What's Trying to Kill Literary Fiction? An Attempted Murder Mystery
In January 1998, Toni Morrison appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote her latest novel Paradise, which was the completion of a trilogy of novels that started with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987). Four years earlier, Morrison had won the Nobel Prize, and there was a great deal of anticipation for the newest novel from a living legend who was still creating original work. I remember it as a distinctly huge literary moment: a living American Nobel Laureate releasing a new, challenging novel to be promoted from this top-tier pop culture platform, which was and is the highest-rated daytime talk show in American television history. I note this event not because I remember much about it, or that I even bothered to watch it. I mention it because it’s what I think of as the last national public display of America as a country that revered literary fiction.
There will be people who disagree. There will be people who feel American literary fiction has never been healthier. They might point to an increased diversity in the authors of literary fiction in this country and argue that to suggest otherwise is to embrace the lack of diversity of past eras. They might site the fact that American creative writing programs offer diplomas to thousands of writers every year, and many of whom hope to pursue literary fiction endeavors. They might point to book sales showing that books are selling at least as well as in past decades, and these sales include contemporary literary titles as well as past literary efforts. They might suggest that I read contemporary literary writer X or Y or Z to discover just how vibrant and interesting literary fiction is today. They might do all of these things and more, and I might or might not agree with them.
This is not the essay in which I debate whether or not literary fiction is dying. I don’t have access to anything quantifiable that says that the interest in literary fiction is on the decline in this country since Morrison’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1998. I suspect anyone who’s been around literature for the last 40 years would find undeniable that the current literary fiction scene is, at minimum, different from what it was 40 years ago. If that is the language you choose to describe it, fair enough. I’ll know what you mean.
That said, this is the essay where I operate on the assumption that interest in literary fiction has been waning in this country since the 1990s, that it’s obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention since then, and that this waning is worth exploring. What in contemporary times might be killing literary fiction? That’s the topic I want to examine.
Literary Memoir Tried to Kill Literary fiction
In the 1990s, The Liars’ Club, Angela’s Ashes, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius started the trend, and myriad others have followed—Frey, Gilbert, Didion, and Strayed, to name only some. Going by nothing but my literary publishing antenna, since I signed on to the fiction guild in 1997, the publishing and reading world has grown more interested in literary memoir and less interested in literary fiction.
Only those with access to the numbers can say if the literary memoir has overtaken the literary novel in any important way. There are few statistics for such things available for free in the book world, and the ones I find aren’t very precise. An internet search requesting sales figures for memoir versus adult fiction titles reveals many blogs that quote from one source or another on the relatively recent “boom” or “surge” of the memoir over the past 20 or so years, or that memoir has or had recently celebrated its “great” or “golden age.” One statistic I unearthed: according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of U.S. book sales, total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008.
Closer to contemporary times, in 2018, Publisher’s Weekly proclaimed in the article headlined “What’s the Matter with Fiction Sales?”: “According to 2017 estimates released this summer by the Association of American Publishers, sales of adult fiction fell 16% between 2013 and 2017, from $5.21 billion to $4.38 billion.” These general trends feel true enough to me, even if they don’t comment much on literary memoirs, which I suspect are some of the books impinging on the literary fiction market.
More telling to me than any of the above numbers is the fact that the contemporary giants of American literary fiction when I started writing fiction— Bellow, Morrison, Updike—greatly favored the novel form over the memoir, if not disavowed the memoir altogether. Toni Morrison flat out refused to write a memoir, proclaiming, “there's a point at which your life is not interesting.”
Regardless of what Morrison thought of it, contemporary literary writers are far more amenable to the memoir form. Many such as Karr, Eggers, Gilbert, and Strayed built their careers on memoir, to the point that it becomes harder for me to imagine literary careers that don’t take some advantage of the form. The reasons are at least two-fold. The first is that the memoir relies on—along with its often positive and compelling redemptive arc—the voyeuristic impulses of the reader, and this strong and immediate readerly appeal helps create interest in the writer and their life. We want to know what’s going on behind the curtain of a writer’s life, what their struggles are like, if they’re like our own, and that pull is often a primary ingredient writers use to curry interest in themselves from the literary writing audience. With scant number of spots open to satisfy the buyers of this comparatively small reading market, it becomes necessary for the talented writer to use every arrow in their quiver to gain interest. As noble as the form might be in other ways, nothing says “look at me” quite like the memoir.
Genre Fiction is Trying to Kill Literary Fiction
An event that might reveal a more direct correlation to the decline of literary fiction occurred in 1997 with the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The popularity of this fantasy series coincided with the publication of this first installment. I remember people talking about it as a kids’ book that adults could love. Between 1997 and 2007, J.K Rowling released seven Harry Potter books, and as of February 2018, the series has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling book series in history.
The Harry Potter series marked the first time I remember genre fiction being praised in terms usually reserved for literary fiction. I was in graduate school for writing from 2000 to 2002, and it was understood people in my class were, in some instances, forgoing more obvious literary works for Harry Potter titles. I of course had to try one out. I made it about to page 100 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone before petering out. It struck me as much good genre work strikes me. It was easy enough to move through the pages, but I wasn’t particularly entertained or interested. I seem to lack the necessary formative experiences with genre fiction to appreciate it as most readers do, and this series felt very much like other genre titles I’d read. Our entertainment culture would be dominated over the next two decades, both in book and film, by Harry Potter, which corresponds directly to the fading of literary fiction as a more widely popular form.
Also, the past two decades mark what I want to call the ascension of Stephen King to something more than wildly successful genre writer. King spent the latter part of the 20th century publishing popular horror novels, but by 2003, he was the recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He edited the collection The Best American Short Stories 2007, and his craft book On Writing, published in 2010, is one of the most celebrated books on writing over the past two decades. King was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2014, and by 2017, Brigham Young University’s College of Humanities dubbed him “America’s Storyteller.” Thus, a genre writer of popular prose received awards and positions that a few decades previously would’ve more typically gone to the likes of Updike, Morrison, or Bellow. I’ve read two Stephen King novels, both assigned for a college class on horror fiction taught by an instructor I liked. They felt like genre works in the sense that they felt removed from literary concerns. I didn’t much care for them. Clearly I’m in the minority.
No one should begrudge Rowling and King their well-earned respect, or chastise their readers for their enjoyment of these books. Still, it’s noteworthy that the rise of both of these genre authors to such heralded literary status corresponds directly with lagging interest in literary fiction. Since the late 90s, writers and readers seem anxious to dub well-written genre work “literary.” It’s hard not to see that interest as somehow reflecting a lack of interest in works that would more easily fit into the literary fiction tradition.
The Golden Age of Television is Trying to Kill Literary fiction
The attack on literary fiction also corresponds closely with the newest golden age of television—which runs from the late 1990s (The Sopranos) to something like the present day. In our current age, many seem to prefer getting their fiction from TV series.
I participated in this golden age. I found series such as The Wire and Deadwood too good to pass up, and for my money, Mad Men is the Beatles of television. I’ve since fallen away from TV series, and movies as well, but I respect how good these shows were during this era.
The Sopranos started in 1998, which became the first great series of the new television golden age and a great excuse for those who might read literary fiction to have their fiction needs satisfied elsewhere.
The Concept of Fake News is Trying to Kill Literary fiction
Hasn’t fiction itself recently has been abused at levels previously unknown? For at least the past decade, people have used the internet to tell fictions that are meant to pose as facts, trading on their real-world credibility to promote lies they want credulous people to believe are true. I can think of three fictions disseminated that were clearly meant to pose as facts and affect what people do, and they were all perpetuated by a sitting U.S. president. One was that his health care plan was perpetually coming in “two weeks.” Another was that the pandemic caused by COVID-19 was perpetually under control. The one likely to have the worst long-term effect is that he won the 2020 election and it was stolen from him. These are all just from the last year of Donald Trump’s first term as president. Before having his accounts suspended in 2021, Donald Trump had 80 million Twitter followers (or about 1 in 4 of all Twitter users) and 32 million Facebook friends.
I can’t help but believe that, for many, such lie-telling is eroding the appeal of fiction more broadly. When one is bombarded with lies at the highest levels and at alarming frequencies, it seems our only emotional recourse is to search for books that tell us something based on fact. Because of the world today, extending the trust required to enter someone else’s imaginative world seems to be harder than it used to be. We don’t want to be lied to. Maybe that’s why the literary world is skewing toward fact-based narratives and away from fictional ones.
Still, if we’re looking for one reason for literary fiction’s waning presence in our culture, then there’s one phenomenon that lines up well with the beginning of the trend and all of the others mentioned above.
The Internet is Trying to Kill Literary Fiction
I remember my first computer. 1994. It was larger and more beige than the laptop I write on today. I was excited to start using the World Wide Web. The internet featured few videos or memes or much of what we associate with it today. I recall some low-grade websites, mostly jokey in content. I wanted to get on the internet to send and receive email. It meant I would be able to send people messages that didn’t have to go through the U.S. Post. It would be instantaneous.
The hype surrounding this new technology made me think that it would lead to more advanced forms of communication. Not holograms or video chats or anything like that. I believed somehow this new device would make written communication better and—specifically—deeper. It would make language count for more, maybe help us unriddle the philosophical conundrums that had plagued us for centuries. It would make the chronicling of the beats of our hearts more substantial, more true. I had no reason to believe this other than hypertext, and maybe the fact that the first big retail internet company—Amazon—sold books. The internet would advance the written word. What else was it for?
It only took a few emails from my friends to realize that we were all still the same flawed creatures from before dialup, and our emails wouldn’t offer clearer, more direct paths to truth and beauty. Reading the dashed off goofiness that people found necessary to zap over to me instantaneously revealed that the internet was not here to raise the bar. In fact, it might very well lower it.
The ubiquitous use of the internet in this country started in 1994. Time did a cover story on the World Wide Web that year. American Online started to circulate widely that year as well, its software coming to you unasked-for in the mail. The contents of those software boxes included floppy disks that weren’t floppy but smaller than their predecessors and made of hard plastic. Yahoo! was founded in 1994. Microsoft published its first web page in 1994. In my world in Phoenix, AZ, at the time, I was ramping up for a life online, as were so many others.
In 1995, The Liars’ Club became the first literary memoir hit of its kind and also an early literary memoir crossover hit for people who typically read literary fiction.
In 1997, the Harry Potter series made genre fiction reading a more legitimate pursuit for those who might have previously gravitated to literary fiction.
The Sopranos started in 1998.
So, the internet killed literary fiction, which works out well for me because I like to blame the internet for everything.
Wait, correlation is not causation. If I’m going to prove the internet’s culpability in the attempt to kill literary fiction, I’d better have evidence.
One hypothesis posits that the internet, through portals such as Google, is an attempt at a repository of all human knowledge. Therefore, the retention of knowledge for people in the digital age is seen intrinsically as something not striven for, or even particularly desired. Why learn something when you can look it up on the internet when you need it? A 2011 paper published in Science shows that college students remembered less information when they knew they could easily access it later on a computer. Also, the average number of Google searches per day grew from 9,800 in 1998 to over 4.7 trillion—per day—in 2013. We seem to be relying deeply on the internet for information that we used to rely on our brains to store. This is a fundamental change from the way humans have felt about acquiring knowledge at least since the Enlightenment, probably much longer.
While the value of having random facts at our cerebral disposal might seem specious, the role those facts play in cultivating the tools necessary to foster deeper critical thought and creative ideas is more relevant here. The process of learning things from our world, creating associations within our brains with other previously learned things, and developing new thoughts from those associations, is an essential process of brain—and human—development. On a cognitive level, we take things from the world, combine them with things we already know, and create new ideas.
With the internet, we’ve learned, unconsciously or otherwise, that we don’t need to know things. We only need to know how to react to things. Information just sort of floats by, and we point our boats toward the things we want or need at the moment, then coast away when we no longer need it, usually within seconds.
No doubt some of this information sticks, but it’s easy for me to imagine that the majority of those things are not at our cognitive disposal when it’s time to think. We are left with more passive minds that have a reduced capacity for intellectual life outside of what’s right in front of us. We’ve been trained to rely on our blink instincts, our visual intelligence. Our job now, it seems, is to react instead of to think. Maybe it always was, but it has been turned up quite a bit with the internet.
It’s not that we need to keep all of that internet information in our heads all the time. Too much information for a brain seems just as detrimental as too little. On an unconscious level, we’re predominantly worried about what we need right now, and therefore in an indirect way, we stunt our ability to make associations with things for later. In short, the process of retaining information in our brains provides the necessary building blocks upon which we learn to think for ourselves, and our use of the internet has removed much of our conscious need for that infrastructure.
So, what could all of this intellectual diminishment have to do with the decline of literary fiction? There’s a wide gap in my argument between the rise of the internet and decline of interest in literary fiction.
To fill it, I think the internet is teaching us new ways to value the information that floats by. Our diminishing awareness of the need for information in our heads has allowed us to become more particular about what we summon the energy to consume. Specifically, fictional information now seems less important to us than what we perceive as more factual information. In other words, I believe we care less about retaining anything than ever before, and we care the least about retaining fictional elements. Like the internet, fictional elements float by, entertain us for the moment, and then, by and large, we forget them. This has always been true to some extent, but seemingly never so true than now. Our cognitive interest in retaining information is at an all-time low, but I believe that information is hierarchical. I believe fiction is low in the hierarchy of the internet-saturated mind.
As proof, let’s separate everything we can learn on the internet into one of two groups, perceived facts or perceived fictions. The “perceived”s stem from the fact that we can’t know for certain what’s fact or fiction by coming across it on the internet. The baseball game highlights I watch on the internet from my favorite team winning the game last night strike me as real. My favorite team was scheduled to play a game last night against Team B, and the highlights I watch are of these two teams. The website where I watch these highlights is a trusted one, one I strongly suspect isn’t out to fool me. The highlight of my favorite player hitting a home run matches the box score of the game. Therefore, I perceive these highlights as real, as fact. My team really did win.
In another instance, if the president is talking about how he won the 2020 election, I perceive that he is telling a fiction. I believe there are facts to back up my disbelief in the same way there are facts that back up my belief that my team won the game last night. He might or might not understand he’s telling a fiction, but I perceive his information—that he won the 2020 election—as not true, as fiction.
So, two types of information: the perceived fact of my team winning last night, and the perceived fiction that the current president won the 2020 election as opposed to lost it. Which bit of information do I retain?
Consciously, neither. I’m not out to remember the facts of the game’s score, or my favorite player’s big hit. I’m also not out to remember that a president is disseminating falsehoods. Still, I remember both, at least for a time. My favorite player might get a big hit later in the year, and I might think, “He sure has a knack for getting big hits. Remember that last time?” Also, the former president might bring up the supposed rigged election again, and I might think, “Would you please shut up?”
Of note here is the emotional value I place in perceived facts and perceived fictions. This perceived fact I remember as pleasing. Sure, part of the pleasure is that my team won and my favorite player played well, but there’s also some weird, overarching value to the fact that I perceive this all as fact, that I can count on the fact that it happened. I believe the world is not out to fool me in this instance, and I can use this factual information when my player gets another big hit later in the year and formulate my opinion of his overall skills. (“He sure has a knack for getting big hits.”)
Let’s imagine for a moment that all of my assumptions are wrong, that the highlights I watch from the game are, in fact, fictional. Say Descartes’s equivalent of an evil demon lurks out there in the digital world. He’s hacked into my computer, and he posts computer simulations of replays of games for me that make me think my team won last night when in fact my team lost. How would that change my perception of these “facts”?
This would be a bummer on many levels. I count on the internet to give me facts, but unfortunately, the internet has become a vessel people use to disseminate fiction that they want others to perceive as facts. Many are manipulating footage and information for political reasons to make this individual or that political party look bad. A famous example was one in which a deepfake video of a speech by Nancy Pelosi was doctored to make her look drunk. Facebook was pressured to remove the video from their site, and they refused. Many saw the video, and only a concerted effort to make sure people knew it was doctored kept it from being perceived as something that actually happened.
And just in case I get too comfortable in one political perspective, in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, CBS rushed evidence on air challenging elements of then-President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1970s. The evidence was quickly revealed as inaccurate, and Dan Rather, who initially reported it, lost his job. This is just one very-well-known example of shoddy journalism from the left. In 2025, I hope most internet users understand that much of the information they’re getting is, if not fabricated, heavily manipulated. If we’re starting to lean toward literary works more likely to hold facts—such as literary memoir—as opposed to those likely to hold fictions—such as literary fiction—it shouldn’t come as a surprise. The internet seems to be making us this way.
Right now, I can hear 500 million Harry Potter fans yelling, “What are you talking about? We love fiction more than ever.” If literary fiction is suffering from inattention, this group might posit, it’s not because literary fiction is fiction but because it’s literary. Likewise, the millions of people who love TV shows such as The Sopranos and its many golden age descendants don’t seem to mind that nothing in the show is fact. It’s a relief that people aren’t abandoning these imaginative journeys into worlds. They’re just not offering, as I speculate, the same attention to literary fiction that they used to.
It seems we read fiction primarily because we want a break from fact. We want to approach the piece as made up on some level, outside of the realm of our corporeal world. We want to make sure no one is trying to pull something over on us, especially these days. If I call something fiction, I can buy claim to an imaginative world that doesn’t have to abide by the laws of this one. Perhaps fiction has in the past 20 or so years become the realm of deeper escape from reality. Maybe we now want our fiction completely divorced from the world we know. Give us a broom-stick flying wizard, or some criminals distinctly different from the ones on the evening news. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, so long as it’s not the world we live in. That way, no one can say they’re being duped.
Literary fiction has always had elements of escape as well. Most who love it love delving into Jane Austen’s world, or Mark Twain’s world, or Homer’s world. Still, most readers view literary fiction as more than simply an escape. It offers something more elevated than that—“truth,” or accurate commentary on life, or a more reliable examination of the human condition. My favorite explanation of literary fiction is that, at its best, it transcends the corporeal world and offers at least a brief glance at the ineffable. We come to it because we don’t just want to turn pages to finish a book to start another book to finish a book. We want a great author to tell us something we don’t know about life, or to reaffirm something we do know.
Literary fiction isn’t just a way to stimulate your mind. It’s a way to learn about the world that runs contrary to the way our current one wants us to think about it. Literary fiction is not constantly demanding our immersion, our supplication, our money. Name any classic literary title from over 100 years ago, and I bet I can find a copy of it for you for free. Literary fiction wants you to slow down, to consider more, to reflect more, to breathe more fully in its company. It doesn’t need to grab onto you making sure you don’t go away. It doesn’t want anything from you—not even, really, your attention. If it did, you wouldn’t have to walk so quickly past that copy of Ulysses or Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov that you bought years ago in a swell of optimism thinking you were going to knock off that behemoth one day very soon. That’s literary fiction’s magic. It doesn’t want you. It wants you to want a deeper part of yourself.
But we stray. We all do. We all love our favorite internet whatevers, the rush of stimulation it offers our lives. It’s the cigarette break of the 21st century, but afterwards your breath doesn’t stink.
Maybe you’ve more or less graduated from the literary novel and are waiting for that last unread Virginia Woolf title to season before you take the plunge. Maybe you’ll do it next year, or maybe when you retire. Of course, Orlando (which has been sitting in my to-read pile—my physical to-read pile, right here in my office—for 20 years) doesn’t change during that time. It’s we who change. I once lamented to a writer friend of mine that I loved Pride and Prejudice, but I hadn’t found the time to read any other Austen. He nodded and motioned with his hands in a way that said, “It’ll keep.” That’s fine, too. Literary fiction’s truth is universal. It spans any era. You will come back, and so will I. It’s the only place in the world you can get what it offers.
In 2019, a World Psychiatry review revealed that “the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in specific areas of cognition, which may reflect changes in the brain, affecting our attentional capacities, memory processes, and social interactions.” I find this to be true in my case, and I at least partly attribute my own disinclination to engage with literary fiction to the training of my brain through what’s now its fourth decade of more or less daily internet usage. My brain doesn’t want me to slow down long enough to consider what Orlando might have to offer. When I do that, I’m not buying anything or clicking on anything. When I read the good stuff, I’m not stimulated to levels associated with life on the internet. When I read great literary fiction, there is room for something else, for other things, other people: my wife, family, friends. When I finally sit down to read Orlando, come bother me. I won’t mind.
This might be a long-winded way to say that literary fiction is boring, and I think there are worse ways to put it. It is definitely a step back from the level of stimulation I associate with contemporary online activity, which has been likened to addiction. David Foster Wallace put it like this: “Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” You could argue that a breath of fresh air is boring compared to, say, a hit of meth, and I would understand what you mean. Still, I wouldn’t want meth over a breath of fresh air. The day I do will be my first as an addict.
I love the digital realm for many reasons—online banking, prose editing, home recording—but it wants too much of our souls. If we can’t put away our internet heads for literary fiction, that’s not on Shakespeare or Twain or Austen or Melville or Dostoyevsky. It’s amazing what this digital realm—which I use to communicate this piece to you—is doing to us, and that we willingly allow it to happen. If, these days, our souls are just a little bit light on the depth reflected by our efforts to read literary fiction, it’s no mystery what caused it.