What has Amazon done to the novel?

An easy answer (at least for those of us who have followed self-publishing circles) might be to bring up the “tsunami of crap” argument that was really popular in first half of the 2010s. But with Hugh Howey’s Wool, E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and much more, is that true?

What does Amazon have to do with it anyway?

The question of “what happened to the novel” is what Mark McGurl tries to answer in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. The writing style may be complex, but after following McGurl through various genres, including very niche erotica topics like ADBL (you may not want to google that), my understanding of his conclusions are:

1. Literary fiction is just one of the many genres of fiction available, rather than being some mysterious thing that is set apart
2. The reader has become consumer and the author a producer of services, designed to make the reader happy or perform some other therapeutic function through the story
3. There is now a surplus of fiction and we see the novel becoming commodified

Or as McGurl memorably puts it:

“Your reader, meanwhile, is not so much reading a novel as taking a hit of a narrative drug of a kind that works for them but will soon wear off.”

But though McGurl writes with mostly sympathy for the various genres and his writing style is forceful and difficult enough to sound convincing at first glance, the more I think about his ideas, the more questions I have. It’s not just about the small things, though Paul Sehgal’s review in the New Yorker chronicles some errors, but rather an uneasiness about the premise of his argument.

Because… how dominant is Amazon when it comes to the literary scene (a key premise, given the multiple uses of the phrase ‘Age of Amazon’)? I’m sure it’s very dominant in the US, but what about other countries and other languages? Self-published/Indie authors have been worrying about the dominance of Amazon for the last decade or so (that I can remember) and yet Amazon remains just one choice among others. And Amazon itself sometimes limits its influence – McGurl discusses Amazon’s publishing arm, including its translation branch, but doesn’t mention that Amazon refuses to have its ebooks available for loan on non-Amazon platforms. Given the increasing growth of ebooks being checked out from library around the world (just look at Overdrive’s 2023 stats), I question how much influence Amazon will have over the entire literary scene via its intentional absences (no doubt a marketing strategy they employ to drive people to buy kindles).

I found this assumption that Amazon is the behemoth in the total literary scene to be a bit strange, given that McGurl dedicates one coda to discussing the way China’s literary scene has sealed itself from the world and presumably is aware that Amazon dominates in several countries and is not as present in others. Unless, of course, he is talking only about the American market and has neglected to mention that.

Another premise of his that I question is the shift in literary scene. Now, I’m not a literary scholar so I admit that I might be very off-base here but McGurl quotes Rita Felski, “a key figure in the new literary sociology” to say that literature is now used “in generating a series of cognitive-emotional effects – recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock – in and on the reader.” He also – admittedly with full self-awareness – stretches the definition of social reproduction to ask if reading a novel for relaxation counts as “a kind of reproductive labour?”. What I got from all this is the sense that it’s new and novel for us to Read For Fun because previously, novels were Serious Art.

But were they? Dickens comes to mind as an author whose serialised works were treated as entertainment as they were read aloud. I also think of how Murasaki’s works were passed around by the Heian-Japan court as entertainment rather than serious reading (at that time, those were written in the manly Chinese characters, y’know). My point is: hasn’t reading always been at least partly for fun? We may have written things down for useful purposes, like debating laws or making laws or reporting on business activities, but I would think that the novel has survived for millennia because it’s entertaining, and the canon in each country is a collection of books that move people the most and hence retain a permanent spot in a nation’s bookshelf. In that case, how much of what is going on a revolution? Or is the revolution really a small wave of readers that are not taking Literary Fiction as seriously as they did a few decades ago?

Now, I realise that whenever I write longer reviews, I tend to focus on the things I disagree with, mostly because there’s more to talk about. But that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy this book. While I did find it hard to read at times, I thought that McGurl did a good job going through the various books in the subgenres he chooses to explore and he brings up some good questions/points, like:

• What does KDP’s removal of virtually all barriers to publication mean for the literary field in general?
• What does the broader media ecology mean for the novel’s relevance as a cultural form and capacity for success as a work of art?
• “The point is that the urge to post selfies and the urge to publish a novel are on a continuum as modes of self-exposure and attention getting and would-be self-aggrandizement in an otherwise thoroughly massified world.” (this reminded me of the book Selfies and the chapter where it explores the literary selfie, aka the biography/memoir)

I also appreciated his effort to put genre back in the centre rather than centering only literary fiction in this book.

Should you read the book? Maybe. I didn’t find this the easiest book to read or review and while I’m unsure about some of the assumptions that McGurl has, I did find it worth mulling over – to the point where I read it twice to more fully understand what’s going on! If you think that the ideas in this book are interesting, it may be worth picking it up and giving it a go.