Hey You, American Reader. Psst… Lean forward... I have a secret to tell you. This is
the golden age of the American book.
Stop laughing. I’m serious.
Yes, I am very familiar with the pessimistic critiques. Andrew
Delbanco’s “The Decline and Fall of American Literature” in the New York Review of Books a decade ago
popularized the hand-wringing. More recently, the Wall Street Journal revived the discussion with a provocative op-ed
titled “What Killed American Lit?” No less a literary luminary than Gore Vidal has offered: “The future is dark for literature. Certainly the young in general are not
going to take up reading when they have such easy alternatives as television,
movies, and rock.” Indeed, we all grumble about lacking time to curl up with a good book;
book reading is out of sync with modernity’s need for compartmentalized
activities like Net surfing.
Nonetheless, a dispassionate look at the American reader
suggests a healthier picture. First, contrary to widely held assumptions,
Americans are reading more than in the past. Gallup reports that 47% of
Americans are reading a book, up from 37% in 1990 and 23% in 1957. To meet this
market, an estimated 320,000 books were published in the U.S. last year (60,000
were novels). The gross quantity of literary content has never been higher, and we have record numbers of writers with advanced degrees and training; the law of
probability tells us that there must be excellent books out there.
The problem then, my dear American reader, is not that you
lack excellent books. The problem is that you lack the time to enjoy them, and
you lack the ability to sift through the junk and find the best work.
Fortunately, there are emerging solutions to both problems.
Shorter Books for Busier People: Book length has
grown and shrunk over the centuries; there is no ideal length for a novel. In
the 1800s and early 1900s, when authors catered to a small, but dominant
leisure class, novels ballooned in size to 200,000 words. Victorian authors like
Dickens were serialized in magazines and paid by the word. We came to accept a correlation
between excellence and length. But this is nonsense: It is harder to write a
50,000 word novel than an 80,000 word novel. My own experience proves this. Two
of my three books were three hundred flabby pages in early drafts. Knowing my
reader would benefit from a shorter and cheaper book, I hacked away and
reimagined the manuscripts—dropping entire chapters and tightening plot lines
for a cleaner read. My latest book, The
Razing of Tinton Falls (about the destruction of a village during the
American Revolution, as witnessed by diverse, opposing narrators) weighs in at a
trim 160 pages. The two best books I’ve read in the last year, Marc Schuster’s The Grievers and Michel Stone’s The Iguana Tree, are 360 pages between
them.
Easy Access to the Best Content: There is amazing
writing out there, but it can be hard to find. The Internet is a good thing,
but it hides great content within a forest of mediocrity. Past arbiters of good
taste (i.e., The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books) don’t even
try to keep up with the small and alternative presses that are publishing
the most interesting books. Fortunately, the Internet provides useful filters
for the resourceful reader. Excellent content filters include: RealClear.com
for journalism, ReadIt.com for blogs, and book reviewers like Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and The
New York Journal of Books (disclosure: I review fiction for the NYJB).
Unlike book reviews on Amazon or Good Reads, where the reviewers are often
biased and untrained, these professional sites provide measured reviews from
well-trained/credentialed reviewers and they cover much more than traditional
magazines.
So, American Reader, do not despair. Authors are adapting to
your needs with shorter, tighter books, and reliable filters are
emerging to guide you to the best writing. Don’t be discouraged, enjoy this Golden
Age.
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