WASHINGTON POST: Today’s writers are too chummy — they should start brawling again to save literary culture

For as long as humans have been making capital-L Literature, people have been writing its obituary. Ten years ago, the author Kelsey McKinney catalogued 30 times in the last century when the novel was prematurely eulogised; since then, rumours of its death have only snowballed. The trouble now is how many people seem ready to accept it.

Fewer people are reading fiction, we are told, and those who do read do so only when the fiction involves murder, sex, dragons or, ideally, some combination of the three. Armchair diagnoses multiply: Decades of failed pedagogy have caused a collapse in American literacy rates. Social media and phones have obliterated attention spans.

Publishers have gone the way of Hollywood, betting everything on franchises and celebrity. Media outlets have killed off book sections.

Large language models based on brazen theft pump out slop in torrents. David Brooks thinks the problem is — I’m kidding. No one cares what David Brooks thinks the problem is.

While all these opinions (even, sigh, Brooks’s) have some truth, there is a larger problem we need to confront: Literature has become boring. I don’t mean the books themselves. Even as publishers conglomerate into a Borg-like hivemind, writers are still crafting transgressive, sophisticated, brilliant work.

When I say boring, I mean the book world itself. The collective of writers, critics, readers, booksellers and tastemakers that we call the literary establishment has lost the one thing that every compelling narrative depends on: conflict.

Books aren’t dead, the literary feud is. And it is high time we resurrected it.

The history of literature is, in many ways, the history of its feuds. Byron wrote Don Juan as an up-yours to then-poet laureate Robert Southey; Theodore Dreiser slapped Sinclair Lewis over losing the Nobel Prize; Mario Vargas Llosa slugged Gabriel García Márquez in the eye over a matter involving Vargas Llosa’s wife; Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy fell out over Hellman’s inflexible support of Joseph Stalin (yes, really) and went on to hate each other very productively for half a century.

It’s not just that all this makes for good gossip, though gossip has its own virtues. Literary movements essentially consist of writers getting so sick of what’s being published around them that they decide to create something wholly new. Writers are by nature jealous, judgemental, insecure and very good at saying so. We call one another out for dishonesty and sloppy prose.

Or at least, we used to. Looking around today, one could be forgiven for assuming that literature is as chummy and supportive as a yoga retreat. My wife compares it to chimps grooming each other, with the same delicate hierarchy.

We’ve equated good literary citizenship with being cheerleaders, which for most of us takes the form of clicking a button or two on a social media app, or claiming we’re “screaming, crying, throwing up” at an acquaintance’s cover reveal. In public, we’re trained to speak like politicians, or actors on an endless press tour.

The only chance most of us get to blow off steam is within the safe confines of an internet dogpile, which is not nearly as invigorating or entertaining as a feud. What we want is to be able to say, as Clive James so gloriously put it, that “the book of my enemy has been remaindered”. Instead, writers are now expected to gush over one another, on the pretense that “we’re all in this together” — even though we absolutely are not.

The truth is that we are all competing over an ever-shrinking plot of turf and trying to pretend there’s enough room for everyone. It’s an attitude that presents the survival of literature as something we all have to fight for, when literature should be something we fight over.

The great privilege of being an author — because God knows it’s not the sales — is that people might care what you think. We have got to stop being so timid about saying it. The best way to get newspapers to restore their book sections is to provide them with actual news. And nothing gets column inches like a good public slapfest.

I say “we,” but let’s be real: If I say that I’ve had it up to the teeth with writers like Ottessa Moshfegh — the kind whose fiction features a lonely, anhedonic bourgeois who slouches through life avoiding any human relationship that might dent their precious crystalline bubble of self-absorption — well, I’m nobody.

If we want our feuds to be truly captivating, they have to come from the big guns. Our Kendricks and Drakes. The authors who get to go on Colbert and Las Culturistas to promote their books. The main reason we know McCarthy’s immortal burn of Hellman (“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”) is that she unleashed it live on The Dick Cavett Show.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with TV mouthpieces such as Isaac Fitzgerald, now a regular promoter of other people’s books on the US Toda show, who in 2013, as books editor of BuzzFeed, announced that the site would no longer publish bad reviews.

“Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said, seeming to have never considered that there is, in fact, a very good reason to talk smack about books: It is fun. It is, in fact, half the point of reading.

You cannot love books if you cannot hate them, too.

Hell is finding yourself trapped in conversation with someone who doesn’t have a single bad thing to say about anyone.

And yet few of us are willing to write reviews at all, and when we do, there’s an incentive to pull our punches because the potential blowback isn’t worth the risk.

What’s so foolish about all this anticipatory compliance is that readers want us to get messy. We live in a moment when people don’t just enjoy artists, they want parasocial relationships with them. Readers crave access to authors.

Book festivals thrive, from Brattleboro to Birmingham. People show up and sit in uncomfortable folding chairs in tents and community centers to listen to panels; they wait for hours in line to get their books signed.

And what do we offer in return? Four writers passing around a microphone and compliments. We can do better. We can give readers reasons to cheer, and reasons to hiss, and in so doing, reinforce their belief that this stuff might actually matter.

It needn’t be all adultery and punching. The best fights are about substance, which is why authors must regularly write honest, even punishing reviews of one another’s work. The recent critical revolt against Ocean Vuong, kicked off by Pulitzer Prize winner and laureate of sick burns Andrea Long Chu, is a good start.

But we have to push harder. Events might be better attended if anyone thought for a second that they might see the authors disagree. What if, instead of every bookstore event featuring two authors “in conversation,” we sprinkled a few debates in there?

As with any sparring match, there are rules of engagement. Established writers ought not punch down, and emerging writers punch up at their own risk. The optimal feud involves two authors of equal and preferably equally exalted stature. Roxane Gay makes frequent public reference to her “nemesis”.

If she wants to be a good literary citizen, she should name the person. If the famously sweet and supportive Alexander Chee were to go on The Daily Show and tell us whom he hates — come on, Alex, I know you hate someone! — we would be getting somewhere.

Then that person might get to come on the show and clap back, and before you know it, more people are getting drawn into the fray and taking sides and feeling invested, and everyone’s sales are going up. A rising beef lifts all boats.

“John Keats,” spat Byron, “… was kill’d off by one critique.” It seems now that we’re all afraid the same might happen to us. If we want literature to grow, we need to be willing to fight for it — with each other.

Samuel Ashworth is the author of the novel The Death And Life Of August Sweeney, about the rise and fall of a celebrity chef, told through his autopsy. He lives in Washington.