I have not yet mentioned, called “Field reports,” that can be read only in specific places—very specific. To access any of these documents the device must be within about ten meters of a location to which such a document has been pegged; for the report to make sense, the reader needs to be looking at the particular thing—be it a dent in a fire hydrant or the trunk of a tree or the opening of an alleyway—that figures in, or is somehow accounted for, in the field report (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). The reports are written by an array of contributors beyond the four main creators of the novel. The app invites its readers to offer field reports from whatever location they wish and provides detailed instructions about how to write and submit one for review (there will be more to say about this element of the reports). As a reader, one can either travel to see a specific report or make a habit of checking the novel as one goes about daily life to see whether there are newly active reports popping up (if the app is left open, it can alert users when there is an active field report nearby). When one arrives at the site of a report—say, the Henry Whitfield House museum in Guilford, CT—the report turns green on the map and is marked as “active,” and the text tells one where to look, what to notice: That tree in the center of the property is where the fictional author of this

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Figure 4.5 The Silent History, screenshot showing an active field report and the reader’s location. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

Figure 4.6 The Silent History, screenshot of the opening text of the Field Report for the Henry Whitfield House, Guilford, Connecticut. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

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report would have his lunch and observe the growth of mushrooms; that well near the house is where the silent girl would linger, tracing the stones with her fingers. This reading practice—and the writing practice that produces it—is made necessary by the noise in the GPS positioning within the app. Horowitz’s editorial instructions to aspiring field reporters explain: “The pin placement within the app is not always perfectly precise, and a reader may have access while not yet standing exactly at your desired spot. Thus, it’s helpful if the text itself can include subtle cues helping readers properly orient themselves.”4 The technical necessity becomes, however, a literary invitation to be oriented through the novel and its medium—to wander with one’s eyes pinned to the blue dot of one’s current location. In this way it is also an invitation both to be the silent and to experience a world not unlike the virtual street entertainment that the silents penetrate (but usually without the gorillas and the airplane). Readers are asked to locate themselves in space so as to understand a particular story in a particular way, toggling back and forth between the view within the device’s fictional world and the view within the space they’ve come physically to occupy. The invitation to file one’s own field report from a chosen site asks the reader to become a producer of the work, producing content for the app but also producing a shared experience of a place across time, accessible to others who follow the app’s GPS to that location. In this sense the reader is no longer the silent’s double but the actual speaking occupant of an imagined world whose writing brings that virtual world further into being. The reader is also actually standing on a street or lot, becoming the wanderer who begins to change the real-time demographic flow of that place at the behest of the novel. These locations are imagined within the novel as places where “the silences collided with our physical world” (“The Archives”); in real time they become places where The Silent History collides with our physical world. ࠮

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We can understand a field report as an individual reader’s imaginative response to the novel. The app stitches that response to a location, making it possible for the

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next reader to replicate the first reader’s imaginative extension of the main storyline into a new part of the world. Private acts of reading thus accrete to the novel’s public form, not as paratext—such as blog post, literary-critical essay, or author interview—but as part of the novel itself, subsumed into the editor’s central vision. Horowitz’s vision for these elements of the novel is articulated in his instructions to field reporters, and that vision chimes with the kind of editorial control he exerted over Moffett and Derby, the main writers of the novel. I will quote at length here to give a sense of the sort of teaching these guidelines provide—they run to six singlespaced pages. “The specific physical location of the report must play a central and necessary role,” Horowitz writes. Ideally this will manifest itself in ways both large and small; for example, an unusual intersection provides a vivid setting for an incident, but the incident also results in odd marks still visible in the pavement. A successful field report integrates the setting in creative and enriching ways, earning the reader’s trip to the location; in fact, field reports should feel incomplete if read anywhere else.5

And again: The setting should be utilized more than described; there’s no need to list the facts that will already be obvious to a reader/viewer standing in that spot. Instead, the location serves as a parallel source of information, accompanying your written narrative; the two sources can subtly support and amplify each other to deepen the authenticity of the incident being described. The setting can also be driving the action, an active force in the story.6

Reports that contradict the backbone of the novel (contained in the testimonials supplied through the “Archives” to all readers regardless of location) are not accepted for publication. The writing practice Horowitz thus guides grows from an imaginative interaction with the story that has long precedent in literary reading practices: “In its own way,”

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Horowitz explains in an interview, “this project is about interactivity and augmented reality . . . : you interact with the story by physically standing inside it; it augments reality by just providing a different explanation of what’s already there.”7 We might think of many low-tech analogous cases from the last 150 years of literary culture: readers touring Baker Street in London to see “where” Sherlock Holmes lived, or traveling to Wordsworth’s Lake District, or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a region roughly corresponding to Dorset (both Hardy and his publishers encouraged his fans to associate the region with his novels). It is as if such literary tourists could then turn around and add to Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected stories, or Wordsworth’s poetry, or Hardy’s novels. Readers are thus drawn by the novel itself into a structure for experience—which is to say, an institution—that assigns both writers and readers to certain roles. It moves us through space, requires our work for expansion, and controls or guides our access to both experience and knowledge. The structure is rigorously historical in a topsyturvy sense possible only in fiction: as Purcell explains in his 2044 Prologue, the story contained in the archive “presumes nothing about the future; it is strictly a record of the past, of what we looked like before, and how we got here.” The chronologically controlled production of the novel in its initial release of six one-month-long sets of daily installments reproduces for the reader herself Purcell’s we-cannot-know-thefuture. The app limits the reader’s access to the unfolding story. Postrelease, the app prevents readers who purchase the whole novel at once from skipping parts or reading ahead; any one of the chronologically organized “testimonials” will not open if all the previous entries have not been opened (and presumably read) first. This interaction between writer and reader is the zone of literary experiment that most preoccupies Horowitz. His previous book, Clock without a Face (McSweeney’s, 2010), is a puzzle book inspired by the activity of geocaching, in which hikers with GPS units hunt for hidden caches where geocachers have left notes, gifts, logbooks, and the like. The book’s conceit revolves around an apartment building of twelve

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stories. Each page spread shows the minutely illustrated floor plan of each story; these floor plans act as maps and keys to an actual geographic location in the United States where Horowitz had buried a hand-wrought, bejeweled bronze number corresponding to the floor of the apartment building where its location was encrypted. These were the numbers of the eponymous clock face, to be discovered one by one and kept by the readers who could first solve the puzzles of the book’s pages. Clock Without a Face is ostensibly aimed at young readers—or at those adults who still fancy maps and buried treasure—though the puzzles are so challenging that the numbers seem mainly to have been found by adults working with their teenage children.8 The book induces a heady and aesthetically pleasing kind of play, a play that asks readers to map book onto landscape and to be present in the geography denoted by the book, checking page against real ground with a real shovel, for real payoff. Horowitz’s next project—an ebook created with the writer Chris Adrian, a book with multiple false endings—aims to experiment further with the power dynamics between reader and writer, dynamics with which both Clock Without a Face and The Silent History have meddled. He recounts, as inspiration, the intensity of some readers’ complaints that they cannot access distantly located field reports and their demands for the delivery of new installments of The Silent History, a kind of desire that narrative seriality has always relied upon, but which the instant interactivity of the virtual medium makes newly pressing. Horowitz wondered: what if a reader could earn the right to access the next installment either by waiting a set amount of time (as all readers did who subscribed to the serialized form of The Silent History) or by performing some task—going somewhere, finding something, doing something?9 Horowitz is experimenting with the ways that new devices for reading, equipped with a whole array of features ostensibly unrelated to reading, might be drawn into a reading practice that blends the virtual reality of fiction with the reader’s bodily, historical life. Contemplating actual readers just before the app began to release its first installments, Horowitz confessed to feeling the limits of his powers rather than their

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breadth: “Words are easy—you choose which ones you want and they stay where you put them. But the world is messy—these field reports only really exist via a weird combination of text, reader, and physical environment, far beyond anything we can hope to control.”10 Authors, even those who felt they were the gods of their universes, have always felt the world’s power shouldering in on their own. What is new about Horowitz’s version of authorial control is that the medium itself, powered by smart algorithms, can more decisively giveth and taketh away. Novel Data I have begun to show how several aspects of The Silent History’s form and content reflect the conditions of its production and reception as well as the literary preoccupations of its makers. I’ve noted how the novel imagines silents occupying abandoned zones of the market economy; we might ask whether literary endeavor is also that region where the market can’t function and money can’t be made. We could note how, in the novel, the government puts implants in the brains of silents in order to pipe in language and meaning. The central processing center in Maine, wirelessly connected to the implants, takes its language from public-domain novels, advertising, and movie trailers. Walking silently around the site of a field report, looking where your device bids you, noticing what it tells you to notice, you find yourself manipulated by a central processor that pipes language into your brain, creating the sort of metafictional experience that ramifies out to our experience of the culture at large. Attaching the novel to the devices that render us silent even as we communicate furiously through them makes us into the very figure of the wandering silent—the person who walks staring intently down at her phone, absorbed in the wilder, more verdant fields of the virtual. And the novel offers a world where institutions much larger than the individual set the parameters for how we narrate history, a thematic feature of the novel that points both back to Horowitz’s experiments with narrative control and outward to the world we live in.

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In short, I’ve offered a typical New Historicist reading, revealing how at every turn the novel invites us to see in its story an allegory of its production, the reflection of the historical moment in which it was made, and the authorial conditions under which it came into being. Countless novels and other works of art do this for the attentive reader as research uncovers more information about context and as we make more detailed, or more sophisticated, observations about the work at hand. But this novel, as I said at the outset, speaks toward context in two distinct voices. Having listened to the one, we must listen to the other. ࠮

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When Horowitz decided that he “wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore,” in the physical sense that I’ve been describing, he was presented with an immediate production problem: he “knew there was no way [he] could fill a whole country [him]self.” In turn, this determined the form and authorship of the novel, a system that would mobilize a whole cadre of readers and make them into writers.11 But even in the diffusion of authorial control that resulted, the raw materials of a different kind of control were amassing within the technical structure of the app. I asked in the first sentence of this chapter what happens to the act of reading when your novel knows where you are standing while you read it. And so there is another kind of answer that comes into view: reading produces new kinds of traces. The Silent History produces entirely new data about readers’ behavior. We can watch the reader as she moves through the novel—it is possible for Horowitz and Quinn to know how far each reader has read in the story, for instance, and how fast they read it, and on what day; readers’ imaginative responses, in the form of those field reports, are gathered and selectively added to the novel itself; Horowitz and Quinn know when and how often field reports are accessed. If they wanted to they could determine exactly when a reader stopped reading and where they were in the novel. There is nothing to suggest that Horowitz and Quinn are interested in the creepier forms of surveillance and control that one can easily imagine given

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these features of the technology built into the novel.12 But we might be interested in that data. And by we of course I mean we who are interested in literary history and the history and practice of reading. This is just the sort of thing that scholars laboring in archives try to reconstruct, and always in a provisional way. Thankfully for us, some of the data The Silent History’s app gathers is both accessible and nicely visible through the novel itself. Even simply using the field reports and the GPS mapping, an ordinary user can amass a certain kind of data and from that data establish some basic inferences about the novel’s social network. First, we might observe that field reporters are in some sense a network made by the guidelines Horowitz supplies for those who might like to contribute: “There was a lot of trial-and-error required to craft guidelines that would elicit a pretty reliable level of success from a varied group of writers,” Horowitz says. “In theory, the specificity of the form will result in a smaller but more dedicated group of contributors.”13 And he’s right: Horowitz’s six-page, detailed guidelines do create a group, a group defined by their investment in writing as a craft and by their willingness to become students of that craft. And who, in the social sense, were the dedicated group of contributors? “The first group of reporters were a couple friends,” Horowitz says. “Then it was friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends—wider and wider circles, in order to simulate the even-wider circles” that the novel would ultimately create. To return to the meditation on literary method: The Silent History’s multiple authors and its GPS innovations construct an actual map of its own literary sociology, making visible the expanding “circles” that constitute the repeated formal structure of the work itself, from its design to its narrative structure to its actual production. Horowitz makes it clear that the collaborative aspect of the work is not modeled on the classic interactivity of a project such as The House of Leaves, multiplayer games, or even posting to a blog, though the field reports seem to follow that logic. The Silent History works differently because of Horowitz’s editorial “guidelines” and because

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the contributors are drawn from a preexisting set of social connections rather than being generated by the work itself—which is to say, Horowitz embraced the primacy of other social networks in the generation of virtually networked literature rather than relying, as other digital literature innovators have tried to do, on social circles entirely assembled by the virtual work itself (as Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade project tried—and failed—to do). Sociology, and the novel itself, tell a story about those social networks. For instance, we can note the importance of the writing program to its existence as we look at two regions of The Silent History’s world map: the UK and Florida (Figure 4.7). In both these regions—distinct, say, from the empty maps of European countries such as Germany—there are clusters of field reports pegged to locations. One of these clusters was generated when Horowitz’s invitation to contribute a field report, sent to a friend in a writing program at the University of Florida, was circulated in the department’s newsletter. The dense UK plot, Horowitz explained, was occasioned by the writing program at the University of East Anglia, where an enthusiastic contributor was studying. The cluster of reports in Australia is the product of a different network: a young man living there who is a subscriber to and fan of McSweeney’s invited Horowitz to a literary festival he was running; Horowitz went and talked about The Silent History, and the connection bore fruit in the Australian field reports. What Horowitz describes as simply “a fluid community of readers and writers with an element of guidance at its core” is revealed to be just that, except that the element of guidance is visible on the map as an effect not of editorial control but of social acts and facts outside the novel which produce the aesthetic investments that define the network the novel in turn produces.14 In its very bones, in its foundational data structures, the novel reveals other sociological realities as well. The Silent History makes visible particular kinds of workers who are important to the contemporary development of the novel. These include workers we might call “subsistence writers,” people who write often without pay in

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Figure 4.7 The Silent History, screenshot showing map of UK Field Reports. The numbers in the hexagons indicate how many reports are clustered in a particular area. As the reader zooms in, the reports differentiate into individually marked locations on the map. Reprinted by permission of Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC, from The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2012–2013 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn, LLC.

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what is experienced as a gift economy, and whose income comes mainly from other forms of work (they are economically speaking what the sociologist Bernard Lahire calls plural actors, writers with a “double life”).15 The two main writers of The Silent History were recruited by Horowitz with the promise of only modest payment: they were offered a small sum up front as an advance, and a generous percentage of anything made on the app; both writers turned down the advance. More persuasively, Horowitz offered the incentives of working on a new kind of novel, of breaking new artistic ground, and of working collectively with other writers. That appeal worked, perhaps in part because Moffett and Derby had enough other employment to make a living (one is a professor, and the other works for a videogame company), and perhaps also in part because the project provided other kinds of capital—it was, for instance, a project that distinguished Moffett when he applied for academic jobs. Field reporters are not paid unless they contribute a number of good reports, in which case, Horowitz says, he might send them a little check, out of the blue. The interaction preserves the sense of generosity and surprise that lies at the heart of the collaborative dynamic Horowitz created.16 Subsistence writers have always been with us, even if the forms of their subsistence might change over time. But literary experiment on digital devices also requires technical craftspeople who will sign on to the same inverted economy that has been shaping literary taste—and sustaining subsistence writers—since the 19th century, an economy where the intrinsic interest of art and its cultural value are not bolstered but threatened by commercial success. What’s more, technical craftspeople must be recruited to that inverted economy against the pull of the right-sideup economy, since technical craftspeople, unlike writers, are voraciously absorbed by the institutions of mass market capitalism. Even small-time programmers, it seems, can get rich quick, or at least subsist, with a nifty app and 99-cent downloads, and those truly skilled as programmers—as Quinn is—are the targets of intense desire emanating from the startups and behemoths that rule the virtual universe. In this

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sense, the Silent History app itself, like the communities of silents whose stories it tells, is operating in a space little developed by market forces. The fact that it is a highly designed app rather than a beautifully designed book, say, places the novel in a region of cultural production that has been almost entirely owned by capitalist enterprise. Russell Quinn, the app’s developer, is that unusual programmer who is content to work without massive salary or the hope of massive future returns. Glancing back to the story’s preoccupation with abandoned warehouses, we might think differently about where the novel speaks loudest to contemporary capitalist culture. Its very existence as an app novel—the data point described by the novel itself—tells us more about the conditions under which literary experiment can happen in the corners of capitalist culture than any creative reading of those old warehouses. But it is worth noting that Horowitz himself doesn’t see the novel’s social networks in these terms. To him, “friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends, all the way out” produces something more like a random demography, a community of strangers. This is part of an ideology of art also represented by the opening anecdote of this book—about the McSweeney’s subscription cards. The ideology is this: that creativity is socially connective, in and of itself and apart from structures such as the school or the market; that its connectivity serves an aesthetic democracy. For neither Horowitz nor Eggers seems to want to know, or need to know, what they might know about their readers—Eggers reacted negatively to an early request to survey the quarterly’s readers for this project, for instance, associating the effort to gather such information with the marketing strategies of publishers like Condé Nast. Horowitz and Quinn do not broadcast or seek to use the data on readers that their remarkable novel produces; that data is time consuming to clean up and inessential to their creative or business purposes. The kind of knowledge valued by a literary scholar stands in this sense at odds with, or at least apart from, the values of the creative enterprise. The critic Andrew Goldstone has been urging the digital humanities to attend to readers as a source and object of large-scale data analysis—a version of this line of

GPS Historicism

research is evident in his analysis of the professional readers who leave traces of their reading in the pages of journals and books cataloged by the MLA bibliography.17 But far more reading is done by amateur readers, and it is the amateur reader who still drives the literary culture, if only by virtue of her aggregated preferences as these are assessed by editors and suppliers of books. The experiment of The Silent History suggests that there is a lot more to know about ordinary readers, that there are things we can and may soon routinely know if more literary workers like Russell Quinn emerge (we are already awash in subsistence writers). While the market for a programmer’s skills might underwrite her literary projects—in her double life she can easily earn money as a consultant—the facts of literary culture virtually require that literary programmers use money in this way. The Silent History thus relies on a classically inverted artistic economy that not only thrives on scarcity—where small market share suggests elite cultural value—but also leads to a kind of scarcity unhelpful to the development of the art form in a technical age. The scarcity of literary programmers sharply limits the pace of artistic development for the novel in digital media. Can the aura of literary taste and the social networks that revolve around literary enterprises produce literary programmers in numbers great enough to allow the novel to continue to develop as a virtual form? The world’s cultural institutions, it seems, must somehow produce the technical artist who will donate his labor at well under its market value—ramping up a process of cultural reproduction that has caused the oversupply of writers, successfully turning out ever-increasing numbers of would-be novelists, but that hasn’t yet produced many programmers of app novels. Our culture probably won’t produce them until the Program Era gives way to the Programming Era. The rise of standard programming courses in primary, secondary, and postsecondary curricula indicates that this will happen eventually. At Stanford, already, the largest major is Computer Science, and the English department looks to grow its numbers by partnering with them in a double major program. One wonders what broad effects these disseminated means

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of cultural reproduction will have on literary experiment, when one considers, for instance, the ethnic and gender profiles of the technical elite. While the GI Bill and multiculturalist politics dramatically expanded the demographic range of writers working in the literary field, what will it take to create a similar effect in forms of digital literature that require programming skills? ࠮

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There is one last thing to say about the data point that is The Silent History: this novel, as of the summer of 2014, also exists as, yes, a book. On paper, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The critic Kate Marshall reviewed the novel upon its release in this traditional form. Charged with assessing how it compared with the app version, what she actually read, in order to do the job, was the paper version. Her argument therefore focuses on the difference that serialization as such makes to the novel, and in this sense her interaction with The Silent History plays out exactly what Horowitz didn’t want to happen: the print form, which is easier or at least more familiar to read, overshadowed the app version and its formal innovations, which are all too easily dismissed as a set of inessential extra features.18 What is ephemeral in our study of literary culture? In this case, the very form of a novel.19

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How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

In the novel, innovation comes in many forms. While The Silent History pursues avenues of innovation closed to all but the most technically skilled literary-digital makers, many writers today—in particular, those who seek to create works that might be classified as literature—look to fulfill that High Modernist imperative to “make it new” on the page, and in doing so, to make their names. To make their names and a living, too, such writers need to thread a fine needle: they must provide both innovation and familiarity, twin requirements of market success in the trade category of literary fiction. This chapter and the next one widen the lens on literary making to include writers who have achieved this kind of success, which is distinct from the forms of success we can track for a writer such as Deb Olin Unferth, for editors such as Nash and Horowitz, or for the programmer and artist Russell Quinn. In training attention on how large-scale success is made, and why it might last or fade, we can discover in a different register how economic and social features of production interact with aesthetic form and therefore how these shape the multiple ways contemporary literature is made. What causes the literary establishment to fall in love with a first novel now, in America, in the early part of the 21st century? This chapter takes Jonathan Safran Foer’s well-received first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, as a case study that answers this question in a particularly revealing way. The novel’s path to fame is not exactly representative of how first novels emerge into the 21st century marketplace, but it illustrates how first novels that do become famous can become famous in a market dominated by established authors, a market mostly indifferent to new names, except when they represent the appeal of novelty itself.1 In a memorable scene in the novel,

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Foer imagines the earth—as seen from outer space—to be literally illuminated by the legendary lovemaking of its author’s fictional namesake, Safran, and the many others who follow his amorous lead. The novel’s cosmic spectacle of loving in turn lights up a constellation of social factors that, as we will see, are maximally conducive to an author’s being loved by the literary establishment. Among the most powerful of these social factors are responses to the kind of story this novel is—a new version of a traditional Holocaust story. Foer had set a hard task for himself in his senior fiction thesis at Princeton: to write a Holocaust story that would meet experimental ambitions rooted in his attraction to and academic study of elite 20th-century art forms, both literary and visual. What does it mean to make a Holocaust story innovative in the context of that cultural field? In laying out how a third-generation American Holocaust story can come to seem innovative in a literary sense, we can see exactly how Foer positioned his novel in relation to the literary world that he aspired to enter and whose love he hoped to gain. We can simultaneously observe the contemporary preconditions for literary fame, the aesthetic forms those preconditions take, and the kind of aesthetic attention—the kind of love—that writers of literary fiction strive to elicit today. Foer won that love in spades: the reception this novel enjoyed in the literary press, classrooms, book clubs, readings, and the film industry encompasses virtually everything an ambitious author of any age could want, let alone what a first-time, 25-year-old novelist could dream of. What those things are, and what it means to want them, is the sociological subject of this chapter, a subject that is not separate from the novel itself or the interpretive work required to understand it. Close reading and sociological analysis will have to proceed together. Making the Holocaust New Everything Is Illuminated is a novel of four strands. In one, a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer searches for the Ukrainian woman who helped his grandfather Saf-

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

ran escape from the German massacre of the Jews in their village. In the second, a young Ukrainian man named Alex and his grandfather act as Jonathan’s guides in his search, and in the process Alex discovers his own family’s relationship to the massacre. In the third strand, we get the fairy-tale story of the shtetl, Trachimbrod, as it existed in the 18th century, and of one particular girl named Brod, a foundling, who lives out her life there and is one of Jonathan Safran Foer’s forebears. At the intersection of these strands is the larger European tragedy of the Holocaust: the utter destruction of Jewish communal life in all its fullness of love and pain and tradition, and the consequences of that loss for the moral fabric of the world. The novel’s fourth and final strand consists of letters passing between Alex and Jonathan about the process of writing their shared story. In interviews, Foer reflects on his approach to the novel’s historical subject in a way that will probably be familiar to anyone who has followed academic or popular discussions of Holocaust representation in the last three decades: “I wondered,” he recounts in one interview, “is the Holocaust exactly that which cannot be imagined? What are one’s responsibilities to ‘the truth’ of an event, and what is ‘the truth’? Can historical accuracy be replaced with imaginative accuracy?”2 Foer’s answer to the last question, of course, was yes, but not everyone was convinced. The novel’s reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly, Brooke Allen, saw such questions as “the height of callowness.” Allen argued (in an equally familiar vein) that “for the many people alive who can remember the Holocaust, the answer is that it can be ‘imagined’ only too well. The generation that witnessed it . . . treated it as a real, solid, ugly fact. . . . To Foer, born more than 30 years after Auschwitz, it is merely the unremembered past, ripe for reinvention and reinterpretation by the artist.” Highlighting Foer’s generational distance from the events, Allen argues that the Holocaust has become simply—and predictably—“the Big Subject of the past century.” And in her opinion, the Big Subject dwarfs the upstart writer: “Not too surprisingly,” the reviewer concludes, “it proves to be too big a subject for [Foer’s] undeveloped talent.”3

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Whatever one thinks about the talent of this novel’s author, then or now, Allen is right to note that the first-time author looking to make a splash might predictably turn to a Big Subject. And it is clear from reviews that the subject of the Holocaust, while it inspired more than one response like Allen’s, had the more frequent effect of disarming critics who often confess to finding his formal choices either old hat—a replay of postmodern cleverness—or annoying, or both. You can see the effect happening sentence by sentence in many reviews. Reviewer Max Watman in The New Criterion calls the book out for being both “adolescent” (because of its pomo tricks) and finally (because of the conceit that it is a collaborative draft rather than a finished novel) “chicken,” but he gives Foer credit implicitly for his big subject: “Most debut novelists cannot get it together to imagine anything beyond their campus quad, their parents’ divorce, the intricacies of dating in New York City. Everything Is Illuminated lists bathetic at times, is sloppy at others, and still shines through as one of the best books of the year.”4 Siddhartha Deb’s review in London’s New Statesman has a similar logic. He notes the novel’s formal excesses and the well-worn method of its humor, but goes on to say that “what is original and thoughtful in this novel far outweighs the derivative and the superficial.” For this reviewer, again, what is thoughtful is the contrast Foer presents between what Deb calls the “excessive animation” of Trachimbrod and the fact that this imagined liveliness is all that’s left of the shtetl after the Nazis get through with it. “Invention” is the point, the reviewer notes.5 In this he suggests the current state of understanding about contemporary Holocaust narrative— that it must register the impossibility of something like restoration, and indeed, at its most ambitious, must formally depend upon that fact. But it was Janet Maslin and Daniel Mendelsohn who most influentially pronounced the marriage of annoyance and seriousness a successful one. As Maslin concludes her New York Times review: “Mr. Foer works hard on these [formal] effects, and sometimes you will, too. But the payoff is extraordinary: a fearless, acrobatic, ultimately haunting effort to combine inspired mischief with a grasp of the unthinkable.”6

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

And Mendelsohn observes in New York magazine: “Jonathan Safran Foer’s remarkable first novel began life as an undergraduate exercise, but it’ll probably take a doctoral dissertation to figure it all out. . . . Like so many young writers, Foer is steeped in the wink-wink orthodoxies of postmodernism; but unlike so many of them he has put his narrative prestidigitation in the service of some very serious themes.”7 Such serious themes are indeed one half of the down payment a young writer makes on literary value; the second half of that payment is innovation. In other words, “ambition,” at least since the defining careers of modernism, expresses itself both in significance of subject and in freshness of aesthetic approach. While the former is always likely to produce the very sorts of familiarity we see in Foer’s comments and in those of his reviewers (the familiarity of much-discussed things), the predictability of one’s largest philosophical questions is not disabling if a writer can remain aesthetically innovative. By “aesthetic” I mean not only the sense in which a text displays itself formally as a work of literary art, but also the sense in which, by displaying itself in this way, the text participates in the whole cultural field of the aesthetic. That field consists of objects (like novels), forms of attention paid to those objects, and social relations, the latter structured by the institutions—schools, publishing houses, literary agencies, the literary press, the film industry—that teach us how to attend to such objects and through which social relationships accrete around them. In this combination of aesthetics and subject matter, in the interplay of object, reading practice, and social relations, the debut novel’s literary value will be won or lost.8 So it comes as little surprise, reading back from the novel’s literary success, that Everything Is Illuminated is sometimes said to be aesthetically innovative; most point to the novel’s style, especially the broken English of Alex’s portions of the narrative, where the language is brilliantly mangled for both comic and, as we shall see, tragic effect. But more precisely, Everything Is Illuminated is an aesthetic innovation within the history of American Holocaust narratives—a tradition that since Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993), Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986/1991), and the US Holocaust Memorial

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Museum (congressional mandate, 1980; dedication, 1993), to name just a few prominent examples, has reliably elicited significant cultural attention in the US. The very generational position that the Atlantic Monthly reviewer highlights in her critique of Foer raises questions that are less philosophical and ethical—at least, in the first instance—than they are aesthetic. The Holocaust narratives of those who remember the Holocaust, and the narratives of their children, are by their generational identity inserted into a cultural field dominated by discourses of history, biography, and memoir. Brooke Allen in essence fails to register a shift in field between the writing of these figures and the Holocaust writing of Foer’s generation.9 Foer’s narrative belongs to another field of cultural production, a field not defined by the original genres and their cultural stature—and by the respect accorded to these for their truth value—or by the tighter relational bond of parent and child, with its accompanying filial pieties. Foer’s field is defined rather by questions of personal achievement and recognition in a network of venues that distill out of the larger batch of new writers a subgroup we might call the bi-coastal young literati. It is a field in which writing remains a prestigious avenue to fame. Here is where the need to innovate comes to the fore. The Big Subject of Everything Is Illuminated presents a challenge: how will it be made new when readers are likely first to note how the novel shares elements of previous works in its chosen subgenre? We might see, for instance, that Everything Is Illuminated has a good deal in common with Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Not only are their two main characters named after their authors, but both these works also meditate centrally on the relationship between growing up in America and surviving the Holocaust. Motivating both books is the accompanying problem of American insignificance. As Keith Gessen put it in a scathing double book review of Everything Is Illuminated and Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which takes 9/11 as its subject), in the last twenty years . . . the idea became more firmly entrenched, especially in selfconsciously young writers publishing first books—Bright Lights, Big City; Generation X;

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—that, aside from some recreational drug use and anomie, nothing truly momentous could happen here. . . . Everything Is Illuminated . . . was in this tradition: an American travels to the Old World in search of the darkness he cannot see at home, and finds it.10

In Maus, the dramatic Holocaust story is impossible for the young Art Spiegelman to match, and so there are certain ways, as I have argued elsewhere, that Art appropriates his father’s story and imagines himself as a survivor. He is not looking for darkness—he senses plenty of that in his life, given his mother’s suicide—but something like personal worth. By contrast, Everything Is Illuminated represents the third-generation effort to recover the Holocaust, an effort both more distant and less fraught. By the time Foer writes, such stories have been told several times, not only by Spiegelman whose Maus came out when Foer was a child, but also by many others, notably W. G. Sebald, whose Austerlitz, like Everything Is Illuminated, is a story of the hunt for the traces of a beloved ancestor and thus for the ground of a child’s identity (Sebald’s work is frequently invoked in reviews of both of Foer’s novels). Foer finds himself belated in two ways, then: firstly, because the story of the Holocaust and of finding out the secrets of a parent’s experience of it has already been told many times; and secondly, because he is generationally further removed from experience of the events in Europe. He is not the child of a survivor but the grandchild of a survivor. What do you do, Foer seems to ask, to make that story your own? For it must be made his own—it must represent his distinctive “voice”—according to the rules of the cultural field in which Foer makes his career.11 Redistributing Conventional Pain One way to make a Holocaust story one’s own in an appealingly communal sense, for both second-generation and third-generation writers, is through the medium of Jewish memorial practice. Foer puts such memorial practices at the center of the

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imagined 18th-century shtetl life in the Trachimbrod sections of the novel. Here he is describing a particularly Jewish itch to remember: “But children had it worst of all. For although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings [of memory] were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents, strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness.”12 The story of Jonathan going back to find Augustine, the woman who helped his grandfather escape, is an effort to tie those strings to something concrete. That he cannot find this woman suggests that Foer has already internalized something that previous Holocaust literature has intently examined and questioned: Can one ever have an unmediated relation to the past? Can one ever tie memory back to the event in a way that feels like genuine connection? In this novel, coming belatedly to that conversation, we find an easy, though also wistful or elegiac, admission that you cannot tie up the strings. The hunt for Augustine can never succeed, and at this late date in the history of Holocaust literature as a genre, it could be no other way. American Holocaust literature has produced an alternative to the classic version of narrative satisfaction (where the child finds the truth about the parent’s experience, and ties up that string), an alternative that is more purely epistemological than relational. For Jonathan, the mystery is not what happened to his grandparents during the Holocaust, which is to say, what happened to people he already loves and who are an intimate part of his life. Instead, the mystery concerns the unknown person who helped his grandfather to survive; what is her story? The photograph of Augustine that Jonathan carries represents that missing knowledge. That this token of what the boy doesn’t know drops out of the picture of the novel relatively painlessly—he’ll never find the real Augustine—is the mark of how the more gripping tale of the survivor’s traumatic repression, a frequent trope in the writing of survivors and of the generation that includes their children, gets displaced onto the gentile, Alex. It is in Alex’s story, even more than in Alex’s narrative voice, that the real innovation

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

of Everything Is Illuminated can be found. Foer’s aesthetic innovation is not to be found in the book’s typographical pyrotechnics and self-conscious structure (which reviewers recognized as the techniques of yesteryear) but rather in literary form’s poor stepchild: in its plot. In Alex’s discovery that his own family is implicated in the massacres that destroyed Jonathan’s family, the story of a hidden, violent, and sometimes shameful past is transferred from the victim’s side of the Holocaust to the perpetrator’s side. Suddenly, it is Alex who is looking to find the secret buried in his dysfunctional family. It is Alex who finds, in talking with his grandfather, some explanation for why his father is an alcoholic tyrant. Again the comparison with Maus is instructive: there it is the Jewish survivor’s son who learns the Holocaust backstory to his father’s controlling behavior. In Everything Is Illuminated the same logic of memory and genealogy that applies to shtetl families—in the metaphor of the strings—is reproduced in Alex’s family. The novel suggests that the wrenching choice Alex’s grandfather made—to identify his friend Herschel as a Jew and thus to give him up to the murderous Nazis rather than sacrificing his own family’s life—returns as transmissible self-hatred. That self-hatred is then played out in the terrible rages and drunkenness of his son, Alex’s father. The kernel of this transaction can be found in one of the novel’s most harrowing scenes, where the woman Alex and Jonathan think of as Augustine—a woman they know is not Augustine but who clearly knew her, and knew both Jonathan’s and Alex’s grandfathers—has told them the story of the murder of the Trachimbrod Jews. This story prompts Alex’s grandfather to confess his complicity with that murder. Describing to Jonathan, after the fact, the experience of translating his grandfather’s words, Alex says, “You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I repeated them I felt like I was making them new again” (185). Beyond Alex’s stylized English, “making them new again” of course refers to Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum defining how literature could matter formally,

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aesthetically, innovatively. It is a loaded phrase—indeed, a troubling one—for any ambitious writer coming after modernism, whether or not the subject is genocidal murder. Its Poundian origin makes the point particularly acute when one considers that Pound himself was an anti-Semite who sided with Mussolini and was imprisoned in the US as a traitor for his wartime radio broadcasts in support of fascism. In this emotionally loaded moment, the phrase suggests Foer’s relationship to literary ambition on the modernist model even as it indicates how he fuses the received truths of trauma theory and popular Holocaust narrative with those of this inherited but still current model of literary ambition. Those received truths of trauma theory are not only implicit in the plot of the novel. The key term of survivor testimony—“witness”—takes center stage in the climactic scene where Alex and Jonathan show the photograph that includes Augustine to the woman they will finally call Augustine. Alex holds the faded photograph out to her and asks repeatedly, in his awkward translations of Jonathan’s questions, whether she “witnesses” anyone there, to which she replies, with ever-lessening resolve, that she doesn’t. Finally, Alex notes her crumbling composure and changes the question: “‘Has anyone in this photograph ever witnessed you?’ Another tear descended. ‘I have been waiting for you for so long’” (117), she whispers. Here the doomed effort, through the mechanism of witnessing—to come to an unmediated connection with the past and with the violence of the Holocaust—is acted out. It is performed by the almost liturgical repetition of the question and the answer, and by the way that Augustine’s body gets closer and closer to the photograph; she touches the faces; she finally merges herself and the photograph by letting her tears fall on it. This woman becomes a “witness” in the established sense of survivor testimony (articulated foundationally in 1993 in Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History) when the social context—of witness and listener—is assembled. In more analytic terms, we might say that Foer lends this scene the established logic of the videotaped testimonies at Yale’s Fortunoff archive,

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

where a witness must be present in order for the story to be told. Now that Augustine has her witnesses, she will witness the trauma to them, and they will be witnesses for her and for the story she tells. To claim the events of the Holocaust as “new again” in the moment of translation and witness is thus to draw on the arguments of trauma theory—about the collapse of representation into experience in the traumatic narrative—in order to imagine how Alex can inherit his grandfather’s complicity and begin to divest himself of its painfully distorting effects. In translating his father’s words it is Alex who makes them new again for Jonathan, and in translating Jonathan’s words for Augustine he makes the scene of witness, and by the logic of trauma theory the scene of trauma itself, new for all of them. Thus Foer’s Poundian modernism goes to work developing an aesthetics of transmission for the third-generation perpetrator. Foer transposes an aesthetic technology previously used to represent the transmission of trauma between generations of surviving Jewish families into a technology for transmitting the guilt of complicity between generations of surviving gentile families in Europe. And that’s not postmodern legerdemain. What is striking about this version of transmission is that it comes about through the immediately recognizable aspirations of the young American writer: the desire to find oneself, one’s voice, one’s great subject, and a career all at the same time. The innovative version of the transmission narrative notably does not come about through the aesthetic and personal aspirations of the young Ukrainian man, whose aspirations (to be “carnal” with hot women, go to “premium” nightclubs, and make a lot of money) are only too clearly laid out in the opening pages of the book. Only by adopting new ambitions that mirror Jonathan’s—specifically, the desire to tell his (Holocaust) story, and to become a writer (on that subject) through a workshop-style tutorial in writing (which Jonathan gives him in the letters they exchange once Jonathan has returned to the US)—can the aesthetic work of translating and “making it new” become the work of transmission. To put the point another way, when Alex

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finally aspires to become a member of the bi-coastal young literati, literary innovation on the Big Subject becomes possible.13 We see here a transmission of traumatic complicity and its consequences: to use Spiegelman’s Maus once again as a touchstone, in Foer’s novel it is not the Jewish survivor who slits her wrists in the bathtub, as Anja Spiegelman does in Maus, but the complicitous Ukrainian gentile. By the end of the novel, Alex’s grandfather commits suicide in just this way. Jonathan’s grandmother, by contrast, though not free of all traumatically induced behaviors—she always lifts her grandson at the start and end of each visit to make sure he weighs enough—is gorgeously represented as a whole universe of life for Jonathan. His most powerful memory of her is of sitting as a little boy under her skirts at the tail end of family dinners, her clothes and body above him like a sheltering tent, a tent recalling both the tents of the wandering Israelites in the desert and the grandmother’s skirts that shelter Oskar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). They form a tent that is also, for the young Jonathan, the imaginative equal of the starry heavens.14 Indeed, Everything Is Illuminated makes the relationship between grandchildren and grandparents as immediate as possible, and in service to this end Alex disowns the middleman, his father. “You are not my father,” he says at the end of the novel as he throws his abusive father out of the house, thus getting the second generation out of the way and moving into that space where the mediation of history is that much less, but the chance for re-mediation of it is that much greater. Chastened by his experience as the victim of his father’s rages, Alex can take on the guilt of the perpetrators and—in this story—transform it. He transforms it into love, a central and moving theme of the novel. Yet he also transforms it into something else: aesthetic capital. For this is the story that Alex will write. It will become his offering at the gate into the aesthetic field that Jonathan so comfortably inhabits. Already intent on transforming his own family’s story into aesthetic capital, Jonathan through private tutorials trains Alex in the technologies of creative writing necessary for Alex to join him there.

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

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Yet this is only part of the story; Jonathan’s ambitions serve as more than just the model for Alex’s new ambition. The narrative imagines the entire trajectory of that transfer of complicity from grandfather to grandson as emanating from Jonathan’s pen. As they sit near the site of the destroyed shtetl, Alex picks up Jonathan’s diary and reads what Jonathan has written about someone who appears to be himself, Alex. He says, “This is what he read”: He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. “What?” he asked. “What?” And Sasha [Alex’s given name] told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, “Say it to my face, not to the floor,” and Sasha said, “You are not my father.” (159)

In this scene Alex begins to understand that Jonathan is using him as material, exploiting him for the sake of storytelling, and that Jonathan has penetrated the most intimate and painful part of his family life—his relationship with his father—in order to fictionalize it. By the close, these words from Jonathan’s journal become the grandfather’s letter to Jonathan describing what Alex actually did after Jonathan’s departure: “He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. ‘What?’” (274). And so it goes, reproducing what we find in Jonathan’s diary, right up to “‘Say it to my face, not to the floor,’ and Sasha [Alex] said, ‘You are not my father.’” This bit of postmodern cleverness broaches the question of who is responsible for the text—or rather texts: all the letters, diary entries, and folkloric tales—we have been reading. As conscious of its fictionality as we may be, in the logic of the novel

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this kind of writing—prophetic writing, writing that comes true—appears elsewhere and in a different form within the story of Brod and the shtetl. We are told that the Book of Antecedents, the Jewish book of memory that the Trachimbroders write over time, has prophetic entries. We are given an excerpt from that book that describes the disaster of the Nazi invasion of the town. Prescience is a quality of Jewish writing here, imagined in this way as a kind of religious practice and as a practice that is specifically associated with Holocaust stories. In the case of Jonathan’s diary, prophetic writing either foretells Alex’s discovery of his family’s complicity or makes that discovery happen. It only matters which we think it is in the sense that the two versions entail different understandings of what it means to transfer the trauma narrative from the innocent (Jonathan’s family) to the complicit (Alex’s family). And those different understandings revolve around a theme that is, strangely, not a prominent characteristic of the Holocaust writing of survivors and their children: the theme of revenge. ࠮

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Is Everything Is Illuminated a novel of revenge or, more palatably, a novel of justice, of guilt finally coming into the light? The story of a survivor of the Holocaust who much later in his life finally looks that terror in the face and commits suicide is well known and utterly tragic; the traumatized victim himself completes the murderous work his Nazi keepers somehow failed to accomplish. To transpose that well-known story into the perpetrator’s life and family is a way of giving the pain of the victims back to the complicit. It turns inappropriate self-punishment (fatally destructive survivor’s guilt) into what might look like appropriate self-punishment (old-fashioned guilt). At the same time, there are many moments where the sense of fault for acts of complicity is mitigated in the novel: “Would you not do the same?” the reader is asked. Who would do differently? How would you decide what to do? We’re given, most dramatically, the example of a father who won’t spit on the Torah as the Nazis insist he must even though he is not religious. He watches as his entire family is killed one by one at his repeated refusal and then finally spits so that he can be killed too. The novel lays out

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

impossible situations, situations where moral machinery simply can’t function. Still, the controlling author responsible for these plot points has also scripted a particular future for Alex’s particular family in the present, and in that act of prophetic writing the author creates what we can describe as an aesthetic redistribution of pain. Lest the idea of revenge compromise the ethical charge of the novel and its commitment to love, Foer steps back from this specific redistribution of pain to a humanist reflection on pain as an element of life itself. We see this universalizing bent in a self-consciously heartbreaking passage describing the people of the shtetl in their last months of life. Here the third person gives way to the first-person plural: “They waited to die. And we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same” (262). Mortality, and the fact that we are, all of us, in some sense waiting to die—and in the meantime not thinking about that inevitable end, going about our daily life with joy and play and the whole range of experience and emotion—makes the pain of their destruction the pain of our destruction, even if their end looked so different from the one that Jonathan Safran Foer, the character in this novel, expects to have for himself, and different from the end we, the readers, expect to have for ourselves. The poignance of the lives lived out by the Jews of Trachimbrod in the days before their destruction becomes a quality of the human condition, the function of human mortality. This is a softening move—and one, it is worth noting, that hit its sentimental mark in Maslin’s review.15 It suggests the tragedy involved on all sides of this story and reframes the tragedy of Alex’s grandfather, a simple man trying to save his wife and child when the Nazis arrive and in doing so facing an impossible tradeoff, finally becoming complicit with the murder of his Jewish friend. Loving Attention The aesthetics of complicity provide Foer with the “important” subject he openly seeks for his debut novel and open the door for the innovation required to take on an established genre and its conventions. The genre and Foer’s innovation upon it

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bear up the formal and narrative risks the novel takes, carrying this story into an established mass market space of culture (these risks are not great, but they are not negligible either).16 The aesthetic redistributions of pain, it must be said, thus produce positive consequences in the social world of aesthetic discourse for this debut novelist, consequences that depend upon the sentimental humanism I have just observed and also upon a number of other characteristics of the fiction that ease its entry into a particular aesthetic market. What is required in that market can be roughly cataloged. Writers need a subject either already important or so offbeat, esoteric, ordinary, or minor that we come to be surprised by its eventual importance (we might consider, as examples of the latter, books about salt or orchid collecting or competitive memory experts, or films about spelling bees). The subject or narrative (or better, both) need a sentimental charge. There must be some stylistic innovation that serves subject and sentiment. The new work must be compatible with existing examples of such aesthetic work but with value added—same enough and different enough, both familiar and fresh. The connections among family story, sentimental investments, and publishing story are sewn together by Foer himself in the novel’s acknowledgments: “It has been my pleasure, and my honor,” he writes, “to think of the wonderful people at Houghton Mifflin as family—Eric Chinski, in particular, whose advice in literature and life, seems always to boil down to: feel more. Which is always the best advice.” Chinski’s advice might have had practical effects as well as humanistic ones: sentiment does sell books. But a distinctive feature of early 21st-century literary production is the way that the search for feeling, and for the audiences that are likely to come with it, has begun to walk hand in hand with modernist-style literary ambition. Jonathan Franzen’s effort in The Corrections (2001) to unite the avant-garde novel with the social realist novel, to unite aesthetic ambition (which for Franzen seems to mean the self-reflexivity of what used to be called “postmodernism”) with a traditional commitment to character, plot, and emotion, set the stage for this pairing.17

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

Foer offers his own version of the pairing, a version made imperative not because he was trying to unite divergent strands of development within the genre of the novel but for avowedly personal reasons. In resorting to self-reflexivity, Foer could find the sentimental intensities he was looking for. Asked why he gave his character his own name, a classic reflexive strategy of the old postmodernism, he explained in an interview with Louis Jacobson for the Princeton Alumni Weekly that it was the way that I felt I could do it [write the story] and feel the urgency and vulnerability. Anything else would have felt too much like I was writing a novel, even though that’s what I was doing. [Jacobson:] So you were trying to write a novel, yet at the same time, you also were not trying to write a novel? [Foer:] I wasn’t trying to write a novel—I was trying to make something that would fulfill a need that I’d had. And it came pretty darn close to a novel form.18

The inward-looking turn of phrase here—the desire to “make something” to “fulfill a need that I’d had”—is quite distinct from Franzen’s view of what the social realist novel accomplishes in the world, a view that revolves around that subgenre’s ability to connect outward to the interests and experiences of readers. Foer’s account of his internal life suggests that he had something like a novel-shaped hole inside, as the shape of his interior need is serendipitously also the shape of one kind of novel—the self-reflexive novel—that is welcomed by the literary elite. In the post-Franzen era, feeling and experiment are yoked, feelings of excitement are the product of the avant-garde. “Foer . . . says he believes very strongly in non-mainstream fiction,” writes Regina Tan in a Princeton newsletter. Foer explains: “It’s what I tend to like to read. . . . It’s where ‘the action’ is. The kind of work published in alternative journals . . . is what excites me the most.”19 We might be forgiven for seeing Foer, in his self-descriptions, as a human being built for the literary field from the inside out. The novel-shaped need he describes implies a

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version of human existence and experience that makes sentimental authenticity— being true to his feeling of excitement about “non-mainstream fiction” in a psychic sense is the same thing as a certain version of institutionally valued aesthetic production. And this is why Princeton’s institutional press corps has been invested in telling his story. ࠮

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Princeton’s investment in Foer’s story is just one side of a mutual relationship between writer and institution. Foer explains, for example, that his edited collection (and first book), A Convergence of Birds, essays by writers on the work of Joseph Cornell, came about “because of the environment I was in.” What he means is the environment of the Princeton creative writing program. “Teachers like Joyce [Carol Oates] were saying, ‘You know, it’s not enough to be interested in it. Do it right—do something, make something.’ So I started sending letters to writers who I wanted to participate in this book.”20 In what sense, we might ask, is being interested “not enough”? The logic here is that interests must be turned into cultural objects that can participate in the market of attention, that can make, from the ephemeral and private feeling of interest, something tangible, more works. It is hard to separate out the productivity of art-making from the productivity of resume building here, especially since in this particular instance Foer’s interest turns over into contacts even before it turns into an actual book—contacts of the kind that Princeton and similar schools pride themselves on providing to their students and that Foer’s interviewer prompts him to highlight in their conversation. It is the contacts that finally and in a literal way make the book’s substance, that produce its collected essays about Cornell, which are penned by various artists and writers. The fact that the Princeton Alumni Weekly has interviewed Foer repeatedly suggests exactly how the “environment” converts a young man’s love of an artist’s work into institutional capital of a kind that can, in turn, generate more of the kinds of contacts that ensured Foer’s letters of inquiry to writers for the Cornell book had a chance to bear fruit.

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

One might object that this is a profoundly cynical reading of Foer’s effort in A Convergence of Birds and of his, and Princeton’s, account of it. Oates’s advice to “do something” with his interest in Cornell may have reflected her sense that here was a student with both passion and ability, who might use those virtues to reach outward and add something to the world—which he did in making a book. Her advice may also reflect her way of instructing Foer in the modernist ideal of an artist’s relationship to tradition, revealing her faith in the art of the past as impetus and inspiration for an art of the present that engages the art that’s come before. In this she would be matching in practical instruction the persistent commitment to this version of artistic tradition that is found in undergraduate English courses, which are still structured around a sense of interlinked writers evolving into a canon over time. Whatever her motives, Foer’s account of his response to Oates’s teaching turns away from the other-directed admiration of Cornell, or the outward-looking effort to make a book, or the modernist appreciation of tradition as a source for innovation, though all these may float in the mix of his motivations. Foer highlights instead a different motivation: the desire for attention. “Why did [Joseph Cornell’s] art capture your attention?” asked a Princeton Alumni Weekly interviewer. Foer’s answer: “What captured my attention was the way my attention was captured. I was in love with the way that I loved his art.” I quote his elaboration at length: I wanted to be around it all the time. I was always looking for new books with images, I got in touch with private collectors just so that I could go see his stuff. We’re so used to thinking of books and paintings and music as things to talk about and write about—they become cultural artefacts that are nice and interesting and are replaced every season. But every now and then you say, “God, that person is just exactly right for me. That person is my artist and says the things I wanted to say but couldn’t.”21

Foer loves attention. At this point readers who appreciate Foer’s work will groan at such a snide remark, and readers who find his work pretentious will groan and

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wonder if they needed to read a scholarly essay to corroborate such an obvious fact (to them). But this statement—Foer loves attention—is one to take seriously. It is a gossipy cliché, which Foer’s own comments allow us to see instead as a sincere and fascinating truth, and one worthy of sustained thought. Foer professes to be in love with how art is loved. In this we see his desire for something more than an aesthetic market that depends upon new objects changing “every season,” and the model he offers to rectify the market’s shallowness is the love of persons—the feeling of wanting to be around a person, being interested, libidinally invested in every aspect of them, wanting to know everything about them, wanting to know their friends. Foer has said that “what I really want to do with my life is to try to create something that would make somebody feel the way I feel about Cornell’s work.”22 There’s something both plaintive and telling about this aspiration. Plaintive because Foer longs for something more than the kind of attention the market can give to his work: the market will always be looking for the next season’s new read. The market is in this sense unstoppable. The aspiration is telling because it is not so much an aspiration for the work itself as it is an aspiration for the social context—for the sheer attention—that the market generates for the work in its moments of greatest success, in the moments when icons—book, painting, celebrity—are adored rather than simply “talked about” or “written about” after everyone gets off work at The New Yorker. Foer, in love with attention itself, understands the aesthetic—the rules of art—as the best form through which that kind of love can be produced. That puts him right in line with a long tradition of aesthetic theorists, from Immanuel Kant through Walter Pater up to the present, where we find, for instance, Michael Fried and his influential reflections on absorption in paintings, or Sianne Ngai and her analysis of the interesting.23 These writers theorize the specific kind of attention we give to the aesthetic. We might return then to my opening image from Everything Is Illuminated, the image of the whole globe as seen from outer space, lit up with lovemaking. That

How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

image is the model for how the attention—the love—that Foer seeks to make would transform the world itself into a glimmering aesthetic object. As it happens, the world that we, and Foer, inhabit is not one supernaturally illuminated by love. The world we live in proves stubbornly social and material in a way that routinely overshadows the aesthetic and its bliss. We must finally understand the presence of the Holocaust story in trade fiction, then, not as a transcendent Big Subject that allows a new writer to rise into the universalist stratosphere, floating above his little peers and their careerist, bi-coastal self-absorption, but rather as a subject fully regulated by the social rules of art with which Foer and his peers all must reckon, each according to their own illumination. And how could it not be? I conclude by noting that among the more mundane outcomes of Foer’s reckoning, his novel’s successful lovemaking forced me to read it in the first place: students I had empowered to decide the final novel on my “American Novel since 1945” syllabus in 2008 nominated, promoted, and then elected it by popular vote. I had to read it and deliver two fresh lectures. My students’ love—produced by and mediated through the literary press, peer sociality, and the classroom—produced, if not exactly more love, then at least more attention: their attention, my attention, this attention. And, Dear Reader, if you have stuck with me this far, Foer’s lovemaking has produced your attention as well.

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On Not Reading DFW

We’ve learned from D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, that the author of Infinite Jest enjoyed “audience pussy.” That was his friend and sometime lover Mary Karr’s term for the hookups that Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour made possible.1 This chapter’s argument is inspired by this admittedly prurient detail of Wallace’s life; the chapter is, at first, about writing, reading, and misogyny, but it ultimately aims to show how different practices of reading shape literary culture in the present. “Audience pussy” becomes interesting in a literary sense when we consider Wallace’s biography as a whole alongside the theories of one of his early writer-figures, Mark Nechtr. Nechtr features in the story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” a story that embodies Wallace’s comprehensive response to the ideas of metafiction—including the self-conscious relationship between writers and readers—exemplified by his literary model and nemesis, John Barth. Wallace’s biographer notes that Wallace felt that “Westward” was such a comprehensive statement of all he wanted to do in fiction that he had trouble moving on from it for several years, turning instead to journalism before finally starting work on Infinite Jest. Given the artistic significance Wallace himself assigned to this story, we might assign Nechtr some weight, then, when Nechtr opines that “a story, just maybe, should treat the reader like it wants to[,] . . . well, fuck him.”2 The link between Wallace’s art and his relationships with the people he slept with bears considering. Those people were by all accounts women, despite the possibly queer, and certainly aggressive, resonances of Nechtr’s male pronoun for the reader. There may be nothing inherently wrong with consensual celebrity hookups—plenty

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of people might treasure the memory (and the story) of sleeping with a famous person—but the very idea of “audience pussy” on a book tour suggests that the logic of Wallace’s relationships with women in his life practice might in fact have a structure similar to the logic of the writer-reader relationship invoked, and formally embodied, in Wallace’s work and the reading practice it imagines. And in the wake of that suggestion, it is worth asking a question that is heretical for most literary scholars: Does that link have any bearing on whether his work is worth reading—worth, that is, the investment of anyone’s reading time, first and foremost, but also the investment of attention, thought, teaching time, and writing effort that might follow from any professional or scholarly reader’s choices about what to read? If there was something rotten in Wallace’s relationships with women (the facts in the biography suggest there was), and if those relationships shared a common dynamic with the relationship he imagined between writer and reader, might there be something rotten in the writer-reader relationship, too? This question addresses not only a particular author (Wallace) but also, and more importantly, two developments in the cultural conditions under which literature is made now: first, the undeniable fact of literary overproduction, and second, the rising call for the academic humanities, including literary criticism, to become more human—to be less concerned with the endless complexifying of specialized histories on the one hand, or the ever-abstracting grandeur of “world history,” “deep time,” “species history,” or “the planetary” on the other. Readers within the academy and without are calling for humanists to speak in voices that can be heard by people outside of specialized academic audiences.3 To suggest that the things imagined in books have a grounding in the world of human behavior—and in the behavior of specific human beings, at that—and thus to question how completely autonomous the work of art can be, counts as an effort in this direction. Overproduction has been a feature of literary history since at least the 18th century, but since the invention of desktop publishing software in the mid-1980s

On Not Reading DFW

production has reached a new scale: to date, over 60,000 new novels a year are published in the US alone (by way of contrast, between 1940 and 1999 new fiction titles in the US ranged between 5,000 and 10,000; by 2010 the number was 55,000).4 Our methods for cultural sorting—reviews, schooling, advertising, personal recommendations, market segmentation, and so on—have not adapted to the increase in volume, rendering a reader’s work of choosing both freer (a good thing) and more arbitrary (a hard thing, at least for scholars or other readers looking for systematicity, representativeness, best-ness, or historical impact). It has seemed fruitful to train the methods of historicism on the growing edge of literary history, especially as academic writing about what used to be called “contemporary literature” became the “field” of “post-1945” or “20th century,” but overproduction at this scale makes historical approaches difficult.5 At the same time, affect studies have gained ground in literary criticism, and out of the conjunction of thinking about readers’ feelings and frustration with the limits of historicism, Rita Felski has articulated a striking challenge to historicism as a method. She notes that in focusing on a work’s embeddedness in its cultural and chronological point of origin, “the critic is absolved of the need to think through her own relationship to the text she is reading. Why has this work been chosen for interpretation? How does it speak to me now? What is its value in the present? To focus only on a work’s origins is to sidestep the question of its appeal to the present-day reader. It is, in a Nietzschean sense, to use history as an alibi.”6 The situation of academic reading bears directly on the case of Wallace and the question about whether his work is worth reading. While Felski’s questions about what historicism can’t see would apply to any work under consideration, and naturally lend themselves to works far removed from the scholarly reader in time, a contemporary case collapses the space between “historical” readers whose responses might be the subject of study and the live reader covered by history’s alibi. What’s more, Felski’s assessment of historicism’s blindness comes hand in hand

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with an embrace of evaluation. Even after several decades of “blistering critiques of canonicity and traditional value hierarchies,” she argues that as such arguments all too clearly demonstrate, evaluation is not optional: we are condemned to choose, required to rank, endlessly engaged in practices of selecting, sorting, distinguishing, privileging, whether in academia or in everyday life. We need only look at the texts we elect to interpret, the works we include in our syllabi, or the theories we deign to approve, ignore, or condemn. The critique of value merely underscores the persistence of evaluation in the very act of assigning a negative judgment.7

What happens if the scholarly reader steps out from behind the alibi of history, and allows herself to be condemned, in open court, to the act of choosing? Fuck the Reader Wallace’s relationships with women, D. T. Max’s biography reveals, were complicated. Some of the aforementioned audience pussy was underage, for example, or so Wallace claimed in a letter to a friend.8 And sometimes his randy habits hurt people he cared about: in order to get some, he was willing to abandon old friends who had arranged to meet him at readings.9 We also learn from the biography that at this point in his life Wallace slept with his female students at Illinois State. This could be inconvenient: “That’s a three-day weekend I am still paying the credit card bill on,” Prof. Wallace noted in a letter regarding one such spurt of recreation. That’s the problem with the teacher/student sexual dynamic: the emotional promissory note extended on Friday to the infatuated student can’t be called due by her come Monday morning. Max’s observation that Wallace “affected not to care” that some of his bedmates were his students seems to miss the point. The power imbalance inherent in the relationship ensures that Prof. Wallace could last out the bills till the girl went away. He could afford not to care. At college the girls always do go away, and there’s always another student to take her place next term. Hookups within Wallace’s AA re-

On Not Reading DFW

covery groups were stickier, where the power balance wasn’t so clear and emotional fragility was abundant. At one point, Max’s biography tells us, Wallace described the situation of walking into his local AA meeting and seeing that among the ten women present he’d slept with three and “come close with one or two more.” Recounting this period of Wallace’s life, Max notes that “his behavior seemed, even to him, at times hard to justify” since he “was leaving a lot of hurt in his wake. But his bigger worry was that all this seducing was most damaging to himself.”10 (Emphasis mine.) The story of Wallace’s relationships with women has a long thread of what might be called abuse—physical and psychic—running through it. Apparently Wallace, at about the age of 12 or 14, knocked his younger sister Amy down during a sibling spat then dragged her through the family dog’s shitting yard. Youthful anger management issues, we might say. But later relationships with women featured stalking, yelling, throwing things, and trying to push his girlfriend from a moving car. Some of these things occurred while Wallace was drunk or high; some after he got sober; perhaps most when he was manic, since he suffered from manic depression throughout his adult life. Wallace’s self-professed problem—that he seemed determined to “stick my penis into as many vaginas as possible”—required some therapy, and when he got to talking, he found that the problem was his mother. Her perfectionism stood at the root, so he stopped speaking to her for five years or so, except when he had a knotty grammar question. “They could talk about grammar even when they weren’t speaking,” Max notes fondly, evoking the redemptive qualities of linguistic minutiae, and perhaps, as might follow, of literature itself. And then there was the time that Wallace set up an appointment to buy a gun so that he could kill the husband of Mary Karr, the woman he’d been infatuated with, and stalking, for the better part of a year. (He thought twice about the plan in the end, and didn’t keep the appointment, though he kept stalking Karr, who only intermittently objected. They became lovers.) When Wallace, at 36, finally decided it was time to get serious about a woman, he told friends that he wanted to be with “either a nurse or a social worker.” He was

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introduced to Juliana Harms, who was the latter, and was briefly engaged to her. She broke it off when he confessed that he was “thinking about” sleeping with a graduate student in his department. Harms moved out and the student moved into his bed.11 One could go on; interested readers can find more details in the biography. ࠮

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Max’s biography of Wallace, though clearly driven by admiration for Wallace’s work, has allowed us to see these aspects of Wallace’s life and personality clearly for the first time. Much credit goes to Max for his research and his honesty (and to his sources, for their willingness to talk), for these things are revealed even though Max is sympathetic to his subject, rigorous in research, and generous about Wallace’s human flaws. We cannot escape the sense that Wallace’s formidable struggle with the diseases of depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction had effects on every aspect of his life. With Max’s approach as a humane model, it might seem churlish and arbitrary to question the value of literary output on the basis of an author’s private and mostly consensual behavior with women. After all, our favorite book lists are bound to include the works of rogues, misogynists, and manipulators of all genders and orientations. An objection to the work on the ground of manipulative promiscuity and abuse may seem a little like the banal controversy over Tiger Woods’s sexual exploits; he too enjoyed audience hookups. But what did private sexual practice have to do with Green Jackets and a spectacular fade off the tee? What did one drive have to do with the other? On reflection, and having read the fairly restrained comments of Woods’s former trainer (whom he had fired) about how invisible other human beings seemed to be to Woods, there might be a connection. The competition of a televised, bigmoney men’s sport combined with the arduous solipsism of golf itself—competing against your own record year after year, spending hours a day in silent concentration on a repeated yet ever-shifting set of movements and conditions—has something in common with novel writing as Wallace practiced it. Blocking out human noise while needing to feel something human seems related to what seem like narcissistic encoun-

On Not Reading DFW

ters with other people. But in Wallace’s case the connection between novel writing and misogynistic narcissism matters more than that between great golf and narcissism, for two reasons. Since his death Wallace has been surrounded with the glow of “Saint Dave,” proponent of love under hostile postmodern conditions, exhorter  of  young people to think for themselves. Wallace’s 2005 graduation speech delivered at Kenyon College is often cited by fans as the classic summing up of his humane wisdom. (I defy readers to find a fresh idea in that speech—then again, to be fair, fresh ideas may not be the point of graduation speeches.) The glow of Saint Dave casts its hazy effects on the reputation of the man and his fiction, making both harder to see. The second reason matters more: we should care about how Wallace treated women because what is at stake in the relationship between writing and misogyny is not sexual morality—about which we all might differ—but the quality of the art Wallace produced. It’s that art, and its putative quality, that makes him the subject of a biography at all. It’s the art to which the literary scholar is asked to be responsible. And from what we see in the biography, there was a profound connection between Wallace’s treatment of women and his literary project, a connection indicated by Mark Nechtr’s sense, in “Westward,” that the writer sets out to fuck the reader. Nechtr’s statement shares a logic not only to Wallace’s literal behavior with readers, both on book tour and on campus, but also to Wallace’s reflections on his relationship to readers in the context that should matter most to the current discussion— that is, in his writing. For instance, summing up Wallace’s achievement in Infinite Jest, Wallace’s biographer makes the case that “Infinite Jest, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are . . . Wallace never forgets his pledge that ‘all the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be

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for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.’”12 Writing to Elizabeth Wurtzel (the author of Prozac Nation, whom he’d met in New York and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep with), Wallace explained that “the crux, for me, is how to love the reader without believing that my art or worth depends on his(her) loving me. It’s just about that simple in the abstract. In practice it’s a daily fucking war.”13 How to read those last two words? In the context of Wallace’s lived relationships with women, it is tempting to see the adjective as a verb, “fucking” as the activity of war (a “fucking-war”) rather than as a measure of how frustrating the fight can be. The talk of loving the reader without requiring that “she” love him back resonates with a selfless chivalric nobility that caught on as a narrative about Wallace: it is remarkable how often his work is said either to be about, or to demonstrate, love. But Wallace, it seems to me, did not need the reader’s love because he was already his own greatest love and his own work’s most devoted fan—which was perhaps the obverse of the ordinary-guy self-deprecation that characterized his public manner. Betrayal was Wallace’s stock-in-trade, according to what we learn in the biography, and the logic of betrayal in his life is the same logic articulated in the fiction. One might return to his character Mark Nechtr’s advice about how to treat the reader: “Pretend the whole thing’s like love. Walk arm in arm with the mark through the grinning happy door. Shove. Get back out before the happy jaws meet tight. Reader’s inside the whole thing. Not at all as expected. Feels utterly alone.”14 Just because Wallace knew what he was doing, and let us know he knew what he was doing, doesn’t mean that being his mark is somehow a mark of distinction. Critical Not-Reading It seems significant that the story chosen for the title of Wallace’s first story collection is “Girl with Curious Hair,” implying thereby a primary interest in a female figure. Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, is named for a saying of his grandmother’s—that apples are, digestively speaking, “the broom of the system.”

On Not Reading DFW

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men speaks for itself about the work’s concern with gender, though a question remains about whether the stories revel in or revile the hideousness of their men. Given Wallace’s own version of hideousness, which shines through even in a sympathetic biography, one might be forgiven for wondering, especially in the absence of clear textual cues. I have relied on other readers to observe the ambiguity, as I’ve only read a few of the stories, and those long ago. And I have not reread them. And here is my heretical declaration: I will not read any further in Wallace’s work. Of course, the textual facts I’ve just noted in Wallace’s titles suggest to any literary-critical brain that there is a pattern here to be explored. Wallace was obviously thinking hard about what he called the “erotics” of reading. He was aware of the suffering that sparks from a failed relationship and he wrote about it, intending the written suffering to feel true to the experience. He could describe, and reproduce on the page, the emotional vortex of depression and abuse. He knew what misogyny sounded like, and he was a good enough writer to dangle these things out front in titles and themes, tempting a reader to think that he had something profound to say about those subjects. But does David Foster Wallace really have anything to say about women, or gender, or sex, or misogyny that’s worth attending to? Does he have anything worth saying about reading as an erotic practice? What is the evidence that he does? How does one decide, on the basis of the evidence in hand, to invest the time to study his work? Smart people often sense where good questions lie, and sometimes such people help us all by formulating a good question accurately. When we and they are lucky, smart people put in the load of labor required to answer a good question and in doing so to raise new questions we never thought to ask. Wallace was obviously smart: a well-educated, achievement-mad student, a hard worker, an obsessive thinker and researcher on a wide range of subjects. He did what smart people do—he sensed where an interesting question lay. In his case, that question lay in the

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recursive, relentless dynamic between self-conscious narcissist and world, and the question’s answers promised to play out in the sheer force of need and desire that fuels that dynamic. But what evidence do we have that Wallace did anything more than put us in sight of a good question and the materials of an answer, when it comes to the sexualized exchange between writer and reader that he imagined? Why should one believe that he has anything smart to say about the dynamics between men and women and reading, given a reasonable body of secondary knowledge about him and his work (in this case, things gleaned from Max’s biography, research that my students have done on his work, critical essays, and so on) and what I personally have read and taught by him (“The Depressed Person,” and a few of the Brief Interviews stories, and “Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way”)? The fact that Wallace makes a subject out of the aspect of his behavior that I find objectionable—and the fact that he is selfaware, and intermittently regretful about his behavior toward women—doesn’t mean that he has anything intelligent to say about that subject even if he would qualify, by many measures, as “smart.” Wallace is not the only writer whose work throws off literary cues (turns of phrase, conceits, titles, plots, and so on) that suggest he or she is working through some major topic, but then fails to deliver genuine insight. When I was writing about religion and meaninglessness in contemporary American literature, Paul Auster and John Updike emerged, through my secondary research, as promising writers on my subject. Each wrote about religion in their books; each featured characters less interested in doctrine than in material language or transcendent feeling. In City of Glass, Auster invented a character that seemed made for my questions: a man who had been shut in a room as a child and left to grow, unspoken to, year upon year. His father had hoped that by isolating him from human language the boy would emerge speaking the language of God. Updike, for his part, offered an equally intriguing premise for Roger’s Version: a professor of theology is challenged,

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both intellectually and sexually, by a brilliant graduate student in computer science who is using a machine to prove the existence of the divine, and who, on the side, is also seducing the professor’s wife. I began to read the work of these writers, and in the end decided that though both of them juggled all the balls that my research questions had in play, they didn’t do more than that. The themes went round and round, but insight never landed. “These ideas are related,” the authors seemed to insist, and being the good writers they are, they made them seem related in the organic ways that fictional form allows. But their novels didn’t teach me anything about those ideas or how and why they are entwined. Did I read everything they wrote? No. Like a good scientist, I decided it would be a poor use of resources (in this case, time) to extend an experiment that had already produced what I considered negative results. And of course, maybe lying unknown to me in one of Updike’s other novels is the insight I was hoping for; be that as it may, my decision to stop reading was not unreasonably made. Wallace seemed ultimately uninterested in whether his ability to voice misogyny in fiction had anything to do either with insight into gender dynamics or with a prejudice lurking within, against his better judgment: “Some friends who’ve read [Brief Interviews] have come back and said, ‘Man, there has got to be a part of you that’s a pretty serious misogynist because you do misogyny pretty well.’ I don’t know what to tell them. If you do a convincing thing about a serial killer, does that mean you have murder in your heart? Well, maybe, I guess. . . . More than the average person? I don’t know.”15 (It’s a shame he didn’t know; this question could lead to insight.) He also didn’t seem to know, or at least didn’t care, that he frequently resorted to language and assumptions that we’d think of as misogynist. For example, take his characterization of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani in his defense of Infinite Jest’s length: If the length seems gratuitous, as it did to a very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times, then one arouses ire. And I’m aware of that. The manuscript that I delivered

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was 1700 manuscript pages, of which close to 500 were cut. . . . If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that’s in there is in there on purpose.16

Or consider his patronizing worry about how his girlfriend would take Brief Interviews, and whether she could possibly understand the Intentional Fallacy: I really love this woman, and I am a little worried that she is going to read this thing and . . . she is not in the business . . . I’m worried I am going to have to explain intentional fallacy to her, that this is not in fact me talking.17

From the evidence I have, the critical self-consciousness for which among other things Wallace is praised cannot run very deep. I have done my homework and have decided that reading more of Wallace’s work in order to gain insight into the erotics of reading just isn’t worth it. Or to put it in the very terms of Wallace’s erotics of reading: Wallace proposes to fuck me. Unlike the “charming Japanese lady” whose job it was to review Infinite Jest for the Times, I can refuse the offer, and so I will. ࠮

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Who tells us that it is worth it to read more of Wallace’s work, on this subject or any subject? It is every person who suggests that any scholar of the 20th- and 21stcentury novel worth her tenure should read Infinite Jest, every essay in the literary press that proclaims his work’s importance, every gushy celebration of his wisdom on the internet, every essay that builds a literary-critical argument on his novels. The very fact that a serious, deeply researched, and well-written literary biography of Wallace came out just a few years after his death testifies to how quickly Wallace is being promoted from hot contemporary novelist to serious required reading. The message is issued in ways large and small, direct and indirect, by the institutional engine of precanonization, as Richard Ohmann described it in his groundbreaking essays from the 1980s about the mechanisms of literary culture. Closer to home, it was Dave Eggers who told readers they should read Infinite Jest in a preface to the reissued edition of the novel in 2006. The exhortation was

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hedged in an Eggersarian way, but it was unmistakable as such and worth quoting at length: Here’s a question once posed to me, by a large baseball cap-wearing English major at a medium-sized western college: Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? This is a good question, and one that many people, particularly literary-minded people, ask themselves. The answer is: maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way. If we think it’s our duty to read this book, it’s because we’re interested in genius. We’re interested in epic writerly ambition. We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine and, in Wallace’s case, chewing tobacco. If we are drawn to Infinite Jest, we’re also drawn to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Songs, for which Stephin Merritt wrote that many songs, all of them about love, in about two years. And we’re drawn to the 10,000 paintings of folk artist Howard Finster. Or the work of Sufjan Stevens, who is on a mission to create an album about each state in the union. He’s currently at State No. 2, but if he finishes that, it will approach what Wallace did with the book in your hands. The point is that if we are interested with human possibility, and we are able to cheer each other on to leaps in science and athletics and art and thought, we must admire the work that our peers have managed to create. We have an obligation, to ourselves, chiefly, to see what a brain, and particularly a brain like our own—that is, using the same effluvium we, too, swim through—is capable of. It’s why we watch Shoah, or visit the unending scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote (in a fever of days) On the Road, or William T. Vollmann’s 3,300-page Rising Up and Rising Down, or Michael Apted’s 7-Up, 28-Up, 42-Up series of films, or . . . Well, the list goes on.18

One could be forgiven for noting that the genre of “genius” Eggers refers to has a masculine cultural shape. Wallace’s is an artistic maximalism that while not exclusively a practice of white men is certainly, in Eggers’s articulation of it, mainly the practice of that demographic (no female practitioner of this genre is mentioned). Even if there is no misogyny in Eggers’s invocation of this tradition of “genius,” the value he assigns to “genius” at least raises the question of why something of such

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ultimate humanistic value seems to reside in such a narrow subset of humanity. Except that Eggers also casts Wallace as “normal,” something he thinks will help him to “convince you to buy this book, or check it out of your library.” Eggers’s Wallace is someone known as “Dave Wallace,” a guy who “keeps big sloppy dogs,” wears a bandana at public readings to keep the sweat off his pages (implication: he doesn’t wear it to look cool), was a “nationally ranked tennis player,” “cares about good government,” and is (like Eggers) from the Midwest. Eggers’s assessment of Wallace as the ordinary guy who produced something extra-ordinary may suggest an accommodation to Wallace’s work that he himself had to make in order to fulfill an ethical obligation to “admire the work that our peers have managed to create” “if we are interested with human possibility, and we are able to cheer each other on to leaps in science and athletics and art and thought” (good things, all). Eggers, who didn’t initially admire the work this peer managed to create, gave the novel a sharply mixed review a decade earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle. He immediately saw a connection, and not a flattering one, between the author and the novel: “The book is more about David Foster Wallace than anything else. It’s an extravagantly self-indulgent novel, and, page by page, it’s often difficult to navigate.” He suggests that Wallace is revealed in his “alter ego,” the avant-garde filmmaker Jim Incandenza, who “held his audiences in almost utter contempt.” Contempt for the reader is expressed in the book’s form and style, too, according to Eggers: “Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length. (That includes the 96 pages of only sporadically worthwhile endnotes, including one that clocks in at 17 pages.) At almost 1,100 pages, it feels more like 3,000.” The review concludes with a reflection on how the novel treats the reader: “It’s an endless joke on somebody.”19 What accounts for the ten-year transformation in Eggers’s take on the novel’s value, and its value specifically for the reader who must give his or her time to finish it? We might look back to Ohmann and see two points on the historical DFW can-

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onization curve. Eggers, as editor, had himself helped to bend that curve, featuring a story by Wallace in the first issue of McSweeney’s in 1998, and another in McSweeney’s no. 5 (2000), titled “Mr. Squishy” (under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm). Reading between the lines of Eggers’s Infinite Jest introduction, we might also see an evolution in Eggers’s own mission in literary culture. By 2006 he had become someone “interested with human possibility” and hoping to be part of a generation that will “cheer each other on to leaps in science and athletics and art and thought.” In the introduction, Eggers stands not for the individual reader, as he seemed to when occupying the role of reviewer in 1996, but for his generation, and in this sense the preface is more about Eggers and creative advocacy (the obligation to “admire” whatever “our peers have managed to create” and to urge others to do the same) than it is about the value of Wallace’s novel. What is judged—and in this case found wanting—is judgment itself, even as the discourse of value proceeds apace in the form of facts on the ground: a tenth anniversary edition, a celebrity writer’s introduction, another wave of marketing. One might argue that because Wallace’s work has produced such facts on the ground in American culture, one must be responsible to it as a scholar, and most especially as a scholar of contemporary literature. If one is a critic, it is one’s job to think about how literature functions in our social life. What do people want novels to do for them? What kinds of thought and meaning do literary works make available? What stories matter to a given culture at a given moment in history and what do they tell us about that culture? Wallace’s works surely suggest some answers to those sorts of questions. And indeed, these are the sorts of questions that inspire scholars to read works that are repellent or that are written by people with whom they would rather not be friends. If historically people read or thought in significant ways about such works, then the works themselves are, de facto and historically, important. They have played a part in history and culture and if one wants to understand the part they played, one must read them and write about them further.

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But with a contemporary work, a work that is still in the process of being integrated into the culture, the scholar finds herself in a different position. What if we just stop talking about such a work before it matters that much to the culture at large? Stop reading it, stop teaching it, stop studying it? What if we start suggesting something else to read, instead? To put the question of Wallace’s work more personally: Is it ever acceptable, as a professional matter, to refuse the culture’s rising call to attend to a literary work? Is the scholar the servant of the culture she studies? Is her relevance and authority contingent on her responding to the cues that flow without cease from editors, biographers, reviewers, and fans? Is attending to these what it means to be professional? I am not arguing that there could never be a good reason to read David Foster Wallace’s work. For instance, one of my doctoral students—the incomparable Leslie Jamison—is writing about 20th- and 21st-century addiction stories. It’s a study of the American recovery culture that grew up in the 20th century after the founding of AA. Jamison asks what AA’s therapeutic narratives have to do with literary narratives. In the context of memoir’s rise in the publishing market and of some spectacular later 20th-century examples of addiction as a theme in novels (Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, and certainly Infinite Jest), her question makes reading Wallace essential; her research grows directly out of Wallace’s novels and his life story. And she is both moved and inspired by his writing, which provides the engine of visceral interest that all scholars need to do their work well. For me, the most persuasive of reasons to be interested in Wallace right now is that as Jamison’s advisor I want to be in conversation with her, and to be the best conversation partner I can be might in the end require that I read Wallace’s novel. My respect for Jamison as a writer and thinker makes me open to the task. The idea that I should be the best teacher possible to a specific student is not the one, however, that prompts most people to tell me to read Wallace’s work.20 The recommendation often comes either from the person’s own fondness for it, from

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the ambient admiration for the sainted posthumous reputation that has grown up around Wallace, or out of a routine respect for a canon of literary works that are thought to constitute the shared material of literary conversation. That canon has long favored works that exhibit features associated with literary modernism, the movement that has for many decades held sway over the scholarly sense of what makes a work “literary” and that has reinforced the version of maximal “genius” that animates Eggers’s argument for reading Infinite Jest. Valued features include linguistic difficulty, allusive density, formal self-consciousness, a marked individual voice, ambition (manifested in the work’s scope, innovation, intensity, allusiveness, or sheer size), the expectation that readers should work at the reading and devote, as James Joyce once modestly put it, one’s “whole life” to it and to the celebration of individual genius—a category that as we’ve seen is imagined in persistently masculine terms.21 Wallace self-consciously worked at these aspects of writing. The value he accorded to them was evident in his self-presentation, trained as he was in academic settings where these things held primary value. For instance, resisting his editor Michael Pietsch’s complaints about incoherence in the manuscript for Infinite Jest, which Pietsch had ascertained would clock in at 1,200 book pages, Wallace admitted (“I guess”) that “maybe I have an arrogance problem—I think I’d presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice.”22 With this kind of orientation toward readers, and as the child of a philosophy professor and a dedicated grammarian, raised in decades of the 20th century when modernist literary values defined the teaching of both writing and literature in the academy, Wallace stood a good chance of writing novels that could adhere to such expectations. That he was a bright and intensely competitive student, an effective researcher and promising thinker when not hampered by depression or substance abuse, is undeniable. He made a point of getting A’s at Amherst, and in Max’s biography we learn that he worked extremely hard for them, logging hour after hour in

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the library and at his writing desk. At the graduate writing program at the University of Arizona, he broadcast his ambition in recognizable ways, invoking “theory” as “what separated the serious novelist from the others” (and verging on an actual fight during a classroom argument over Derrida’s relevance).23 His teachers responded accordingly; even the director at Arizona, Mary Carter, whom Max describes patronizingly as “an entirely conventional writer and not even a very good one,” offered him special double-credit class work, telling other students that “he’s going to make us all very proud.”24 Max reflects that Wallace’s “interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. It was a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of a mimic and engineer.”25 All of which is to say that the conformity of Wallace’s work with the expectation of what is “serious” and “literary” in the academy is the product of a circular system of literary production. That conformity is not by itself evidence that this work is worth preserving within our always-changing canon, or that it has been important to the evolution—rather than simply the reproduction—of an art form. One thing that Max’s biography of Wallace reveals is just how crucial a handful of people were to making Wallace into a literary celebrity. Acknowledging that few people actually read Infinite Jest even if they bought it, Max’s account makes an implicit argument about who and what made Wallace into a literary author to attend to: his agent, an editor, a particular reviewer, and two publishers respected for their literary offerings and powerful enough in the market to set the literary press in motion for a book they got behind.26 The marketers knew their marks, projecting the aura of literary seriousness out toward reviewers who were already committed to a certain vision of what literary seriousness meant in the late 20th century, and daring them to man up, read a thousand pages, and prove that they had something

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intelligent to say about it. Of the reviewers, Max trenchantly notes that “all agreed Infinite Jest was significant—or, at least, a novel others would think was significant, so their readers should know about it.” Critics had been given what Max calls a “dare” by the marketers at Little, Brown, and the reviews had, Max notes, “an undertone of obedience to their writing, of being relieved they could answer in the affirmative the dare Little, Brown had laid down.”27 The strategy worked for Wallace, and incidentally, it worked for his editor, Michael Pietsch. In a recent article on Pietsch’s efforts as chief executive of Hachette Book Group to challenge Amazon’s discounting policy on ebooks, the first two paragraphs were about his work with Wallace a decade earlier, how he had “paid $80,000” for Infinite Jest, “$45,000 more than the next highest bidder,” and edited the book for over two years, publishing it in 1996 and thus launching “a literary sensation.”28 The journalist didn’t bury the lede; the article, “Toe-to-Toe with a Giant” is about cultural power, and Pietsch’s power is measured in Wallaces.29 ࠮

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The dare, and its momentum, is preserved and extended by the literary press today, not only through publishers who promote books by or about Wallace, or through the representations of those like Pietsch whose careers were significantly bound up with Wallace’s, or through new editions of Infinite Jest that will bump sales again for a reliable title, but also through a body of other professional readers who have accepted the argument for canonicity. Among the latter we’d need to count an editor at the LA Review of Books, to whom a short version of this piece was submitted. The editor liked the idea of publishing a negative piece on Wallace to counter the “Saint Dave” phenomenon and balance “all the puff pieces” that had been published about Wallace in the last few years. He acknowledged that while he was an admirer of Wallace’s writing it was true that Wallace’s relations with women and his conception of sex were “ugly” in a way that was significant and that wasn’t getting much play. But he found it unconvincing that Wallace’s misogyny could be substantively related to

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an argument about why one might stop reading his work, and the solution he recommended was, naturally, to read more DFW: While of course I wouldn’t expect you to go and plow through all of Infinite Jest with gritted teeth, I do think, for the essay to work as a convincing critique of Wallace and not just evidence of a personal antipathy, it needs to have more of a grounding in Wallace’s writing: a little good old-fashioned close reading, in other words. . . . In particular, it seems like you really ought to engage a bit with the “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” and maybe also the story “Adult World” in the same volume, both of which deal directly with misogyny and sex addiction; and perhaps you can elaborate on your readings of “Westward the Course of Empire . . .” and “Girl with Curious Hair,” as well.30

The editor assumes that Wallace’s work “about” misogyny must somehow be revealing or smart about that subject—an assumption that the biography and my reading in Wallace’s work already lead me to doubt, for the reasons I have laid out. More tellingly, the editor seems to assume that a decision to stop reading must be merely “personal” rather than scholarly or rational if a feeling (in this case, “antipathy”) is attached to rational analysis. The assumption is that a refusal can’t, in the absence of more reading, have an intellectual or scholarly relationship to a professional decision about resource allocation—about what to spend one’s (limited) time doing. The editor’s advice allows us to step back and observe the mechanisms at work in the interaction: because the scholar in this case had tenure, and because she did not in a professional sense need to publish the essay, she could without significant cost choose to resist the engine of canonization. That canonization takes the form both of authoritative claims about the significance of certain works and of a process of cultural replication through which intellectual “conversation” about a certain writer perpetuates itself by credentializing those willing to join it. This machine of canonization asks people invested in literary capital to keep reading Wallace and keeps everyone talking about Wallace’s work as if it had something important to say (in

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this case, about misogyny), or as if a serious reader must be responsible for finding out for sure whether it has something important to say. The machine also implicitly directs people not to read something else, since time is finite and the jest is infinite, or nearly so. And this all works beautifully, because critics are good at making the things they read seem important, especially once a big chunk of work time has become a sunk cost. After all, great criticism is often achieved through the intellectual creativity of the critic’s mind and not through the inherent quality of what they happen to be reading. If the scholar in my example did need a publication, she might well have taken the editor’s advice, put in another four or five weeks of work, and produced the essay that the editor had in mind—a piece that would balance our view of Wallace, but also a piece that would take for granted the idea that she, and we, should have a fully developed view of Wallace. This sort of balancing work is a good first step and useful to people convinced for their own reasons about the value of Wallace’s work. This is what I take A. O. Scott to have done in his early omnibus review of Wallace’s work, “The Panic of Influence,” published in the New York Review of Books after the release of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in 1999, and more recently what Mark McGurl accomplished in his scholarly deflation of Wallace (an article entitled “The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program,” in boundary 2, Winter 2013), which is alive with close readings and dedicated research, not to mention very funny on the subject of Wallace’s gushing admiration of the Mel Gibson blockbuster Braveheart. But the fact that such work must be done over and over suggests the self-replicating nature of the canonizing process: Scott’s insights about the limits of Wallace’s work, while they may have balanced the early assessment of it, led only to more assessments. The wave of scholarly interest in the institutions of contemporary literary production and all their invisible actors is allowing us to see afresh exactly how the sausage of literary culture is made. Such studies allow the scholar of contemporary literature to see how contingent the survival of particular books is, and

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to understand her own role as an institutional actor. And this is where my refusal to participate might count in some small way. My refusal to read Wallace’s work seems dramatic, even melodramatic, the product of personal antipathy, but it needn’t. All of us, especially scholars of literature, refuse to read books every day. Consider again for a moment the problem of overproduction mentioned at the chapter’s outset. What Matthew Wilkens calls “the problem of abundance” is a problem for every person on earth who has an internet connection, and it is a professional problem in every corner of literary study. Franco Moretti has been making this point for years about the novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. As a culture and as a profession, then, we are daily embracing the decision not to read even as literary scholars continue to read in every spare moment and worry more and more about how they choose. Nonreading, seen in this light, is the way of the future (just as it has been the way of the modern past). And as the French sociologist of literature Pierre Bayard argued in the utterly sensible but provocatively titled book How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, we live in a culture where the shared “library” of books that matter to the culture is so large that we must be able to know about books without reading them in order to build intellectual common ground in public culture. (Maybe, for conversation with Leslie Jamison, it is enough that I know about Infinite Jest.) This should not produce the shame, he suggests, that the brilliant David Lodge sent up in his 1979 novel Changing Places. There, a devious literature professor invents a game called Humiliation, where the goal is to rack up points by not having read famous books. You earn a point for each book that the other people in the game have read but you have not. Winning a departmental game of Humiliation may mean losing your promotion, as one hapless participant discovers. My refusal to read—any refusal to read, in and of itself—is not radical; it is normal. It is not shameful; it is pragmatic. And unlike Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, whose repeated response to his employer’s request that he do his job

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was “I prefer not to,” my refusal is neither unprofessional nor mysterious. In placing my reasons, and the evidence on which I base them, on the table, in suggesting the kinds of reasons it might be legitimate to consider as we make our best guesses about how to parcel out our reading hours, I hope to draw attention to the fact that refusal can be an intentional and transparent part of professional life for the scholar. In fact, it must be. The standard of evidence on which refusals are made is lower than our standard of evidence normally would be for judging a work we’ve read. How could it be any other way? We must make educated guesses about the experience of reading something we have not read, and must go from that guess to the investment, or withholding, of our reading time. And more: refusal is a tool we can use by our own lights as we—all us readers—take up the task of shaping culture with our aggregated purchases, clicks, views, syllabi, talks, articles, and books. David Foster Wallace understood this power: “The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this,” he said to the graduates assembled at Kenyon College in 2005, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” It’s a cliché worth repeating (though that doesn’t make it any less of a cliché). Reading at the Limit If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” So says the narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and so it is for any scholar of contemporary literature. In the roar of contemporary culture, to hear what is happening down in the grass, to truly hear and attend to it, would be to die of the noise. From that limit one sets out to choose, and such acts of choosing began, and now end, this book.

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Eliot was more than commonly aware of the choices we all make, consciously and unconsciously, about to whom and to what we attend. Even an epic novel like Middlemarch was for her defined by its limits, while within those limits Eliot was committed to representing a broad cross-section of what she called “un-historic” lives and acts. Of her central character, the noble but flawed Dorothea, who disappears from public view at the end into happily married life as the helpmeet of her politician husband, Will Ladislaw, Eliot concludes thus: Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Whatever we might think of this narrator’s faith in moral teleology—that “growing good of the world”—it is certainly true that the effects of hidden lives, represented in the context of Eliot’s epic, can be seen as “incalculably diffusive.” Perhaps that is because Eliot put them in the novel in the first place, or perhaps that quality inheres in certain actual lives regardless of whether they have a bard to sing them. I think Eliot hoped that unhistoric lives could have diffuse effects, though she surely understood that the chances were greater if someone stood by to write of them. The point is not to make a certain person or act qualify as historic, but to help the diffusion along. That has been the work of this book. ࠮

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“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” The human limit of time has made me jealous of my reading choices. Sometimes, as I’ve said, I refuse to read a book, with reasons. More often I simply neglect to read books, without reasons, without even knowing what I am neglecting (who could know the approximately fifty-nine thousand nine

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hundred and ninety new novels that even a quite dedicated reader of new American novels will turn away in a year?). And of course, many times I accept the invitations to read extended by the cultural institutions I live within. Critics, colleagues, friends, students, prize competitions, a beautiful cover, a fine review, exceptional obscurity, exceptional popularity, exceptional influence, strangers who simply make a good case: each of these recommend books, and I choose to accept, and I read. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes I gain a friend of the mind forever. Middlemarch is my case in point. In the summer of 2013, as I was working on the first draft of this chapter (and, it’s true, trying to place a version of it in the LA Review of Books), I was also running for a half hour, and usually talking for a half hour more, early each morning with a friend and fellow professor. We were both teaching at the Ripton, Vermont, campus of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, a paradisal place where students who are mainly in their twenties and thirties, mainly high school English teachers, come for four or five summers to earn a Master’s degree in English. The isolation of the campus—set within meadows and forest in the mountains outside of the town of Middlebury—and the sheer literary geekdom of the life we share there, make for a matchless scene of conversation and thinking about anything to do with literature. And so each morning my colleague and I and my dog panted our way down and then up a half-mile dirt-road hill, talking about novels and writing and teaching and children and friends. One of our themes that summer, when I wasn’t blowing off steam about what I called my “Fuck the Reader” essay, was whether contemporary novels were worth reading in general. I bridled when he said, in his nebbishy way, that I should give up all that crapola I was writing about and accompany him back a century or so, and read some Proust, or some James, or especially, Middlemarch. It was all in good fun, of course—he is himself a distinguished scholar of contemporary literature, skeptical of the canon, someone who covers the novel from the Victorians forward. He was needling me, and it got me up the hill, and led us to many another topic.

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But as a surprise for him, to be revealed on our first run the following summer, I decided to set aside the time required to read Middlemarch, which my graduate and undergraduate education had somehow never demanded, though the canon machine has, in general, preserved the novel well. It began with the audiobook, as I drove home from Vermont that August; by the time I reached New Haven six hours later I was hooked. The opportunity to finish came when I flew to Singapore and then Paris with my book-mad daughter later that year. Disappearing into our books could be done companionably on the long flights. I lugged an impractical hardcover, the silky Penguin “Drop Caps” edition, bright yellow; it was the only copy I could find at the bookstore on the day of our departure. Never had I been so aware of the reassuring presence of a big book—except perhaps when I read Anna Karenina in my early twenties, the summer after my brief first marriage ended. And my friend was right: the human wisdom and human mercy contained in Eliot’s novel overshadow anything I’ve read for decades, perhaps in my life. I quoted from it in remarks to graduating seniors in my college the next spring; I challenged my daughter to read it in Vermont the following summer. My spouse is reading it this summer before he falls asleep. The diffusion goes on, and I admit that I think the world might be better for it. I, at least, am better for it, and it lives permanently in me now. Dave Eggers has said that he wants McSweeney’s books to “speak for themselves.” He is leery of critics throwing their voices around, taking things out of context, twisting the narrative into new shapes. Having written this concluding chapter, I certainly understand his concern: some of the sentences I’ve written here seem to beg for quotational misuse. But the image of reading that his sentiment evokes is profoundly private—it suggests that books speak best to the individual reader, alone in an endless room full of books, for it is only in that context that a book can be protected from the talkative and perhaps cynical or sinister reader; only there can it achieve its power to cross the space between page and mind with integrity. But we need not read

On Not Reading DFW

alone, and we do not read alone, and happily, readers will talk. Our unhistoric acts of reading diffuse through our own words about them, be they written, or spoken in a classroom, or thrown out on failing breath to a friend who meets us each morning to run the same hill.

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Making this book has led me to predictable places: to the study of writers’ careers, to the contents of novels and stories, to the people who found and staff businesses that make and sell literary books. But it has led me also to think about the vagaries of bankruptcy law, the psychology of coteries, accidents of birth, and the movement of delivery vehicles on a particular morning in San Francisco. As it has turned out, all these things play a part in shaping literature’s role in American life. In revealing how this is so, and by telling stories that illuminate the still-marvelous potential of imaginative writing to supplement what any given person can hope to experience, I aim both to make something and to help resist the creative destruction that the critic Alan Liu has described in his account of contemporary knowledge work in The Laws of Cool. Liu calls for literary studies and the humanities more generally to offer their historical vision to counter the relentless abandonment of ideas, products, and workers that we accept, and even embrace, in capitalist societies in the service of innovation—innovation that has come to be taken as a value in itself rather than as a means to some end. For new ephemera is neither canonical nor the valued trace of an otherwise inaccessible past time. By attending to the invisible and ephemeral in the present, the literary method I have practiced tries to resist that relentless abandonment of ideas, products, and workers. To resist such destruction by studying the very recent past serves two purposes: one, to preserve historical vision in a space that is traditionally off-limits to history’s help, and two, to have a decent hope of intervening in the formation of the future insofar as the stories I am telling keep fruitful ideas in play after their issue date looks stale and the products that embody those ideas have drifted

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out of the market’s churn. The stories in this book touch living persons still invested (their money, their time, their emotions, their lives) in things they tried—or are still trying—to make and do. The materials one sees in a study of the present are not free of the institutions that create archives and data sets; the scholar participates in those institutions herself and the world she sees is visible in part through their lenses. But scholars of the contemporary, in acts of research and ethnography, can step outside established archives and their institutions to find what still floats unmoored in the open water, cultural material catchable in its shifting clumps and eddies, as yet unclaimed by some enduring enterprise or narrative. And yet, less than three years after I rummaged in the McSweeney’s basement, the subscription cards and everything else in those boxes were bought by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The New York Times reported in December 2013 that Small Demons, a web venture I wrote about in Chapter 3, was about to fold if it didn’t find another investor right quick. The site closed soon after. The Red Lemonade web site appears, as of this writing, to be inactive. And who knows what might happen to that mural in the basement on Valencia Street. But the context recoverable by live conversation cannot be archived even by a well-endowed center—or rather, it can’t be archived until context materializes in an artifact. Social life moves. This book moves—and moves on—with it.

Notes

Introduction 1. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2. Bernard Lahire has written extensively on the “double life” of writers, and his work informs my sense of the writer’s labor. See esp. “The Double Life of Writers,” trans. Bernard Lahire and Gwendolyn Wells, New Literary History 41:2 (2010). This is the first piece of Lahire’s La condition littéraire: La double vie des écrivains (2006) to be translated and published in English. 3. The signs of that interest would significantly include the Modernist Journals Project, a joint venture of Brown University (which founded the project in 1995) and the University of Tulsa (joining Brown in 2003), which began to digitize and make available entire runs of small periodicals that promoted what came to be known as Modernism. A raft of books and articles on the little magazines have come out in the same period, including the compendious Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, the third volume of which was published in 2013, and chapters in such influential collections as Bad Modernisms. Scholarly monographs would include Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Rachel Schreiber, Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the Masses (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011); Dean Irvine, Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916– 1956 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008); Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada 1925–80: Its Role in the Development of Modernism and Post-Modernism in Canadian Poetry (Toronto: ECW Press, 1984); Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (New York: Routledge, 2002); Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995);

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David Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009); and Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2008). Recently, Hoyt Long and Richard So have begun to combine the archival turn that is responsible for much of this work with the techniques of data mapping to establish a broader view of the social networks that fueled these magazines; for a sample of their data-mapping work, see their short piece, “Network Science and Literary History,” Leonardo: International Journal of Contemporary Visual Artists 46:3 (2013): 274. 4. See, for example, Mark McGurl’s account of the rise of the art novel in relation to popular forms of the genre in The Novel Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: NYU Press, 2004). 5. Richard So and Hoyt Long used this technique to study the minor religious poet Thomas Clark and his relationship to the networks of modernism in Poetry magazine. Paper presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Chicago, January 2014. 6. Submissions from Ploughshares subscribers, for example, are accepted in a distinct category and a $3 electronic submission fee is waived (Ploughshares at Emerson College: Submission Manager. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015). Carve literary magazine’s blog puts “Not reading literary magazines” in the number one spot in a list of aspiring authors’ top ten mistakes in submitting their work (Eva Langston, “Mistakes Writers Make When Submitting Work to Literary Magazines,” Carve, 28 August 2014. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015; this essay is widely linked, judging by its multiple appearances under different sites in Google search). Carve also gives “priority consideration” to submissions from Premium Edition subscribers to the online magazine and, like Ploughshares, waives a $3 online submission fee. Pleiades, “a journal of new writing” published out of the University of Central Missouri English Department, charges a reading fee of $25 for each submission to their annual Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Book Prize competition, and the fee includes a one-year subscription to the journal (Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing: Submit. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015). The journal Narrative takes a persuasive approach: “Our desire is to connect readers and writers, and we strongly encourage anyone interested in submitting work to read the magazine before submitting. You may read the magazine for free. If you enjoy reading it and wish to submit, we hope

Notes to Introduction

you will feel that the reading fee, which is lower than most literary magazine subscription fees, is more than justified by the quality of the work the magazine offers” (Narrative: Submission Guidelines. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015). The Atlantic takes a similar approach: “The Atlantic magazine is always interested in great nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. A general familiarity with what we have published in the past is the best guide to our needs and preferences” (Frequently Asked Questions, theatlantic.com. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015). McSweeney’s falls in the same category, though with a different flavor: “We publish fiction and nonfiction. There are no rules. The best way to get a sense of what we’re interested in publishing is to read the Quarterly. You can pick up a subscription or back issues here” [with link to store] . . . Please keep [your cover letter] brief, though we do like to hear from people who like the magazine. We’re not concerned about writing degrees or past publications, so don’t be daunted if you don’t have an MFA or much in the way of previously published work” (Guidelines for Quarterly Submissions, mcsweeneys.net. Web. Accessed 5 January 2015). 7. The history of reading as the foundation of publics is well told by the many distinguished scholars who have taken up this topic in the last two decades; of particular influence have been Benedict Anderson, Cathy Davidson, Michael Warner, Pascale Casanova, Janice Radway, Leah Price, and Stefan Collini. 8. Contributor information from “Index of Contributors to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Issues 1–31),” inside back cover of The Art of McSweeney’s (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010). 9. The writers I refer to are, in order, Rachel Sherman, Wythe Marschall, Andy Lamey, and Shann Ray. My thanks to each of them for speaking with me about their lives and careers. 10. Matthew Wilkens, “Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers,” Post45 Contemporaries, Post45.org. Web. Accessed 29 June 2015. 11. Most Frequent Contributors to McSweeney’s, Issues 1–31 Contributors with five or more pieces Pieces appearing in nos. 1–12 / Total pieces Bearman, Joshuah 3/5 Bradford, Arthur 4/6 Budnitz, Judy 3/6 b Doyle, Roddy 1/7 (first was in no. 12) Hudson, Gabe a 4/5 Johnson, Denis 3/6

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Lennon, J. Robert a 5/5 a Maliszewski, Paul 5/5 Moody, Rick a 6/6 Oates, Joyce Carol b 1/5 (first was in no. 11) Vowell, Sarah a 5/5 (in each of the first five issues) Weschler, Lawrence a 6/8 Six mainly early contributors (a); four crossovers; two later contributors (b). Dave Eggers, it should be noted, is not listed among the contributors. Numbers in the index do not appear to include contributions to the letters section of the journal. 12. See Cynthia Ozick, review of Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, New York Times Book Review, 18 May 2015. Web. Accessed 27 May 2015. 13. Andrew Goldstone’s analysis of the frequency of authors’ names in the titles of articles in the journal Modernism/modernity was presented in a conference paper in 2014. This big-data approach shows that there are many players but just a few winners: a few canonical authors appear frequently, alongside dozens of other writers who each appear only once. Andrew Goldstone, “Seeing through Numbers,” paper presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Chicago, 11 January 2014. Chapter 1: Making Literature Now 1. The essay in question was Irving Howe, “Phillip Roth Reconsidered,” 1972. 2. Soon after A Heartbreaking Work was published, his sister Beth wrote an angry statement claiming he had exaggerated his role in raising their brother Toph and underplayed hers; shortly thereafter she recanted and apologized. The following year, in 2001, she committed suicide. 3. John Preston, “Dave Eggers Interview: The Heartbreak Kid,” The Telegraph (UK), 29 December 2009. Web. Accessed 22 March 2011. Eggers told Preston that “I’ve had a really complicated relationship with [Heartbreaking Work] for some years. In a lot of ways the guy in it is me, but also he isn’t. We were very private people, my family, and that kind of selfrevelation is something that was not in any way native to them. In a lot of ways, writing it was an act of rebellion.” 4. Spike Jonze, There Are Many of Us (print and DVD) (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2010). 5. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

6. All quotations from Russell Quinn and information about the workings of McSweeney’s office presented here come from interviews with Quinn, Horowitz, Eggers, and other McSweeney’s staffers, conducted by the author, 12–17 December 2010. 7. Wilkens, “Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers.” 8. Quinn, private communication with the author, in comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 9. Martin Lindstrom, “You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” New York Times, 1 October 2011, A21. 10. Thanks to Adam Krefman and Chris Ying for information on the press’s total output. 11. Quinn, private communication with the author, in comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 12. Quinn, private communication with the author, in comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 13. Nolan Hamilton, “Dave Eggers Reassures Us That Print Lives, Via Email,” Gawker, 3 June 2009. Web. Accessed 31 March 2011. 14. From Russell Quinn’s web site, russellquinn.com. Web. Accessed 31 March, 2011. 15. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 14. 16. Janice Radway, “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change,” PMLA 126:1 (January 2011): 140–50. “This presence is political because it challenges established hierarchies of forms and voices, the selection of those who are attended to as legitimate, authorized denizens of the major institutions that comprise contemporary knowledge production” (145). In particular, in this essay (whether this will be true in the larger project this essay announces isn’t clear), Radway emphasizes the inclusion of adolescent voices in public discourse as a significant political act. This transforms the young, she argues, into knowledge producers rather than “the targets of surveillance, policing, and silencing by others.” Chapter 2: McSweeney’s and the School of Life 1. See Mark McGurl, The Program Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). McGurl sees Eggers’s work as emblematic of fiction’s potential to thrive outside of the academy due to its vastly superior marketability when compared to poetry (29) and as an example of the close relationship between an institution outside the academy and the “culture of the school”

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(a concept McGurl borrows from Langdon Hammer’s 2001 Representations essay, “Plath’s Lives: Poetry, Professionalism, and the Culture of the School”). McGurl establishes the latter by citing Eggers’s founding of the 826 community writing and tutoring centers with the proceeds of his sale of A Heartbreaking Work (30). 2. Of course, A Heartbreaking Work, and even What Is the What, are books that project both anger and aggression toward readers; this does not, for me, contradict the central commitment to reading and writing as acts of love. It rather registers the fact that this version of love is not the sentimental let’s-feel-good-together sort of love, but something more like intimate love, where anger and attachment are often inextricably linked. 3. Hamilton invokes the anthropological analyses of Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss to suggest how aesthetic production more generally enters commercial circulation under the flag of the gift economy, if not in fact then in self-presentation. See Caroline Hamilton, One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing, and Publicity (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 4. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 119. Hereafter cited parenthetically. See A. O. Scott, “Among the Believers,” New York Times Magazine, 11 September 2005. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011. 5. Warner gives a catalog of the readerly responses off-limits in the classroom to lead off his essay on the history of critical reading as a practice, responses which include “fall[ing] in love with authors” (13). This and other affective responses Warner mentions are ones we might recognize woven thematically through Eggers’s work—identification, arousal, love, anger, desire, and the urge for social power. Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (Essays from the English Institute), ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13–38. 6. McGurl catalogs many objections to the writing program and their evolution across the latter half of the twentieth century throughout The Program Era. The critique of school as the home of racialist thinking comes from McGurl’s reading of Schoolteacher in Beloved and is implicit, he argues, in the way Morrison set up her “atelier” at Princeton, a program imagined as an alternative to the tainted “school.” McGurl expands upon the critique of school as a restraint on creative freedom in his chapter on Ken Kesey and his psychedelic school bus. 7. “The Believer,” interview by David Amsden, Salon.com, 9 March 2005. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011.

Notes to Chapter 2

8. David Amsden, for instance, reports during his interview with Eggers that when he wrote “The Perpetual Debut Novelist” for the February 2004 Believer, he “just pitched Heidi [Julavits] cold, and then wrote a piece.” 9. “Readers Interview Dave Eggers,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 7 July 2008. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011. 10. Conversation with the author, December 2010. 11. Keith Gessen, “Dave Eggers, Teen Idol, or The Education of Gary Baum,” n+1, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 60. 12. “McSweeney’s: A Regressive Avant-Garde,” n+1, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 7. A. O. Scott nicely refutes the sharp differences the n+1 editors assert between their journal and McSweeney’s projects. 13. “Bowl of Cherries: A Novel by Millard Kaufmann,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Web. Accessed 9 March 2011. 14. “His presence was so expected . . . that when someone noticed him for being him, we would all have to stand back a second and see him for what he actually was, at least superficially: a seventh-grade boy. Of course, he had a difficult time discerning, himself. . . . [Marny and I] were talking about one of the new interns, who, at twenty-two, was much younger than we had assumed—‘Really?’ said Toph. ‘I thought he was our age.’ . . . It took Toph another few beats to realize what he had said” (253). 15. Gordon Burn, “The Believers,” Guardian Review, 27 March 2004, 4. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011. The heading to this article reads: “Artists have often come together in groups, and a new literary network stretches from London to San Francisco—via Mantua. Gordon Burn considers what it is that Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby and David Foster Wallace have in common, and makes a case for the coterie as a creative hub.” 16. Andy Lamey, “The Little Press That Matters: McSweeney’s Reinvented a Role Some Thought No Longer Existed,” National Post (Canada), 22 May 2004, RB8. 17. Sven Birkerts, “Taste and Tenacity; Are ‘Little Magazines,’ Those Tip Sheets on the Literary Future, an Endangered Species—Or on the Verge of a Renaissance?” Boston Globe, 22 August 2004, F1 (“T. S. Eliot’s . . . ”). 18. Rick Moody, “Writers and Mentors,” The Atlantic Fiction Issue, August 2005. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011.

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19. Heidi Julavits, “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” The Believer 1:1 (March 2003). 20. VIDA, according to its web site, “was founded in August 2009 to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.” They conduct research that attempts to put hard data behind the general sense, among women writers in particular, that the publishing world for literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry favors men. As their count of male and female writers in the history of the Best American series shows, the picture can be more complex than “The Count 2010” alone might suggest. The Best American Short Stories volumes published more women than men in 2010, and published 47% women and 53% men over the history of the series from 1978 through 2010. See “The Count 2010” and “The Best American Count” at vidaweb.org. Accessed 2 January 2012. 21. Interview with the author, 29 January 2010. Further interview quotations are excerpted from this conversation unless noted otherwise. 22. Unferth, correspondence with the author, 26 January 2012. Email. 23. One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box, McSweeney’s Store, n.d. Web. Accessed 9 March 2011. 24. Sarah Manguso, Dave Eggers, and Deb Olin Unferth, One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2007). 25. Unferth, Minor Robberies, 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 26. The contrast between Unferth’s and Manguso’s stories in this regard is striking. The “I” dominates Manguso’s numbered series of shorts (1 through 80), and one assembles a cumulative sense of that narrator’s activities, her character, where she lives, her history. Though abstracted characters do enter into the stories, and their genders are not difficult to evaluate, there is far more variety in the types named: “the girl,” a “senior,” the “groundskeeper,” “my best friend.” In contrast, Unferth’s protagonists seem trapped in a world where there is mainly “he” and “she,” and when the “I” appears he or she is not around long enough for us to accumulate detail. 27. For a short discussion of the role of play in Eggers’s literary vision, see my “Wild Things: The Book of the Film of the Book” (Huffington Post), on Eggers’s novelization of the screenplay he wrote for Spike Jonze’s film. Eggers’s mother was trained as a Montessori teacher,

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

and I see this focus as, in part, a legacy of how Eggers manages to take intersecting social forces and put them into relation to one another within the mass culture. 28. Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008), 150. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 29. Unferth, who keeps dated monthly drafts of her work, writes that she “began Vacation in early 2005. By August 2005 it had a male protagonist.” Unferth, 26 January 2012. Email. 30. This quotation and those in the following paragraph are from Unferth’s email correspondence with the author, 26 January 2012. 31. I offer the multiplicity of verbs as an act of scholarly honesty, because it is not within the scope of my evidence to determine which of them is the right one. The question of causality is a challenge to literary methodology that I want to highlight as part of my larger project. 32. Unferth, 26 January 2012. Email. 33. “Readers Interview Dave Eggers.” 34. Christopher Monks, Master’s Tea talk, Pierson College, Yale University, 28 January 2010. 35. Unferth, 29 January 2010. Chapter 3: Reading Novels in the Net 1. This is how the best-selling novelist Amitav Ghosh put it in a keynote lecture for the Society for the Study of the Novel, at Duke University in April 2012. 2. Ilana DeBare, “A Financial Thriller in the Publishing World,” SFGate.com, 27 January 2007. Web. Accessed 24 April 2012. 3. Priya Jain, “The Struggle for Independents,” Salon.com, 21 June 2007. Web. Accessed 24 April 2012. 4. See André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (New York: Verso, 2000). 5. “Redlemona.edu—the First Red Lemonade Writing Workshops with Vanessa Veselka,” redlemonade.com, 18 August 2011. Web. Accessed January 2012. 6. Richard Melo, interview with Kathryn Mockler, “Rusty Talk with Richard Melo,” therustytoque.com. Web. Accessed 24 April 2012. 7. Richard Melo, comment on Happy Talk, redlemonade.com, 11 May 2011. Web. Accessed 24 April 2012.

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8. Richard Nash, “Why We Are DRM-free (and it’s not because we trust you . . .),” red lemonade.com, 6 September 2011. Web. Accessed January 2012. 9. Melo, interview with Mockler. 10. Ibid. 11. Ghosh, describing a reading of Gaddis’s work that he attended in the 1990s. Ghosh’s point was both that his disregard of readers suggested an impoverished view of the novel as a form, and that the other extreme, what I am describing in Melo’s response to readers, requires writers to be something other than they are. Ghosh is especially interesting on these topics as one of the few novelists who never teach writing, a novelist who lives solely off the royalties of his books. 12. Nash, interview with the author, 9 January 2012. Further quotations from Nash are from this source unless noted otherwise. 13. Nash, interview with the author, 16 October 2012. 14. The term “prosumer” was first used by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave (1980), about early mainframe computing, and has taken on an increasingly important meaning as theorists and businesses have understood internet usage in the age of Web 2.0. 15. Jain, “Struggle for Independents.” 16. Eggers email, quoted in Jain, “Struggle for Independents.” 17. Ibid. 18. Quoted in Jain, “Struggle for Independents.” 19. Red Lemonade, “Someday This Will Be Funny [Limited Edition],” redlemonade. Web. Accessed 16 October 2012. 20. Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). 21. “What Is Pinterest?” Pinterest.com. Web. Accessed 16 October 2012. Their account of themselves includes these telling notes about the capacity of object curation to become socially connective: “People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. . . . Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people.”

Notes to Chapter 4

Chapter 4: GPS Historicism A version of this chapter was published in “Reading Practices,” ed. Winifried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt, and Philipp Löffler, special issue of REAL:Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 31 (2015): 65–80. 1. Eli Horowitz, interview in Contents, no. 4, 25 July 2012–4 October 2012. Web. Accessed 7 June 2013. 2. Here is Horowitz’s fuller explanation: “I guess the first element was that I wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore. But I knew there was no way I could fill a whole country myself, so that led to the system of field reporters. But I knew they’d need to be inspired and unified by a central narrative, so that led to the testimonials. But I realized I could never write that narrative by myself, so I found collaborators (Matt Derby and Kevin Moffett), but then I needed to make the varied voice a strength, rather than something to hide, so I settled on the oral history format, and I needed a plot that would allow for hundreds of different perspectives, so I ended up with a sort of epidemic, and . . . well, like that, all the way down to the day of the week in which a given testimonial is released—a Monday entry should feel different than a Friday. The form and content were constantly shaping each other” (Horowitz, interview in Contents). 3. This and all further quotations and screenshots from The Silent History are taken from the edition released through Apple’s iTunes in 2012, published by Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC. The quotations here are from the prologue. 4. From Eli Horowitz’s “Guidelines for Field Reporters.” Private communication with the author. 5. Horowitz, “Guidelines.” 6. Ibid. 7. Horowitz, interview in Contents. 8. This profile fits the accounts of number-hunters’ successes that I was able to find posted on the web, where a reading community inspired by the book popped up to track which of the numbers had been found and where. 9. Horowitz, conversation with the author, 14 February 2013. 10. Horowitz, interview in Contents. 11. Ibid. 12. Horowitz explains that the data the app collects is by no means without complications,

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even regarding the number of “readers” who have used the app. Special offers such as free downloads on a certain day or different purchasing options (volume 1 is free, then you get the option to pay for the rest when you finish that volume; or you buy all six volumes at once but only pay for five) suggest analogs to, say, picking up a book off a shelf in the store, browsing it, but not buying it. Horowitz attests to being mildly curious about some aspects of reader behavior but also leery of what he might find out. “I would guess that the numbers would be slightly chilling,” he says, considering whether he’d want to figure out where readers stopped reading—noting, however, that this would be potentially discouraging data to possess if we could know it for any kind of book. Interview with the author, 29 May 2014. 13. Horowitz, interview in Contents. 14. Certainly manipulation was not Horowitz’s point, or at least that is not the aspect of the project he emphasizes: “I do know that I wasn’t trying to build a wiki, and I don’t particularly see this as ‘user-generated content.’ To me, it’s not so modern or unusual, just a fluid community of writers and readers, with an element of guidance and structure at its core” (Horowitz, interview in Contents). 15. See Bernard Lahire, “The Double Life of Writers,” trans. Bernard Lahire and Gwendolyn Wells, New Literary History 41:2 (2010); and, for his broader analysis of the individual’s social plurality, The Plural Actor, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 16. My account of the recruitment and payment of writers contributing to The Silent History is the product of a series of interviews I conducted with Horowitz in the early spring of 2013 and 2014. For details on the process of writing the novel as a team, from Kevin Moffett’s point of view, see Moffett’s interview with Adam Levin, The Rumpus, 1 October 2012. Web. Accessed 28 May 2014. Money is not mentioned at all in the interview’s discussion of Horowitz’s appeal and Moffett’s work on the project. We might also note in passing that Levin is a McSweeney’s author: his enormous novel, The Instructions, was published by the press in 2010. 17. Andrew Goldstone, “Seeing with Numbers” panel, Modern Language Association annual convention, January 2014. 18. In her review, Marshall poses the crucial formal questions: “To what degree do the serialized, electronic format and limited interactivity provided by the app version of The Silent History contribute to its status as an innovative, experimental work of fiction, and if they do, why should you read the print novel instead?” Kate Marshall, “Waiting for the Plague: A Field

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

Report from Contemporary Serialization,” review of The Silent History, both app and print forms, Iowa Review 44:2 (Fall 2014). Web. Accessed 8 January 2016. 19. We may wonder, then, why Horowitz published the novel in paper form. He explains that he did it for two main reasons: for money, and to increase readers’ access to the story, which its creators had come to care more about, having worked on it for two years (at the beginning, he says, their main focus was on the intrinsic interest of the form). The firm Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC, which owns the novel, was paid a $25,000 advance for the right to print it, which was split between the agent and the four creators. This was not the first time that the original form of the novel was provisionally set aside, either: before the app was released, also in an effort to generate some income, Horowitz sold the film rights, which, if a film were ever made, would again translate the novel to a different medium. Horowitz was content to allow these formal permutations of the work, and happy for the income, because he thought that neither one impeded what he calls a “full reckoning” with the electronic form of the original release. He notes he would not have agreed with a simultaneous release of the app and paper versions, because doing so would forestall a full engagement with the app on its own terms. Horowitz, interview with the author, 29 May 2014. Chapter 5: How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love 1. Writers and others in the publishing business have commented to me that second novels are even harder to publish than first novels if a first novel has not been exceptionally successful, since second-time authors have neither the appeal of newness nor the power of an established name behind them. 2. Author interview, “Jonathan Safran Foer on Everything Is Illuminated,” HarperCollins Publishers, harpercollins.com. Web. Accessed 8 March 2012. 3. Brooke Allen, “Review of Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2002, 139–42. Print. 4. Max Watman, “Guileless Games,” New Criterion 20:9 (May 2002): 66–71; Book Review Digest Plus (H. W. Wilson). Web. Accessed 7 March 2012. 5. Siddhartha Deb, “Review of Everything Is Illuminated,” New Statesman 131:4594 (1 July 2002): 55. 6. Janet Maslin, “Searching for Grandfather and a Mysterious Shtetl,” New York Times, 22 April 2002, E6. Academic OneFile. Web. Accessed 7 March 2012.

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7. Mendelsohn, “Boy of Wonders,” New York (22 April 2002). Nymag.com. Web. Accessed 7 March 2012. 8. Here I am guided by an understanding of the literary field as Pierre Bourdieu and scholars inspired by his version of literary sociology have described it. 9. Gordon Houser, in the Christian Century, registers more accurately the novel’s relationship to Holocaust literature; he opens his review with the claim that “Holocaust literature is an attempt to tell a tale that is impossible to tell.” Mentioning the various forms of Holocaust narrative—memoir, history, and novels—he concludes by suggesting that Foer’s innovation, appropriate to his generation, is humor. “Because the history of his ancestors has been destroyed except for the one photograph, Jonathan must manufacture memory through imagination. As he has his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother say, ‘If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world.’ . . . Foer is trying to make some kind of sense out of a story that makes no sense. . . . And because ‘there is no God’ for the majority of these characters, all that’s left is imagination, creating love or truth however one can.” Christian Century 119:23 (6–19 November 2002): 44; Book Review Digest Plus (H. W. Wilson). Web. Accessed 7 March 2012. 10. Keith Gessen, “Horror Tour,” New York Review of Books, 22 September 2005. Nybooks .com. Web. Accessed 7 March 2012. 11. Finding one’s “voice” as a writer and making sure that voice is distinctive is a primary goal of the university-based writing programs that underpin the cultural field in which Foer produces his novels and in which Foer in fact wrote the first draft of his novel (as his senior fiction project at Princeton). See McGurl, Program Era. 12. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (New York: Houghton, 2002) 260. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 13. Gessen, in his critique of the novel, draws attention to the oddness of this arrangement and to the fresher subject Foer passes up in favor of the weightier subject of the Holocaust: “In this first novel, Foer depicts the strange and difficult friendship of a talented, sentimental post-Soviet youth and his privileged American contemporary. For 50 years the West had beamed images of its wonderful life to the Communist countries—and now the residents of these countries were seeing that capitalism wasn’t all fancy houses and trips to the drive-in. Here was something new in the world, and Foer had the acumen to notice it. At the same time he clearly felt that this was not enough. Alex and Jonathan spend a week together and never meet again; instead they write each other letters about the Holocaust.”

Notes to Chapter 5 and 6

14. I am indebted to Mark Christian Thompson for pointing out the Günter Grass reference. 15. This particular scene is featured in glowing terms in Maslin’s review. She writes, “Early in ‘Everything Is Illuminated,’ Mr. Foer describes the act of remembering as a kind of prayer. That is what it becomes here, for all the book’s wild flights of fancy and its irresistible humor. By the time it reaches a devastating finale, it has summoned a deep gravitas that has as much to do with Trachimbrod’s obliviousness as with its fate. ‘They waited to die, and we cannot blame them,’ Mr. Foer writes, ‘because we would do the same, and we do do the same.’” 16. “My fears when I sit down to write are not that I will over-step my bounds or that I will be insensitive with material; it’s that I won’t try to do something that is significant enough to justify spending hours and hours alone in a room. I’m afraid of doing something that isn’t important, that isn’t necessary” (Bookseller interview, May 2005). Foer’s second novel, in keeping with this desire for the big subject, is a 9/11 story, also featuring a boy’s quest for a lost family history. 17. Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” New Yorker, 30 September 2002. On the term “postmodernism” as it applies to contemporary literature, see my “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” ALH 20:1–2 (2008): 410–19. 18. Jacobson interview with Foer for Princeton Alumni Weekly. 19. Regina Tan, “Recent Grad’s First Novel Attracts Attention,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin, Princeton University, 21 May 2001. Web. Accessed 7 June 2011. 20. Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, by Louis Jacobson, “Debut Novelist Creates Literary Stir,” Princeton Alumni Weekly Web Exclusive, Princeton University, 15 May 2002. Web. Accessed 7 June 2011. 21. Ibid. 22. Bendicte Page, “Throwing Non-Existent Pebbles,” Bookseller, 16 March 2005, n.p. Web. Accessed 7 June 2011. 23. I am referring here to Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality; and Sianne Ngai’s essay “Merely Interesting,” Critical Inquiry 34:4 (Summer 2008): 777–817. Of course there are many other examples one could note. Chapter 6: On Not Reading DFW 1. D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (New York: Viking, 2012), 232–33. 2. David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair (New York: Norton, 1996), 331.

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3. The profusion of specialization is an obvious feature of academic humanities in the last three decades or so. The call for exponentially broader views of history and culture is more recent. An incomplete inventory of this development in literary studies would include Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (2004), Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2007), and the broad embrace of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of the Anthropocene in cross-disciplinary humanistic study of the environment (exemplified by his essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35:2, 2009). Scholarly ambivalence about abstraction away from the human person is already entering into this body of work: see Mark Greif ’s intellectual history of “the crisis of man” as a discourse in mid-twentieth-century American culture, and his call, in the conclusion to the book, simply to stop that line of thinking as it becomes reincarnated in more recent formulations of the topic. See Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 4. Matthew Wilkens, “Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers,” Post45 Contemporaries, Post45.org. Web. Accessed 29 June 2015. 5. I argued, for example, in 2008 that historicism was “the water we all swim in” and that the founding of the Post45 collective in 2006 indicated the transformation of “the contemporary” into something that could be studied as “history.” (One would want to add to this fieldmaking time line the appearance of ASAP—the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present—which was hatched in 2005 and launched publically in 2007.) See my “On the Field Formerly Known as the Contemporary,” ALH (20, 1–2), 2008: 410–19. The historicism of the field now seems like a question and not a given. 6. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), 10. ProQuest ebrary. Web. Accessed 29 December 2014. 7. Felski, Uses of Literature, 20. 8. For the details I mention here and below, see Max’s account of Wallace’s relationships with women after his rise as a celebrity author. Max, Every Love Story, 232–33. 9. See Max’s account of the aftermath of the Infinite Jest launch party, for example. Max, Every Love Story, 222, 224. 10. Except as noted otherwise, all quotations in this paragraph are from Max, Every Love Story, 233. 11. Max, Every Love Story, 248, 252.

Notes to Chapter 6

12. Ibid., 215. 13. Wallace, letter to Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1995, quoted in Max, Every Love Story, 203. 14. Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair, 331. 15. Patrick Arden, interview with David Foster Wallace, “David Foster Wallace Warms Up,” Book Magazine, 1999. Reprinted in Patrickarden.com. Web. Accessed 12 March 2015. 16. Laura Miller, interview with David Foster Wallace, Salon.com, 9 March 1996. Web. Accessed 12 March 2015. 17. Arden, “David Foster Wallace Warms Up.” 18. Dave Eggers, Introduction, in David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Abacus, 2006). Reprinted as “Infinite Jest: Dave Eggers on David Foster Wallace,” Theartsdesk.com, 8 April 2013. Web. Accessed 1 July 2015. 19. “America in 2010: Everyone’s Hooked on Something,” Infinite Jest, reviewed by Dave Eggers. Reprinted as “Dave Eggers’ Negative Review of Infinite Jest from 1996,” Electriccereal. com, 25 April 2014. Web. Accessed 1 July 2015. My thanks to Todd Gilman for helping me to recover this review. 20. This is a version of the reason that John McGowan, a distinguished critic and teacher of literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives for forcing himself to read the novel. In his post, McGowan describes dutifully reading the novel in order to direct a senior essay, a time-consuming act that prompts a reflection on the derivative nature of the novel’s form, its disregard for audience, and other flaws in the work. McGowan concludes with a request to DFW fans to explain what they see in it. “I felt more than a little ripped off at the end,” he reports. See John McGowan, “What Am I Missing? Infinite Jest and Its Cult Following,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, n.d. [December 2013]. Web. Accessed 1 July 2015. David Andrew Trow posts a reply, “Missing the Point Is Part of It: An Apologia for Infinite Jest,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, n.d. [3 March 2014]. Web. Accessed 1 July 2015. 21. Joyce famously said in an interview with Max Eastman for Harper’s Magazine in 1931, “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” Eastman raises the question of whether we should believe Joyce is writing for the reader’s pleasure, as he proclaims to Eastman that he is. Eastman is skeptical of the work after Ulysses in this regard. See Max Eastman, The Literary Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s

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Sons, 1931), 97–102, excerpted in James Joyce, 1928–1941, vol. 2, ed. Robert H. Deming (New York: Routledge, 1970; reprinted 1997); quote on 417. 22. Wallace, quoted in Max, Every Love Story, 199. After editing and font-fiddling, the book was published at 1,079 pages. In his charming and thoughtful meditation on literary overproduction, So Many Books, the Mexican poet and critic Gabriel Zaid likens publishing to a microphone set up in the public square. In a world where so many come forward to the microphone, he suggests, an especially long book does betray an arrogance problem: it suggests that this voice should hold the microphone much, much longer than most others. See Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, trans. Natasha Wimmer (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2003). 23. Max, Every Love Story, 74. 24. Ibid., 75. 25. Ibid., 74. 26. For a comparable but far more developed example of how this worked for J. D. Salinger in the 1960s, see Richard Ohmann’s analysis of the relationship between the books chosen for review by the New York Times Book Review and the publishers advertising in their pages. Ohmann, The Politics of Letters (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). 27. Max, Every Love Story, 216. 28. Jonathan Mahler, “Toe-to-Toe with a Giant,” New York Times, 2 June 2014, B1, 4. 29. “Michael Pietsch at a Glance,” a sidebar to Mahler’s article, gives telling stats (“Age: 56, Education: Harvard”), a summary of his publishing career, and a list of his “Notable Books and Authors.” The latter begins with Infinite Jest, and goes on to include The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Life by Keith Richards, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and the authors Michael Connelly and James Patterson. The masculine cultural ethos of the professional and literary profile, and of the fight with Amazon, is unmistakable. 30. Evan Kindley, communication with the author, 9 August 2013. Quoted with permission.

Index

The Actual (Bellow), 63 Adrian, Chris, 109 Advanced Marketing Services (AMS), 72–73 Affect studies, 143 Alexie, Sherman, 9 Allen, Brooke, 121–22, 124 Amazon, 159 AMS. See Advanced Marketing Services Amsden, David, 48 App developers, 115–16, 117. See also Quinn, Russell Apps. See The Silent History; Small Chair app The Art of McSweeney’s, 11–12, 14–15, 20, 20 (fig.), 21 The Atlantic, 50, 53–54, 172–73n6 Auster, Paul, City of Glass, 150, 151 Austerlitz (Sebald), 125 Authenticity, 6–7 Barth, John, 141 Barton, Emily, 85 Bass, Jordan, 49 Bauer, Amelia, 88 Baum, Gary, 50 Bayard, Pierre, 162 Beats, 76, 77, 78

The Believer, 31, 43, 52, 69, 176n7 Bellow, Saul, 6, 63–64; The Actual, 63 Bertelsmann, 73, 87 The Better of McSweeney’s, 47, 57 Big-data literary study, 8, 14, 94, 111–12, 116–17, 174n13 Blake, Gillian, 66 Bloom, Harold, 15 Book clubs, 58 Book marketing, 60–62, 65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 158–59 Books: commonplace, 90–91, 92; distribution, 72–74, 87–88, 89; limited editions, 89–90; markets, 17, 60–61; physical, 11–12, 35, 75–76, 89–90, 118. See also Ebooks; Memoirs; Novels; Publishers Bowles, Paul, The Sheltering Sky, 58 Bowl of Cherries (Kaufman), 51 Brandon, John, Citrus Country, 69, 89 Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 165 Burn, Gordon, 52 Capitalism: as context of novels, 115–16, 117–18; as context of publishing, 73; innovation in, 169–70. See also Markets

189

190

Index

Carter, Mary, 158 Carve, 172n6 Carver, Raymond, 52 Celebrities: Eggers as, 7, 22, 50; influence, 26; sexual encounters, 141–42, 146; writers, 6, 7, 12, 14, 120. See also Wallace, David Foster Celebrity culture, 50 Chabon, Michael, 9 Changing Places (Lodge), 162 Cheever, John, 62 Chinski, Eric, 134 City Lights, 13 City of Glass (Auster), 150, 151 Clegg, River, 36 Commonplace books, 90–91, 92 Computers. See Technology Contemporary literature: ephemera, 17, 169–70; scholarship on, 14, 15–16, 156, 163–64, 169–70, 186n5 A Convergence of Birds (Foer), 136–37 Cornell, Joseph, 136, 137, 138 The Corrections (Franzen), 68, 134 Counterpoint Press, 13, 74 Creative writing classes and programs: at Arizona, 158; demand for, 9; failures, 44–45; genders of students, 54; goals, 184n11; influence, 41; influence of Eggers, 52–53; at Princeton, 136–37; social networks, 113, 136; teachers, 43, 176n5 Crichton, Michael, 9

Cultural capital, 10, 42–43, 57–58, 79, 81–82, 84 The Dangerous Book for Boys, 63 Darnton, Robert, 90–91 Davidson, Michael, 64 Deb, Siddhartha, 122 Deng, Valentino Achak, 51 Derby, Matthew, The Silent History, 95, 103, 107, 115 Diaz, Junot, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 79–81 Digital technology. See Apps; Technology; Web sites Distributors, 72–74, 87, 89 DIY ethic, 6–7, 21, 26, 28 Doyle, Roddy, 10–11, 12 Eastman, Max, 187n21 Ebooks: novels in virtual form, 71–72, 73–77, 87, 89, 91–92; Small Chair app, 27–31, 34, 71, 88–89 Education, McSweeney’s projects, 43, 47. See also Creative writing classes and programs; Schools Eggers, Dave: Bellow’s influence on, 64; book design work, 21; on books published, 165; cultural capital, 57–58; as editor, 9, 19, 48–49, 58, 69, 155; fame, 7, 22, 50; family members, 50, 174n2; fundraising events, 5; How the Water Feels to the Fishes, 55–56, 57; Infinite Jest introduction, 152–54, 155; Infinite Jest

Index

review, 154, 155; influence, 52; leadership of McSweeney’s, 1, 2, 6, 36–37; Might zine, 21, 50–51, 52, 53; on physical books, 11, 35; social networks, 26, 35, 47–48, 50–51, 57; Teachers Have It Easy, 47; What is the What, 22, 51, 57, 58, 176n2; Wild Things, 24–25, 64; writing process, 48; You Shall Know Our Velocity, 43–44, 48; Zeitoun, 22. See also A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; McSweeney’s Ehrenreich, Barbara, 13 Ehrenreich, Ben, 13 Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 163–64, 165–66 English, James, 38 Esquire, 63 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer): acknowledgments, 134; cosmic spectacle of loving, 119–20, 138–39; innovations, 123–24, 126–27, 129–30, 133–34, 184n9; main character’s name, 135; on memory, 125–26, 127, 185n14; on pain, 133; plot, 120–21, 125–33; postmodernism, 131–32; revenge theme, 132–33; reviews, 121–23, 124–25, 184n9, 184n12, 185n14; success, 119, 120 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer), 124–25, 185n15 Fame. See Celebrities Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 118 Felman, Shoshana, 128 Felski, Rita, 143–44 Fiction. See Novels

Foer, Jonathan Safran: A Convergence of Birds, 136–37; on Cornell, 137, 138; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 124–25, 185n15; on fiction, 135–36; on Holocaust representation, 121; love for attention, 137–39; at Princeton, 120, 136–37; senior fiction thesis, 120; voice, 125; on writing, 185n15. See also Everything Is Illuminated Forman, Richard, 85 Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections, 68, 134; on social realist novel, 135 Fried, Michael, 138 Fromtling, Steve, McSweeney’s mural, 3, 32, 33 (fig.) Gaddis, William, 77–78 Gaiman, Neil, 10 Games, alternate reality, 2 Gender: book marketing and, 60–62, 65, 67, 68; in McSweeney’s journal, 16–17, 53–54, 63–65; of readers, 53, 56; of writers, 53–54, 64–65, 68, 153–54, 178n21. See also Men; Women Geocaching, 108–9 Gerasimowiez, Sonny, 26 Gessen, Keith: All the Sad Young Literary Men, 64; “Dave Eggers, Teen Idol, or The Education of Gary Baum,” 50; reviews, 124–25, 184n12 Ghosh, Amitav, 180n11 Ginsberg, Allen, 78

191

192

Index

Glass, Loren, 7 Glass, Philip, 9 Goldstone, Andrew, 16, 116–17, 174n13 GPS (Global Positioning System): devices, 94, 110; features of The Silent History, 94, 103, 106–8, 112 Grass, Gunter, The Tin Drum, 130 The Great Gatsby (film), 81 Greif, Mark, 21 Gross, Terry, 22 Grossman, Lev, 85 Grove/Atlantic, 72, 76 Hachette Book Group, 159 Hamilton, Caroline, 43–44, 176n3 Happy Talk (Melo), 75–76, 77, 89 Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (Manguso), 55–56, 57–58, 178n27 Hardy, Thomas, 108 Harms, Juliana, 146 Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, 170 Harvard University, Adams House, 85 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers): “Acknowledgments,” 42–43; advance, 69; characters, 44–46, 49, 51, 174nn2–3; readers, 24, 42–43, 46–47, 176n2; tone, 1 Historicism, 94, 143–44, 186n5. See also New Historicism Hodges, Jim, 90 Hodgman, John, 87

Holocaust stories: American, 123–24; generational distance, 121, 124, 125, 129; imagination and, 121, 122, 129, 184n9; Maus (Spiegelman), 123, 124, 125, 127, 130; in novels, 121, 139, 184n9; revenge theme, 132–33; witnesses, 128–29. See also Everything Is Illuminated Holt, 66, 69 Homes, A. M., 9 Horowitz, Eli: Clock without a Face, 108–9, 181n8; as editor, 13, 31–32, 49, 60, 61, 62, 65, 87; mural of, 3, 32, 33 (fig.); Quinn and, 30, 34, 35; restlessness, 32–34. See also The Silent History Houser, Gordon, 184n9 Howe, Irving, 22 How the Water Feels to the Fishes (Eggers), 55–56, 57 Humanities, academic, 142, 143–44, 185–86n3 Illinois State University, 144 “I’m Here” (Jonze), 24–25 Independent publishers, 7, 72–74, 87–88, 89. See also McSweeney’s Infinite Jest (Wallace): book tour, 141–42, 147; introduction by Eggers, 152–54, 155; length, 151–52, 157, 188n22; marketing, 158–59; reading, 147–48, 152–54; reasons to read, 156–57, 160–61, 187n20; refusing to read, 156, 159–60; reviews, 151, 154, 158–59

Index

Innovation: in fiction, 119, 120, 123–24, 126–27, 129–30, 133–34, 184n9; new writers, 6, 7; technological, 79, 92; as value in itself, 169 Internet. See Web sites iPhones, 28, 29–31. See also Apps; GPS Jackson, Lawrence, 17 Jacobson, Louis, 135 Jamison, Leslie, 156, 162 Jews. See Holocaust stories Jobs, Steve, 31 Johnson, Denis, 32 Jonze, Spike: “I’m Here,” 24–25; There Are Many of Us, 24–27, 25 (fig.), 26 (fig.); Wild Things, 24–25, 64 Jørgensen, Casper Hübertz, 28–29 Joyce, James, 15, 157, 187n21 Julavits, Heidi, 31, 52–53, 69, 176n7 July, Miranda, 87 Kakutani, Michiko, 151–52 Karr, Mary, 141, 145 Kaufman, Millard, Bowl of Cherries, 51 Kerouac, Jack: Dharma Bums, 32–34; letters, 78 Kramer, David, 25–26 Krefman, Adam, 37–38 Lahire, Bernard, 115 LA Review of Books, 159–60 Latour, Bruno, 4–5, 27, 31 Laub, Dori, 128

Leonard, Elmore, 89 Lindstrom, Martin, 30 Literary criticism: academic, 142, 155–56, 158, 161; affect studies, 143; big-data approach, 8, 14, 94, 111–12, 116–17, 174n13; of contemporary works, 14, 15–16, 156, 163–64, 169–70, 186n5; historicism, 94, 143–44, 186n5; New Historicism, 94–95, 111; selecting works to read, 162–67 Literary culture, 6–7, 9, 13–14, 15–16, 38, 79 Literary fiction. See Novels Literary institutions, 10, 69, 170 Literary journals: cultural capital, 10; gender of writers, 64–65; influence, 7–9, 52; modernist, 7–8, 171–72n3; small, 7–9, 16, 36–37, 52; social networks, 7–9; submissions from subscribers, 8–9, 172–73n6. See also McSweeney’s journal Little, Brown, 158–59 Liu, Alan, 85, 169 Lodge, David, Changing Places, 162 “Making of ” stories, 21–22, 23, 24–27, 31 Manguso, Sarah, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, 55–56, 57–58, 178n27 Markets: for books, 17, 60–61; cultural production, 99; for literary fiction, 9, 119–20, 134–35, 138; for technology workers, 115–16, 117–18. See also Book marketing; Capitalism Marshall, Kate, 118, 182–83n18 Maslin, Janet, 122, 185n14

193

194

Index

Matsumiya, Aska, 26, 27 Maus (Spiegelman), 123, 124, 125, 127, 130 Max, D. T., Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 141, 144–46, 147–48, 152, 157–59 McGowan, John, 187n20 McGurl, Mark, 41, 53, 161, 175–76n1, 176n5 McSweeney’s: archive, 1, 87, 170; books, 6, 13, 31, 43, 51, 55–62, 65, 68, 69, 88–89, 165; as cultural institution, 41–42, 48; distributors, 72, 87, 89; editorial and production processes, 19–21, 31; educational projects, 43, 47; Eggers’s leadership, 1, 2, 6, 36–37; fundraising, 5, 87–88; growth, 31, 36; influence, 52–53; mission and vision, 11, 36–37; mural, 3, 32, 33 (fig.); offices, 1, 35; social network, 2–3, 16–17, 35, 39, 57, 87– 88; staff members, 12, 21, 31–32, 35, 36–38, 52; supporters, 5–6; volunteers, 5, 6, 12; web sites, 35–36, 43, 55–56, 64, 87–88. See also Eggers, Dave; Horowitz, Eli McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 35–36, 43, 55–56, 64 McSweeney’s journal: The Art of McSweeney’s, 11–12, 14–15, 20, 20 (fig.), 21; costs of production, 5, 19–21; criticism of, 50; design, 11, 19; editorial and production processes, 11, 19–21, 23–24, 49; editors, 32, 48–49; founding, 9, 19; human connections, 47; influence, 13; issue 1, 63–64, 155; issue 5, 23, 155; issue 11, 23, 24; issue 12, 5–6, 10, 12–15; issue 33, San Francisco Panorama, 20, 21, 22–23;

issue 39, 89; letters, 47, 48; masculinity, 16–17, 53–54, 63–65; media shift and, 71; prices, 21; printer in Iceland, 19–20; quarterly schedule, 38; readers, 5, 29, 37, 38, 116; Small Chair app, 27–31, 34, 71, 88–89; submission guidelines, 9, 19, 172–73n6; submissions as social network, 23, 24 (fig.); subscription cards, 1, 2, 47, 170; subscriptions, 38; tone, 1, 11, 49–50; writers published, 2–3, 6, 9–11, 12–15, 16–17, 54, 55, 173–74n11 Melo, Richard, Happy Talk, 75–76, 77, 89 Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 162–63 Memoirs, 68, 156. See also A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Holocaust stories; Revolution Men: homosociality, 64; writers, 16–17, 53–54, 64, 68, 153–54. See also Gender Mendelsohn, Daniel, 122–23 Metafiction, 110–11, 141 Middlebury College, Bread Loaf School of English, 165 Middlemarch (Eliot), 163–64, 165–66 Might zine, 21, 50–51, 52, 53 Minor Robberies (Unferth), 55–57, 60, 68, 178n27 Misogyny, of Wallace, 147, 149, 150, 151–52, 159–61 Modernism: literary, 54, 68, 119, 123, 137, 157; literary journals, 7–8; Poundian, 127–28, 129; scholarship on, 15, 171–72n3

Index

Moffett, Kevin, The Silent History, 95, 103, 107, 115 Monks, Christopher, 64 Moody, Rick, 11, 52 Moretti, Franco, 14, 17, 162 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 176n5 n+1, 21, 36, 50, 64 Narcissism, 146–47, 148, 149–50 Narrative, 172–73n6 Nash, Richard, 74–75, 76–77, 78, 79–82, 84–85, 87, 92. See also Red Lemonade; Small Demons Networks. See Social networks New Historicism, 94–95, 111 New Yorker, 9–10, 13, 53–54 Ngai, Sianne, 138 NOON, 55 Norwood Club, 84 Novels: addiction theme, 156; avant-garde, 134, 135; canonicity, 15, 16–17, 157, 159, 160–61; cultural value, 84, 156–57, 162; feeling in, 134–36; first, 122, 124–25; increased publication, 14, 28, 142–43, 162, 164–65, 188n22; markets for literary fiction, 9, 119–20, 134–35, 138; online concordances, 79–84, 90; reading, 71–72; second, 183n1; social networks and, 76–77, 112–13, 116; social realist, 134, 135; in virtual media, 35, 71–72, 73–77, 87, 89, 91–92, 93–94. See also Books Novelty. See Innovation

Oates, Joyce Carol, 136, 137 Ohmann, Richard, 152, 154 One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box, 55–58 Ozick, Cynthia, 15 Pantheon, 73 Park, Ed, 31 PGW. See Publishers Group West Pietsch, Michael, 157, 159, 188n29 Pinterest, 91, 180n21 Plascencia, Salvador, The People of Paper, 13, 31 Pleiades, 172n6 Ploughshares, 8–9, 172n6 Poetry magazine, 7, 8 Politics, 39 Postmodernism, 122, 123, 131–32, 134, 135 Pound, Ezra, 127–28 Princeton Alumni Weekly, 135, 136, 137 Princeton University, 120, 135, 136–37 Prosumers, 82, 180n14 Publishers: independent, 7, 72–74, 87–88, 89; large, 73; small, 7, 11, 87; social networks, 2–3, 4, 7–9; technology, 11; workers, 3–4. See also Book marketing; McSweeney’s Publishers Group West (PGW), 72–74, 87, 89 Punk. See DIY ethic Puzzle books, 108–9 Quest narratives, 58, 60–62

195

196

Index

Quinn, Russell, 27–31, 34–35, 36–37, 39. See also The Silent History; Small Chair app Radway, Janice, 38–39, 175n16 Random House, 73 Readers: amateur, 5, 117; book clubs, 58; choices of books, 143, 162–67; comments on online novels, 75–76, 77; commonplace books, 90–91, 92; data collected about, 111–12, 116–17; feelings, 143; genders, 53, 56; of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 42–43, 46–47; of McSweeney’s journal, 5, 29, 37, 38, 116; of memoirs, 68; physical locations, 93, 103, 106–9, 111; relations with writers, 109–10, 142, 147–50, 187n21; social networks, 9, 76–77; students as, 42–43, 45, 46; Wallace’s relationship with, 141–42, 147–50, 154, 157; women, 58, 68; writers as, 9 Reading: critical, 45, 46; data collected about, 111–12; diffusive effects, 164, 166– 67; New Historicist modes, 94–95, 111; in new media, 71–72, 90, 91–92, 93–94; as private act, 9; sociological mode, 94, 113–14, 120. See also Literary criticism Recovery culture, 156 Red Lemonade: community, 74–75, 77, 82; current status, 170; Cursor software sales, 78, 79; novels, 75–77, 89; physical book sales, 89–90 Religion, 150–51

Revolution (Unferth), 65–68, 69 Roger’s Version (Updike), 150–51 Roth, Philip, 22 Salinger, J. D., 6 San Francisco Chronicle, 154 Saunders, George, 10, 62, 103 Sayles, John, A Moment in the Sun, 26 Schiffrin, André, 73 School of life, 41, 53, 62, 69 Schools: critiques, 44–45, 47, 48, 176n5; culture of, 41; literary, 41; literature classes, 9, 42, 45. See also Creative writing classes and programs; Students Science, lab culture, 4–5, 27, 31 Scott, A. O., 161 Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz, 125 The Secret Language of Sleep (Thomas and Bauer), 88 Sendak, Maurice, Where the Wild Things Are, 64 The Sheltering Sky (Bowles), 58 Sherman, Rachel, 15 The Silent History: algorithm, 101–2; collaborators, 95, 98, 103, 106, 112, 113–16, 181n2; data collected, 111–12, 116, 181–82n12; design, 97 (fig.), 101–2, 116; field reports, 103, 104 (fig.), 105 (fig.), 106–7, 109–10, 112–13, 115; film rights, 183n19; GPS features, 94, 103, 106–8, 112; interactive features, 103, 106–8, 109–10; introductory material, 98, 102–3, 108;

Index

maps, 96 (fig.), 97 (fig.), 113, 114 (fig.); metafictional experience, 110–11; narrative, 94, 95, 98–101, 110, 181n2; paper book, 118, 183n19; reading, 103, 106–8, 181–82n12; release, 93, 95, 108, 109; social network, 112–13, 116; testimonials, 96 (fig.), 98, 108, 181n2; trailer, 99, 100 (fig.) Small Chair app, 27–31, 34, 71, 88–89 Small Demons: business model, 81–82, 84, 85–87, 89; closing, 170; concordances, 79–84, 90; contributors, 82–84, 83 (fig.), 85; homepage, 80 (fig.); promotional video, 86 (fig.); Storyboard feature, 91 Small publishers. See Publishers Smartphones. See Apps; GPS; iPhones Smith, Meryl, 26 Smith, Zadie, 10 Snyder, Gary, 32–34 Social networks: activation, 4, 5; artistic production and, 27; in contemporary publishing, 2–3, 4, 7–9; of creative writing programs, 113, 136; of Eggers, 26, 35, 47–48, 50–51, 57; of McSweeney’s, 2–3, 16–17, 35, 39, 57, 87–88; McSweeney’s submissions and, 23, 24 (fig.); of Nash, 84–85; novels and, 76–77, 112–13, 116; online, 87–88; of readers, 9, 76–77; research on, 4–5; of technology workers, 35; of writers, 136; of youth, 50–51 Soft Skull Press, 72, 74, 75 South Sudan, 51

Spiegelman, Art, Maus, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130 Spoiled Milk, 29, 34 Stanford University, 117 Students: critical and uncritical reading, 45, 46; as readers, 42–43; of Wallace, 144, 146. See also Creative writing classes and programs; Schools Surveillance, 111–12 Syracuse University, 54, 62 Systems theory, 53 Tan, Regina, 135 Teachers Have It Easy (Eggers), 47 Technology: big-data literary study, 8, 14, 94, 111–12, 116–17, 174n13; GPS, 94, 103, 106–8, 110, 112; iPhones, 28, 29–31; publishing, 11; startups, 78–79. See also Apps; Web sites Technology workers: demand and supply, 115–16, 117–18; literature app developers, 115–16, 117; social networks, 35; startups, 78–79; web designers, 29 There Are Many of Us (Jonze), 24–27, 25 (fig.), 26 (fig.) They Might Be Giants, 9 Thomas, Evany, 88 Tillman, Lynne, 77, 89–90 Time, 34, 85 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. See McSweeney’s journal Trauma theory, 128, 129

197

198

Index

Unferth, Deb Olin: career, 53, 54–55, 68, 69; Minor Robberies, 55–57, 60, 68, 178n27; Revolution, 65–68, 69; Vacation, 58–62, 65, 67, 68, 179n30 Universities. See Creative writing classes and programs; Students University of Arizona, 158 University of East Anglia, 113 University of Florida, 113 University of Texas, Austin, Harry Ransom Center, 170 Updike, John, Roger’s Version, 150–51 Vacation (Unferth), 58–62, 65, 67, 68, 179n30 Venture capital, 78–79 VIDA, 53–54, 178n21 Vida, Vendela, 31 Virtual media. See Small Chair app; Web sites Walker Art Center, 88 Wallace, David Foster: AA groups, 144–45; biography, 141, 144–46, 147–48, 152, 157–59; book tours, 141–42, 147; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 149, 151, 152; The Broom of the System, 148; education, 157–58; family, 145, 157; “Girl with Curious Hair,” 148; Kenyon College graduation speech, 147, 163; manic depression, 145, 146; misogyny, 147, 149, 150, 151–52, 159–61; narcissism, 147, 148, 149–50; “The Panic of Influence,” 161; questions

addressed, 149–50; refusing to read, 16, 149–50, 152, 156, 159–63; relationships with women, 141–42, 144–47, 148, 150, 152, 159–60; relationship with readers, 141–42, 147–50, 154, 157; reputation, 147, 152–61; sexual encounters, 141–42, 144–47; students, 144, 146; study of, 152, 155–57, 159–62; substance abuse, 145, 146; “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” 141, 147, 148; works published in McSweeney’s, 9, 155. See also Infinite Jest Ware, Chris, 87 Warner, Andy, McSweeney’s mural, 3, 32, 33 (fig.) Warner, Michael, 46, 176n4 Watman, Max, 122 Web 2.0, 94 Web sites: artistic projects, 36; commonplaces, 91, 92; designers, 29; McSweeney’s, 35–36, 43, 55–56, 64, 87–88; novels in virtual form, 35, 71–72, 73–77, 87, 89, 91–92; Pinterest, 91, 180n21; Quinn’s projects, 36; Red Lemonade, 74–77, 78, 79, 82, 89–90, 170; reputation management, 92; startups, 78–79 Weschler, Lawrence, 11 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (Wallace), 141, 147, 148 What is the What (Eggers), 22, 51, 57, 58, 176n2 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 64 Whitehead, Colson, 85

Index

Wholphin, 31, 43 Wild Things (Eggers), 64 Wild Things (Jonze film), 24–25, 64 Wilkens, Matthew, 28, 162 Williams, Diane, 55 Winfrey, Oprah, 22, 68 Winton, Charlie, 72 Wired, 21, 93 Witnesses, 128–29 Women: book clubs, 58; misogyny, 147, 149, 150, 151–52, 159–61; readers, 68; reviewers, 53–54; Wallace’s relationships with, 141–42, 144–47, 148, 150, 152, 159–60; writers, 6, 53–54, 57–58, 61–62, 64, 178n21. See also Gender Woods, Tiger, 146 Woolf, Virginia, 15; A Room of One’s Own, 61 Wooster Group, 85 Writers: African American, 17; celebrities, 6, 7, 12, 14, 120; genders, 53–54, 64–65, 68, 153–54, 178n21; genius, 153–54, 157; marketing efforts, 75, 77; personal lives, 146; as readers, 9; relations with readers,

109–10, 142, 147–50, 187n21; reviewers, 53–54; social networks, 2–3, 4, 7–9, 136; subsistence, 5, 6, 7, 12–14, 113–15, 117; successful, 119–20; voice, 184n11; women, 6, 53–54, 57–58, 61–62, 64, 178n21. See also individual writers Writing workshops. See Creative writing classes and programs Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 148 Yale Daily News, 36 Yale University, Fortunoff archive, 128–29 Ying, Chris, 37–38, 93 Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC. See The Silent History Young, Kevin, 85 You Shall Know Our Velocity (Eggers), 43–44, 48 Youth, social networks, 50–51 Zaid, Gabriel, 188n22 Zeitoun (Eggers), 22 Zine culture, 21, 38–39, 175n16

199

J.D. Connor, The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America Loren Glass, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of the Twenty-First Century Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures