Does It Matter That Prestige Lit Is Dead?

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

 I have tried my hand at many things related to writing. I like science fiction, and I love detective stories. I wanted to try my hand at flash fiction because I thought it might help me write better short stories. Most of what I write is experiments with genre, even if I am more inclined to write what is, to my mind, literary fiction. But I am not interested in prestige fiction. I think prestige cuts off fiction from readers. That also lets me rationalize that my talents do not rise to a level necessary for prestigiousness.

What prompts these statements from me is Dennis Wilson Wise's review essay Prestige Fiction Is Dead (Los Angeles Review of Books).

In the final analysis, anyone still committed to the novel’s specialness—probably most folks reading this article—is bound to consider Novel Competition thoroughly depressing. But Brier is a historian, not a prophet. He has no answers, no grand solutions, for the novel’s lost pride of place. The prestige competition is over, he says; there’s just “less to be gained by denying it now.” And that rings true. Although winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award can still make one’s literary career, we no longer expect our literary lions to become public intellectuals. Once upon a time, authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag were recognizable faces on the television circuit. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any novelist finding that same prominence.

That paragraph made me wonder if we are not settling into the same patterns in literature as we are in politics: pre-WWII divisions have returned. I knew Truman Capote and Norman Mailer from television long before I read their work. But how much did the public know about Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, J.P. Marquand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl S. Buck, or Eugene O'Neill during their heyday? Consider my list contains three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a long-running best-selling author, and four winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The only writer who did not win any awards for his writing was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Who is read today by the general reader? Fitzgerald. Prestige is the eye of the beholder; literary fame is ephermal.

But from my list, who is not a good writer? I would suggest none. They may be stuck in their time (Tarkington and Marquant and Lewis seem most likely to suffer from this fault), but they wrote to the best of their talents. I found The Good Earth a surprise for not being boring. I think Fitzgerald probably did not rise to the challenges of his talents, but they are better talents than I have, and what would America be without The Great Gatsby? If I recognize humanity in their work, then I think it is worth reading.

That means to me that we write not to make a television appearance or be lauded in The New York Review of Books. It means we write as best we can to connect with humanity.

Sam Kahn's What Has Gone Wrong With Fiction in Our Era? A Laundry List (Castalia) includes much that makes what I have written foolish, certainly off the main stream. But then I am far from the main stream of American publishing. Nor do I have an MFA. I am a writer with nothing to lose and, at my age, little to gain.

I feel more in line with Damien Cowger of New Ohio Review Recommends…

And there I end today's sermon.

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