A Review of Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin

Big Fiction. Written by Dan Sinykin. New York: Columbia University Press, October, 2023. 224 pp. $30.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-231-19295-8.

It’s hard to convey the deep value I find in Dan Sinykin’s 2023 nonfiction work Big Fiction. His book offers the reader a glimpse into the effects of American publishing on literature from the 1930s to today. What happened that led to, say, the paperback novel? How did we go from that form to trade paperbacks? What led to the rise of genre fiction? Why, all of a sudden, did writers as mega-popular as Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel emerge? Where is this all likely headed in the age of Amazon? These seem like important questions, but Sinykin manages to contain them enough with what feels like sound reporting, as well as colorful portrayals of the book publishing personalities that affected the form. He’s created an extremely valuable portrait of the 20^th century U.S. book publishing world.

Sinykin takes the time necessary to unravel the path of book publishing in the U.S. During World War II, American publishers invented the cheap, accessible book version known as the mass market paperback to satisfy the needs of soldiers off at war. These are the smaller paperback books printed on pulpier paper that I associate with bodice-ripping covers and usually sell for as little as possible.

After the war, many newly bookish military men came home looking to attend college, and the mass market paperback flourished during this era. Before then, according to Sinykin, books were by and large still a coastal phenomenon in the country. Literary offerings by the likes of by Faulkner and Hemingway benefited by being included in this mass market form, and the future titans of literature were sold in metal shopping stands at your local drug store and grocer. I love imagining the surprise of someone strolling up for the first time to one of those spinning displays, being enticed by the newly minted covers of a Mickey Spillane or Harold Robbins or James Baldwin novel, making the display a weekly, pleasurable stop on their shopping to-do list.

An advancement to this form came about when an editor at Doubleday named Jason Epstein in the 1950s wanted to get the great literary works of his time out of the drugstores and railways stations and into actual bookstores. This led to the invention of the trade paperback—“a tactic to reclaim a space of distinction against the flattening impulse of the mass market.” These are the slightly larger paperback books that still today tend to be associated with literary as opposed to genre fiction. Epstein’s tastes slanted literary, so much so that, when Doubleday refused to publish Lolita, he left the company for Random House, which featured an impressive catalog of literary greats such as Faulkner, Stein, and Ellison.

In his new position, Epstein continued to cultivate a literary culture around the trade paperback form. By the late 1950s, the academic, literary, highbrow set had a paperback version they could call their own, and literary novelists managed to carve a place for themselves, if not flourish, in the bookstores of the country.

But publishing is a business, and these two forms—the mass market and trade paperback—continued to evolve. The biggest impact for the industry came during a period of conglomeration, which started to change the game. Sinykin writes that these comglomerates were run by “bureaucratic managers who were incentivized, above all, to grow the organization, ‘even at the expense of profitability.’” As one example, bigger companies such as the electronics giant RCA bought well-heeled literary entities such as Random House. The giant multi-business corporations that are ubiquitous now were just starting to make themselves known. By 1990, these conglomerates would buy up virtually all of the money-making U.S. publishers.

This takeover was fine for a while. Editors at these houses managed to keep the hounds of the parent companies at bay and keep the focus, by and large, on artistic adventure and quality work. Sinykin spends a few pages diving deeply into the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975), a kind of fascinating case study that he describes as “a heterodox account of the origin of the culture industry.” It’s the story of “an artist betraying his political values to become a cultural entrepreneur in the budding film industry.” The novel for Sinykin serves as a kind of bellwether for where this conglomeration was likely to lead the industry. It was that rare effort that “accommodated the aesthetic demands of popular readers, the literary establishment, and academia.” Can one book satisfy all of these markets? The answer, to publishing editors and executives, was yes. All of a sudden, the drugstore racks that contained both Spillane and Faulkner weren’t just holding separate titles. The literary and the popular were existing in the same work.

It wasn’t long, however, before this new arrangement started “eroding editorial, and thus authorial autonomy.” In the 1980s, the industry shifted again. Parent companies, hitherto letting the publishers run the show, were paying attention to those books that could reach across markets, and they were getting involved to make it happen. In the broadest sense, this became the era of “‘remodeling the author as a content creator’ whose intellectual property might be monetized across media.” Think Steel, King, and Krantz—writers of mega-books that sold millions of copies and often became mega-films.

This was a wonderful development for the populist expansion of the form. Sinykin writes, “Success came to depend less on knowing the right people, hanging out, say, in Sag Harbor, and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system.” It was no longer about who you knew but whether you had the story that could move units. Everyone on the planet now had a chance to succeed in publishing, not just the elite.

As promising as that sounds, it was clear that the artists and editors were no longer running the show. There was an industry to satisfy, and the prospect of a big seller enticed even the most literary of writers to see what they could do to scare up sales. I was shocked when Sinykin pointed out that Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison is on one level a horror story. In retrospect, of course it is, but its mild nod to genre had never been noticed by me. All the Pretty Horses (1992), the mega-selling literary effort by Cormac McCarthy, is easier to place in the western genre. These books were successful not because they were literary but because the majority of the folks who buy books were having their needs fulfilled, and those film rights must’ve led to a nice check or two for writers who had struggled for decades to build audiences.

It’s easy for me to romanticize this era of publishing: literary recognition as lofty as the Nobel, lots of captive readers ready to follow your lead, and film residuals to boot. This 1980s era strikes me as the sweet spot for being a literary writer in America, and not just for the top of the field.

So, where did we go from there? Amazon debuted in 1995 and since then has become the most prolific and interesting bookseller, publisher, and seller of, well, everything. In his title Everything and Less, Mark McGurl goes one step further: “[W]e might think of [Amazon] not only as the protagonist of contemporary literary life but as its most emblematic ‘author,’ as deserving in its way of lending its name to the literary period in which it appears as Samuel Johnson was of the Age of Johnson … or Ezra Pound was of the Pound Era.” The book landscape has changed fundamentally, and this new book order casts a shadow over every word Sinykin writes. There is the sense that the good old days are gone.

Perhaps for this reason, Sinykin waits until the end of his book to mention the behemoth in the room of 21^st century literary culture. This was a relief for me. I get enough about Amazon just looking out my office window as my neighbor receives yet another package of such size that it must contain a plasma TV, or electric bike, or refrigerator, or all three. It’s impossible to deny my envy as this “bookseller” gets more attention—by one hundred miles—than any contemporary author, but it’s also the result of trying to be an author during the era of Amazon. From the time I first wrote “Once upon a time” in 1997, I’ve watched the literary landscape slowly change to something I don’t recognize, and this is heartbreaking for many reasons.

I much prefer Sinykin’s chapter on the remaining large, money-making U.S. independent publisher, of which there is exactly one: W.W. Norton. I always thought of this entity as the publisher of the anthologies I bought for undergraduate English classes. They are indeed that, but in the 1990s, they were also the one taking risks on fiction by Chuck Palahniuk, Walter Mosley, Patrick O’Brien, and others, and being rewarded for it. Such a company—which is owned entirely by its employees—shouldn’t exist today, but it does. It is the last vestige of a book world I loved and aspired to. If they’re still here, there’s still hope.

I invested 1,500 words in the wonder of Big Fiction because I’ve never read a book that chronicles so much about the U.S. publishing world in the 20^th century, and analyzes it so effectively. If there is another book that does such a good job of telling the story of this publishing era, I don’t know about it. This substantial achievement shouldn’t be lost in what I write next.

Sinykin has another point to his book. He wants to state what participation in this system means for the fiction we read during this era. In short, Sinykin wants to show that “[t]he books available to us today are products of the conglomerate era.” Fair enough. Despite the vast number of books that have come to us via non-conglomerate entities, I know what he means. If you got enamored with fiction over the past 70 years, most likely you came to your interest through books published by these conglomerates.

But Sinykin reaches for a more radical thesis. He writes in his introduction, “I show how much we miss when we fall for the romance of individual genius.” Again, there is much truth in that statement. Sinykin does a great job of showing how conglomerate publishing not only fostered the publications of certain classics by late 20^th century greats such as McCarthy, Morrison, Doctorow, and others, but also helped shape the contents of their fiction. His arguments are persuasive. After reading his work, there is no doubt in my mind that these conglomerates had at least an invisible and sometimes perhaps even an overtly acknowledged hand in the creation of the great literary works of the latter half of the 20^th century. You can’t publish a book in such a conglomerate environment and expect the mothership not to have some kind of influence over what the book actually contains, and considering the great books that came out during this era, it was no doubt often a positive influence. It has been inherent in the publication process of great literature from at least the late 1970s through today, and it is therefore all but futile to deny.

For me, this publishing arrangement does nothing to quell the idea that these books, by and large, are the products not so much of the conglomerate era but of the individual geniuses that created them. How do I know? There are many reasons. It’s as obvious as looking at the thousands upon thousands of fiction titles that were published during the 1980s and 1990s that we do not associate with anything resembling individual genius. The vast majority of fictional works published during this era—during any era—were well meaning but largely forgettable books that did not result in anyone but their authors and maybe a few others remembering them beyond their initial publication windows. Do we think of these books as the literary failures of the conglomerates? Of course not. They are the product of anywhere from competent to less-than-competent authors who happened to have their works published by these entities during this time. If Sinykin is going to give the conglomerates credit for the genius of the great fiction of their era, then I don’t know why all comglomerate published work wasn’t genius.

But I’m being disingenuous. I know why all of their published books weren’t genius. Because only a select few were written by people who had the talent and skills that might lead to a work of genius. Sinykin wants to put the cart before the horse. If you eat too much ice cream, you might get fat. You wouldn’t get fat because you have a stomach. You would get fat because you ate too much ice cream. Sure, you couldn’t get fat without a stomach, but you have to do some serious mental jiu jitsu to equate the fact that you have a stomach to the reason you got fat.

The above Sinykin quote is not the only instance in Big Fiction where the author wants to over-emphasize the role of conglomerate publishing in the creative success of the writer. In another instance, he pokes Danielle Steel for a comment she wrote in a blog post in 2012:

I’ve reacted with amazement, shock, and outrage when people have asked me in my fan mail, who writes my books…WHO writes my BOOKS? Are you kidding? Who do you think writes my books …

Sinykin writes of this passage: “With a childlike seriousness …[Steel] wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art—its formulaic plots, its women’s mag prose style, its mass production—betrays its mechanicity.”

I’m not a great person to talk about the novels of Danielle Steel. I’ve never read one. Danielle Steel is for me what I’m sure she is for most people. She’s the extremely successful author of dozens, maybe hundreds, of romance novels. In fairness to Sinykin, she does continue in her blog post to be dramatic about her process and how difficult it is for her.

But does this quote really say what Sinykin thinks it says? Does Steel want to be the “inspired creator solely responsible for her art”? I don’t think so. She just wants you to know that—even when she was writing six or seven novels a year—she wrote her own damn novels. If that’s true—and I have no reason to believe it's not—then why not be proud and say so? Good for her.

This is an inconvenient truth for Sinykin. I believe, having never read a word of Steel in my life save what Sinykin printed in Big Fiction, that Steel has some genius for communication that most of us could never understand. Of course, her work was aided by her environment and her publisher, but these were merely the delivery method for her stories (the stomach), which people read and enjoyed enough to buy more and more titles by her (the ice cream). What is the essence of the phenomenon of Danielle Steel? I would more likely believe that it’s something that goes on between her books and her readers than the path those books took to get to her readers. If Steel is beholden to anyone, it’s not publishing. It’s her readers.

Quick: name the publisher of Dickens? How about Austen? Melville? I’m a lifelong lover of all things literary, and I can’t name these publishers. Yet off the top of my head, I can name Dickens, Austen, and Melville a century or two after their deaths. What must these publishers have been like? I’m picturing an apparatus like a Guttenberg press, someone (I’m guessing) gluing those printed pages together and maybe stretching leather across some board-like material to create covers. Then the package is glued or stitched together and put in the publisher’s store front for sale. This could all be accurate, or it could all be wrong. From my perspective as someone who loves classic literature, I don’t really care.

What matters is that this cottage industry had the stewards to bring the masterworks of these writers to enough of the public that they eventually found the way to future generations, where they entertain us and impart their wisdom. For me, this is the essence of the publishing industry, the one part that truly matters. It’s extremely helpful if the industry earns livings for people like writers and publishers, but to me, that’s secondary to having an industry that has the capacity to deliver this generation’s Homer to the generations that follow. I’m sure shareholders disagree with me about the purpose of the publishing industry. I suspect it wouldn’t be the only thing we disagree about.

Do we still have that industry? In 1993, before I started writing novels and participating on the internet, there were an estimated 300,000 titles published by U.S. publishers, according to data from the American Book Publishers Association (now the Association of American Publishers). In 2023, Publishers Weekly and Bowker put the number of U.S. self-published titles receiving ISBNs at 2.6 million. If the latter number is correct, that’s all but guarantees that the number of books per year in the U.S. has gone up exponentially in the past few decades I’m going to estimate that we as a society have not added significantly to the number of readers of any kind of book-length work since 1993. If we as readers and reviewers are not able to sift through all of these books every year, then how are we to know which are worth passing on? If we’re not able to find the titles worth passing on, they might not get passed on. That’s one way this process falls apart.

Another way is if writers simply are not capable of writing books worth passing on. Sinykin is confident that this isn’t the case. He writes, “I don’t believe that the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous.” As someone who has published three novels since 2003, I’m glad for Sinykin’s optimism. As someone who has slowly lost interest in the novel form over the last three decades, I can’t say I share it.

Western society once dipped into several centuries of cultural stagnation, which has been described as the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages. Many such as the 14^th century poet Petrarch have described this previous era in gloomy terms. He wrote, “Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.”

If this dark era happened—many contemporary scholars have argued it didn’t—why did it happen? There were many perceived reasons for this stagnation—the fall of the Roman Empire, the ascension of Christianity over paganism, the corruption of the Catholic church, a substantial economic downturn. In any case, the result was a decline in literacy, learning, and other noted cultural pursuits.

Could a new dark age be caused by a flood of books and dearth of serious readers for those books? I hope not, but the signs are getting harder to ignore. The National Endowment for the Arts has reported a four-percent drop from 2017 to 2022 in the percentage of adults who read at least one book in the past year. In 2022, Americans read an average of 12.6 books, fewer than in any previous Gallup survey since 1990. There are several other statistics one could dive into that suggest a decline in the current century in the deep reading we associate with the books Sinykin concerns himself with.

The movement of attention from books to—one presumes—other media doesn’t mean we’re doomed for a new period of mass illiteracy. It could be a different kind of literacy, one that doesn’t rely on deep reading to achieve the advancements we might normally associate with those who read deeply. If there are enough authors to write millions of books per year, there must be some readers out there, if only the authors themselves. With AI just getting its footing, the number of books published per year is only going to go up.

But if we dip into a less enlightened era, one that sees the novel form become less of what it was a few decades ago, this slow erosion of deep readers is going to be seen as an emblem of the phenomenon. I’ve always been deeply skeptical of the use of other media to replicate what we get from reading books. There’s just something important you can get from the undistracted reading of a book that I don’t believe you can get anywhere else. I’ve always believed it has something to do with the time it takes for most to make it through a book. Even the fastest readers take at least a few hours to read a title, which is longer than even watching your typical film, and certainly longer than whatever the last thing I engaged with on YouTube was. There’s going to be an impact from the substitution of deep reading for engagement with other media. Let’s hope it’s not a terrible one.

So, it’s possible that, as Sinykin states, contemporary novels haven’t gotten worse. I hope he’s right, and I’ve just missed these titles.

Because of Sinykin’s insights, I better understand that the publishing industry’s substantial role in the creation of the great novels of the world, but their roles were not as important as the greatness of the writers of the era. We’ve been blessed with the perfect combination of world and souls to offer us the special literature that will be talked about and written about for a long time. Will the 21^st century’s literature be revered as well? It’s not guaranteed. There are ebbs and flows of genius, in society’s ability to bring genius to us, and in our ability to understand it. We should feel lucky to have any era that brings great literature to the world.

If you’d like to read more of my nonfiction, buy my memoir, which is available now for preorder.