Literary conversations these days — the ones about books in general and not one book in particular — tend to turn on matters of scarcity and abundance. On one hand, readers are increasingly attuned to which voices are missing: the disproportionate dearth of diverse writers on shelves or in writing programs, or the ostracism of genre fiction and women writers from the literary world’s tonier circles. On the other hand, the amount of literary output today is so overwhelming that even the most diligent reader can’t hope to keep up, even with the most-hyped titles. With a straight face, bookish websites tweet out lists of the “10 best books to read right now!” while the average U.S. citizen reads four books in a year and nearly a fourth of the population doesn’t read books at all.
An important figure in both cases, in its strange, aggressive, libertarian way, is Amazon. Abundance is its calling card, of course. Forty percent of the print books sold each year are sold through Amazon, and it also sells the lion’s share of ebooks. Its algorithmic savvy also means that it is determined to serve every market for which there’s even the least demand, from cross-cultural literary fiction (thanks to its translation imprint, Amazon Crossing) to women’s fiction (via its Lake Union Publishing imprint), to — as Mark McGurl notes in his engrossing exploration of Amazon’s impact on literature, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon — its massive self-publishing apparatus, which gets you, or somebody anyway, satirical gay porn like Unicorn Butt Cops: Beach Patrol and a multitude of titles in the decidedly niche genre of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica.
Hoo…ray? McGurl argues that Amazon’s outsize role in serving readers’ needs has had a profound impact, not just on well-documented matters of retailing and warehousing, but on what we read, and to an extent, the content of the books themselves. He proposes that the company has instigated a kind of massive literary flattening that positions “literary” fiction cheek-to-jowl with its genre-fiction cousins in a yin-yang relationship. That dynamic hasn’t erased low-, middle-, and highbrow distinctions, but it’s also made them somewhat beside the point. The post-Amazon literary universe has genre-fied everything, and “literary fiction” is now firmly its own sortable category, little different from kitchen appliances or men’s outerwear.
After all, McGurl suggests, by Amazon’s ruthless logic, Song of Solomon is satisfying the same need that Unicorn Butt Cops does — our wish to read a story. Because Amazon is concerned about customer satisfaction first and foremost, the company has reframed the novel as, McGurl writes, “an existential scaling device. It is a tool for adjusting our emotional states toward the desired end of happiness, whatever that might look like to a given reader, however complex or simple a state it might be.” This is, of course, a provocation: How can you liken a brilliant, multivalent novel like Mrs. Dalloway to Fifty Shades of Grey? McGurl doesn’t deny the distinction, but also suggests that the abundance and diversity offered by Amazon makes high modernism less essential than it used to be. A heavy consumer of a particular genre isn’t reading Woolf, no. But by gobbling down many variations on a theme, she is, in a way, creating a similarly prismatic Mrs. Dalloway-ish experience out of parts. Amazon itself is a kind of literary experience in itself, he writes. It is “making an epic narrative out of the speedy satisfaction of popular want.”
Just as readers are running toward that same essential thing, McGurl suggests, they’re all running away from the same thing, too — death, which their book purchases attempt to stave off. If we’re buying more books than we can possibly read, we’re fending off the anxieties of late capitalism. In this regard, Amazon is a lot like what Homer Simpson once said of beer — it’s the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Or as McGurl puts it: “So much of Amazon’s effort, once it has led the customer to its infinite trough of goods, is to find ways to get her to click ‘buy’ rather than stare in irritated awe at the number of objects she has to choose between.”
Aware as I am of the anxieties of the post-capitalist hellscape, this all feels at once overly complicated and crudely reductionist. The emergence of scads of hot billionaire men in romance novels, the subject of much of McGurl’s scholarly attention, may indeed say something about our changing attitudes toward capitalism and sex; it may also be just the latest iteration in a genre that’s long traded in Mr. Darcys and brooding, exotic sheiks. Acquiring more books than we can possibly read is an act that Amazon savvily exploits, but not one it invented. Nor did Amazon invent the anxieties of capitalist existence that inform the works of, say, Sally Rooney, to pick a writer whom romance and literary readers can both get behind. McGurl arguing that the whole corpus of literature is effectively a permutation of children’s literature — “a fictional world tailored to their presumed imaginative needs” — is a matter better suited for neuroscientists than literary critics. When he says Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis is “essentially Fifty Shades of Grey for intellectuals,” he’s just being glib.
But that’s not to say McGurl hasn’t put his finger on something important about the relationship between literature and its most fearsome purveyor of it. Like everything else on the website, Amazon is selling books as a thing that satisfies a want, and by dealing in fiction in scale it’s shifted some conversations about the novel away from matters of art, beauty, language, and so on, and instead toward filling in gaps in our cultural-intellectual well-being. That’s what makes “25 books to read right now!” make a perverse sense; it’s the thinking behind those bingo cards that grown-up readers use sometimes. (“Read a 19th century classic!” “Read an #ownvoices novel by a writer whose background is not the same as yours!”) And as more books become slotted to satisfying particular needs, books that fall afoul of those expectations will have a harder time in the marketplace and in the imagination. Amazon Crossing’s approach to global literature isn’t the curatorial, high-literary approach of a New Directions, Dalkey Archive Press, or Open Letter. It’s thrillers, except Asian, or Scandinavian. When McGurl writes that the contemporary novel is a vehicle for the “therapeutic processing of information,” it’s exasperating jargon, but also a correct way of describing how we’re all caught in Amazon’s algorithmic net.
Still, despite all its retail might, there’s a barrier between the literary edifices that Amazon has created and the wider literary culture. Independent booksellers, disinclined to engage in the economic equivalent of slitting their own throats, generally avoid carrying the books published by Amazon’s 16 in-house imprints. Kindle Direct Publishing is a walled garden of self-published fiction that rarely breaks through into the mainstream (though there are exceptions, such as Hugh Howey’s Wool series). But just as Jeff Bezos’ billions can pierce the upper atmosphere and launch him into space, there’s no reason to believe Amazon can’t knock down that retail barrier, to become literary culture in itself. Then we’ll more fully be in a world where we can access more genres than we know what to do with. And perhaps, if the algorithm gets it exactly right, a world with only one story to tell.
[Published by Verso on October 9, 2021, 336 pages, $29.95 hardcover]