While literary backchannels have always shared negative book reviews, dreaded one-star Goodreads reviews now keep authors up at night, adding to that feeling that everyone can witness (and contribute to) your public failure. Plus, no one likes being the center of a Twitter pile-on, even when it might be ultimately deserved. We’re all waiting for someone to tell us we’ve written something that failed — and we’re all anxious about how devastating the consequences might be.
Which is why, perhaps, the author Kathleen Hale has become a representative for a worst-case scenario of what can happen when someone writes something that has been deemed “wrong.” But Hale’s story is not just about a singular personal disaster — it also speaks to the nature of criticism today, so-called cancel culture, and the growing power of Goodreads, especially for emerging genre writers.
There are many reasons why the popularity of the personal narrative has displaced that of fiction. Two of them, I think, can be traced to the demise of modernism and the occurrence of the Holocaust, each in its own way having contributed heavily to the developing hunger for “true stories.” So long as modernism, which dominated the arts in Western culture for a century and more, held sway, the novel was revered as the literary genre. But as the twentieth century wore on, the ability of a fictional narrative soaked in the emotional disconnect of an ungrounded voice speaking from the middle of nowhere gradually but steadily lost the power to make readers experience their own lives while reading. The alienated voice in literature became the cliché of the century, and novel writing slowly began to lose its cachet.
“I was texting my husband saying, ‘Justin Bieber is singing to us,’” Ms. Bagozzi said, laughing. “You could’ve knocked me out of my chair.”
The result of the call was Timbiebs, a limited-edition line of doughnut holes in flavors dreamed up by the pop star and Tim Hortons’ in-house chef, which includes chocolate white fudge and birthday cake waffle. They hit restaurants in November.
March 13, 2020. The first words of Jodi Picoult’s novel strike dread, or at least trepidation. Do we really want to relive those disorienting, soul-crushing first days of the shutdown felt around the world?
“Wish You Were Here” doesn’t shy away from the devastation of COVID-19 — but it’s simply the springboard, born of Picoult’s enforced isolation, for a tale of self-discovery.
Generations is confessional: Clifton doesn’t shy away from unflattering memories of her father in a fury over her mother’s shaking “fits.” And it has elements of the bildungsroman, following Clifton as she becomes the first member of her family to go to college (there are those unbelieving repetitions again: “I was soon going away to college,” she writes. “I was going to college”). But above all it belongs to a tradition of American self-writing that’s optimistic in its vision of, and hope for, equality.
“Women in the Picture” mounts a sensitive and probing critique of the motifs, the preordained poses and affectations of the female figure in art. If feminism aspires to render itself obsolete, McCormack’s project too yearns for a future when critiquing such postures — the flayed victims, the temptresses and the sexless “mammies” — will no longer be necessary. For now it is.
Why is it that making sweeping generalizations about people on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or nationality is unacceptable, but stereotyping them based on arbitrarily defined “generations” is totally fine? Millennials (roughly, those born between 1980 and 1995) have been demonized as narcissistic snowflakes who spend so much on avocado toast that they cannot afford to buy property. Baby boomers, meanwhile, are selfish, technophobic sociopaths who have stolen younger generations’ future. And so on. What is the reality behind such stereotypes, and is there any merit at all in seeing the world through a lens that is generational?
In a slim, engaging volume, Edward J. Renehan Jr. chronicles the dark proceedings and argues that the explanation for their current obscurity is itself an interesting story. “Deliberate Evil: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, and the 1830 Murder of a Salem Slave Trader” describes the brutal killing of 82-year-old Joseph White, its influence on writers including Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and the subsequent efforts of the families involved to erase the episode from historical memory.