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What has Amazon meant for the novel? In his new book, Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of cultural experimentation in literature: one with little to do with how novels are written, and far more with how novels circulate online.

Text by Mark McGurl

Personae of Contemporary Capital The symbolic trajectory from the human founder figure through the corporation to the pure abstraction of the market is one of increasing escape from responsibility for capitalism’s harms, while the reverse trajectory moves toward the privatisation of its benefits. 

As the story goes, it was a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day that inspired Jeff Bezos to leave a lucrative job on Wall Street to start something new in Seattle, lest he, like that novel’s butler, look back upon his life with regret. But if a novel gave us Amazon, what has Amazon meant for the novel? My book, Everything and Less: the Novel in the Age of Amazon, answers that question by examining the company’s ongoing attempts to redefine literary life as an adjunct to online retail.

 It has done so as the purveyor of the vast majority of books sold online in the US, UK and beyond, as producer of the Kindle e-reading device, proprietor of book-centric social media site, Goodreads, and facilitator of a new model of literary self-publication in its Kindle Direct Publishing program. These and many other interventions in the market for fiction have made Amazon the inescapable platform of contemporary literary production and consumption alike. They have shifted the scene of innovation from the form of the novel to the ways and means of its distribution.

Doing so, the company has sought to redefine authorship as the entrepreneurial provision of good service to readers and reading itself as a repeatable experience of self-care. Conceived in this way, all fiction is “genre fiction,”including so-called literary fiction, which for Amazon is simply one modality of the pursuit of reliable customer satisfaction among others. Genre fiction takes the lead in defining the situation of the novel now, suggesting a new set of emphases in the critical analysis of the contemporary literary field. 

With an eye on the longer history of the novel, my book tells a story that connects Henry James to E.L. James, Faulkner and Hemingway to contemporary romance, science fiction and fantasy writers. It reveals how, in opening the floodgates of popular literary expression as never before, the Age of Amazon offers novel writing as the image of unalienated labor in a world of dreary wage-slavery and chronic time-famine, even as time for novel reading becomes more and more difficult to find. It shows us what it means when literary culture becomes corporate culture in the broadest but also the deepest and most troubling sense.

These images represent some of my attempts to see what the situation of contemporary fiction looks like from various angles of analysis, from a picture of the entire institutional context of contemporary fiction, to a snapshot of a genre system that links minimalist and maximalist forms of the novel, to a recreation of some of the attention-grabbing book covers characteristic of the world of self-publishing. ◉

The Contemporary Genre Triad While it is irresistible to attach specific recent titles to the triad of epic, romance and novel, given how efficiently they help it come into focus, in fact it is better to think of them as forms of narrative value unequally distributed between different individual works. For instance, while it seems quite reasonable to call Fifty Shades of Grey a romance novel, what are we to make of the fact that it is part of a trilogy? From The Divina Commedia to The Lord of the Rings, the trilogy is the quintessential epic form. Partly, no doubt, it is a result of its derivation from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy – it having started life as a fan fiction extension of the latter – but that just begs the question of the relation of the paranormal romance to epic. Partly it responds to the demand for more product, conveniently turning one profitable trans-action into three. By the same token, but for the slightly absurd idealisation of its billionaire hero, and especially as compared with Twilight, the world depicted in Fifty Shades of Grey is more or less the same one we find in realist novels. 

Contexts Distance from the centre of the diagram is a measure of explanatory generality, which is a source at once of comprehensive power and of potential banality. To say, for instance, that contemporary fiction is a product of nature, or modernity, would be as absolutely true as it would be absolutely uninteresting unless those claims could be specified. To notice, in turn, that poetry lies on the periphery of the diagram is to see at once how all literary activity can be described as “poetic” in the loosest sense, but also how weak the specific influence of contemporary poetry on contemporary fiction is beyond its association with the “lyric impulse,” that is, the human predisposition to artful self-expression in words. A more specific influence on fiction is exerted by the university, and in particular by the creative writing programs where so many professional poets now work alongside fiction writers. As discussed at length in my book The Program Era, creative writing programs didn’t exist in anything like the form we know them until the postwar period, but they now figure as perhaps the most crucial institutional infrastructure underlying the production of literary fiction and poetry in the US, the sine qua non of innumerable careers.

The Rise of the Service Economy Having been at near parity with the goods-producing sector during the Second World War, the service sector has since taken off in the US, now employing almost 80% of US workers. The numbers are similar for the UK and slightly less stark in Germany, France, and other highly developed Western economies, while they are still at near parity in China. 

Genealogies of the Alpha Billionaire Romance The sources of the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey to readers are many. To me the most interesting event revealed in this diagram is the sharp splitting of romance into high literary versions virtually defined by their attention to the failure or frustration of romance, and mass-market ones where true love continues to reign supreme.

#Cockygate Is it possible to trademark the use of a single word in book titles? Faleena Hopkins thought so, but it had already been used in an earlier work by someone else. More recently, Christine Feehan, author of Dark Prince (1999), Dark Fire (2001), Dark Promises (2016) and thirty-some other paranormal romances in the Dark Carpathian series, attempted to trademark the word “dark”. These efforts run afoul of the spirit of mutual aid that is surely one of the most appealing features of the world of self- or – as they prefer to call it – independent publishing.

The Dialectic of Epic and Romantic World-Building To the extent that this dialectic structures our sense of contemporary fictional form as such, as I believe it does, it suggests the immense pressure put on the novel qua novel in the Age of Amazon, at least as we know it from the great tradition of novel theory centred on 19th-century realism. To be sure, the term “novel” remains in common use across the genre system as a way to refer to a discrete unit of product, but the fundamental symbolic integrations of which that genre was alleged to be the vehicle – as when the competing claims of the social order and protagonist are successfully negotiated in the bildungsroman – are now being pulled apart and distributed to different “pre-novelistic” novelistic modes. This is perhaps why we tend to think there are no truly great novels anymore, only – and even then in a spirit of generosity – a great many interesting ones. 

Literary Fiction in the Genre System A sketch of the contemporary genre system in which literary fiction is extrinsic to but also defined by its proximity to core generic operations of world consolidation or world expansion, the first tending toward autofiction, the second toward what we can call by contrast “allofiction.” In between these poles lie the would-be equilibrium of the family as a social unit. All works of literary fiction lie in close proximity to their generic siblings, but the very moderation of “classicism” makes it especially porous in relation to less prestigious categories like “women’s” or “book club” fiction. At the top of the diagram are dialectical inversions of the maximalism/minimalism relation, which I label monumentalism and miniaturism, respectively, the first stretching autofiction out to epic length, the second condensing “the world” into a text of lyric brevity. Placed in a marginal relation to genre fiction, the prestige of literary fiction is defined in part by its proximity to the extra-literary “real” as a matter of common concern.