How Reading Became A Virtue

Until fairly recently, people didn't read much.

I am about a quarter way through Dan Sinykin’s book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. I have a feeling I’ll be writing a few pieces about this very important historical survey. One of Sinykin’s goals here is not just to tally up the deals of publishing industry consolidation but to measure the artistic effect. After all, in an age of corporate dealings that really gathered steam in the 1960s, America’s publishers put out some great and important fiction, just as large Hollywood studios have produced great movies by fantastic directors.

You can’t completely turn your nose up at the big corporations who gave us Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith… pick your favorites. Part of Sinykin’s story is that all of these authors participate in a shared enterprise with conglomerate publishers that answer to shareholders and that the story behind any successful book is just a lot more complicated than our romantic notions of the author as visionary.

As I said, there’s a lot to deal with there, and I’ll be taking it up in future columns. I want to savor reading Big Fiction because it is beautifully written and structured. I also want to take my time with its ideas because it punctures some myths of the author as hero that I have held as fundamental for many, many years. Remember, when some complained that a biography of Philip Roth had become a hagiography, that made me happy because I want to read an admiring story about him. That’s just who I am with books and their writers.

One thread of Big Fiction is the development of middlebrow literary culture, personified by best selling writers like Gore Vidal and Stephen King. A big portion of the book is devoted to E.L. Doctorow, who grew up reading pulp paperbacks, wrote a few himself, and then earned the largest fiction advance in history for Rag Time, a plot driven, but intellectual work of history that was a huge bestseller and a triumph of the middlebrow sensibility.

During the post World War II years an audience of readers emerged that the United States had not seen before. In the 19th century, books were hard to get and expensive. Reading and book collecting were wealthy pursuits. Cheaper pulp paperbacks and the emergence of racks of books in drug stores helped to democratize things and the GI Bill and accessibility to higher education hooked people on words.

Now, this isn’t in Sinykin’s argument (at least not yet) but I was brought up with the idea that reading is a virtuous activity that would develop a defter mind, reward curiosity and independent thinking, and would inspire great ideas. Even reading, like, a Star Trek novel was better than watching an episode on television because it forced the use and development of the mind’s eye.

In my family, this seems to have been handed down from the World War II generation. None of my grandparents went to college but they saw reading and book ownership as paths to betterment. Especially on my father’s side of the family, they read novels and histories, art books and philosophy and popular books about physics and astronomy. A guy like Carl Sagan made a guy like my grandfather, who owned an industrial dry cleaning business, feel like he could be part of bigger conversations.

The midcentury American embrace of books deeply influenced parenting choices in ways that are still part of the culture. New parents are implored to read to young children and the concern there is not simple literacy but to teach empathy and to inspire the imagination. Books transport us to other places and other lives.

But so does music and so do movies and so do video games and so does the internet (even X, nee Twitter). All entertainments, in all their forms, have had to deal with the competition for our attention that has only accelerated since the television age. In most industries, companies used to compete with their peers. Publishers competed with other publishers to sell the most books. A movie studio would compete with a rival studio to sell the most tickets. This is no longer the case. These days, every book that’s published has to compete for attention with every free Substack (like this one, though The Middlebrow is friendly to books and all creative people).

One thing that has changed is that the book as object no longer signifies what it used to. At work, the smart executive used to have an office with full book shelves. Now, many of us office workers don’t even have dedicated workspaces where we could store a small library. When I moved home to New York City in 1999, the sidewalks were full of people walking while reading, and I was often among them. I was never anywhere without a physical book, though there was one time I wished I hand’t been carrying a certain Carl Van Vechten novel.

Book stores have been disappearing. During the 19th century, they were not so common and then, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks showed up in every mall in America and now we’re back to decently-sized towns without bookstores again, though online options make books, if not the experience of buying them, an easy purchase pretty much wherever you are.

Remembering the years of the literary “brat pack” author Bret Easton Ellis has said that there will never again be so much enthusiasm and cultural significance to a novel release ever again. This does seem right — the world is full of books and, thankfully, of readers, but the cultural significance of literature (fiction and non) seems on the wane and the authority of the author as cultural leader and public intellectual has been diminished.

I wonder if we still see reading as a moral virtue, or if that thinking ever made sense.