How We All Became Bernhard Bros

This post is most profitably read as an addendum to Naomi Kanakia’s impressively comprehensive report on the influence of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard on contemporary fiction. Although I have not read all of Bernhard’s books or all of the novels of his most prominent inheritors—as Kanakia did—I’ve long been interested in why Bernhard’s style seems so particularly appealing to contemporary Anglophone writers and readers. I include “readers” here as a reference first of all to myself. I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve read that are written self-consciously in Bernhard’s style, like Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist and Muscle Man. More than enjoying them, I’ve found in them a voice that seems like it is sincerely channeling a significant contemporary mood. Especially during the long 2010s, these novels that were imitating the prose of a European who wrote in a different language and died the same year as the Berlin Wall fell seemed to be echoing the voice in my own head—and doing so more faithfully than the vast majority of other novels published alongside them. Presumably, this resonance is also what recommended Bernhard to the writers in question. But what accounts for it? Kanakia does explore this question in her own post, but there is one further theory I would like to add to hers.