Good-Bye To All That

Susan Dominus has a nice essay in the New York Times about the demise of the writing industry. She refers to an essay by Joan Didion, "Good-bye To All That," a fun read that describes Didion's gradual weariness of the New York fabulous life. Dominus writes that all writers are going to have to say good-bye not only to the cocktail parties and phoniness, but also to earning a living at their trade.

She writes,

 But what is lost, along with a lot of image packaging, is that expansive home for good writing. Philip Roth recently predicted, in The Guardian of London, that in 25 years, the number of people reading novels would be akin to the numbers now reading Latin poetry; it will be a curiosity, certainly not a profit center. This is painful gospel for anyone who reads Philip Roth, or other great writers, the way other people read religious texts — to make sense of the world, to be humbled or inspired by the power of language.

The New York magazine- and book-publishing scene is no Detroit — devastating as they are, the convulsions in the word industry do not exactly seem to be decimating Brooklyn real estate prices, and it is the rare literary essayist left to survive on public assistance. The parallels are more abstract. People will keep making cars, only somewhere else; people will keep making literary culture, just not at the same scale, or in the same hallways, or for a living. In her essay, Ms. Didion said she never really worried about money, sensing that she could always “write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name ‘Debbi Lynn,’ ” for example. Nice work if you can get it, these days.

Ms. Didion tired of the same faces at the same parties, the gossip about book advances, the uneasy courtship of press and publicists, the endless cycle of aspiration and pretense. She eventually learned “that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair,” as she wrote in one defining line. Everyone outgrows the scene eventually, but it was nice to know it was there. And, I would guess, even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that.

Comments

[Jody]

So, we agree with Roth then? I mean, I know of MORE new bookclubs forming, and in my own, we always have more choices than months. I believe that the industry is in crisis, but really? All of us will be relics reading Latin by the time we're 65? I guess I find that a little hard to believe.

(And the audience for mass-market paperbacks seems pretty robust, actually. And the sheer volume of youth and young-adult fiction never ceases to amaze me. When I consider what was available at the local B. Dalton when I was a kid -- I mean, again, I get that the industry is in crisis, but for some sectors, the last 15 years have been a GOLDEN age. Does it really go from the heights to the depths that fast?)

[Doug K]

Joan Didion has a distressing tendency to mistake her own indigestion for the stirrings of Some Rough Beast. 'Goodbye to All That' used to be the title of a memoir about losing hope in the trenches of WW 1. To apply it to a sadness for one's immaculately privileged youth, as Didion does; or to falling off the gravy train, as Susan Dominus does; is bathos defined.

There is an 'expansive home for good writing', and it's where we read and write now. The difference is there's no money in it.

[laura]

good comments. Yeah, totally agree, guys. I can't imagine there was ever a huge market for Philip Roth books. It's always been an elite group who read him. People seem to be reading the same amount as before. The publishing industry has changed a lot since the 1980s, but there was a lot of waste back then. We published too many crappy books.

And, loved your comment, Doug K, about the Internet being the expansive home for good writing. The lack of money is a big problem though. Gotta put food on the table.

[Amy P]

Portnoy's Complaint?

[MH]

I can't imagine there was ever a huge market for Philip Roth books.

We have a home library of with well over a thousand books, not counting Sandra Boyton. My parents had the same. I've never read Roth or Didion or Updike or Vidal or (insert other 'literary' writers). When I was younger, I used to try out of a sense of duty, but now I feel no need to read something I don't enjoy unless I'm being paid for it or gaining crucial information.

[Marya]

People are always predicting the demise of literature. It never seems to happen. It's true that a lot of pap gets published, but when, since we started educating more than the elite, has that not been true?

I can take or leave Roth and was rolling my eyes some months back when various hand-wringers were wondering why he hasn't won the Nobel. But his claim that if it takes you more than two weeks to read a novel, you haven't read it, is surely idiocy. Does that mean all that serialized Dickens and Trollope didn't count?

Damn kids, get off my lawn. Yawn.

[Sarah]

Yeah, Dominus conflates a number of things. Living large at Conde Nast in the 90s did not equal the nurturing of 'serious' literature. It's been a long time since glossies did that, and even in the 50s, Updike was one of a lucky few, making a steady living from New Yorker stories; Nabokov taught for years until Lolita became a best seller. I'm a lot more concerned by the demise of newsrooms, by how thin local papers have become.

I have to smile at Dominus’ “‘Debbie Lynn’” quote, though. The rest of Didion’s sentence is: “I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.” Didion isn’t exactly analyzing employment prospects for mid-1960s writers. Underneath her gorgeous syntax she over-shares and self-indulges just as bloggers get pilloried for doing now...