How Much of Literary History Is a Lie?

If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you may have noticed that I am less than enthusiastic about the state of contemporary publishing. My usual critique runs something like this: there was this good thing, a mass readership of literary fiction, and then it started to dissipate through a combination of inertia and the pusillanimity of the industry. Given the first excuse — i.e. anything halfway decent to watch on television — the (in theory) aspirational middle class readership checked out. Then the industry sold itself out for some very minor profits that drifted, on the whole, to a Shanghai restauranteur, and when the cynical generation had taken early retirement as a consequence of corporate mergers a new earnest generation drove a politicized view of literature that, surprisingly enough, gave them something like the modest profits that the cynical generation had but without ever really stopping to consider whether what they were putting out was good or not.