The Author in Contemporary America

Where does the creative generalist fit in these days?

It surprised me to learn a few weeks ago, that author George Saunders does not like make a living from his fiction. He as been widely and skillfully published and promoted and his novel Lincoln on the Bardo was a best seller. His short story collections sell in an era where such books mostly don’t. He is a MacArthur Foundation grant recipient, which comes with. fat check (but only one). Saunders makes his living, he says, as a creative writing and literature professor. That’s where the steady money, health insurance and retirement planning comes from, not the books that got him there.

It’s never been easy, of course, to make a living as a creative writer. It’s a privilege no writer is owed or can count on. There are a few decisions worth making that help the odds. People who write screenplays can get big paydays, but those are a bit more like the MacArthur grants — lovely to have, but not dependable enough to give steadier income. People on television show staffs make living wages and sometimes a lot of money. But that’s highly collaborative work for hire. It’s no doubt good work and fun but unless you’re Larry David, the television show you write for is probably not going to be an expression of you the way Catcher in the Rye was an expression of JD Salinger.

Writing genre fiction is also a way to try to make a living out of it, especially if you’re writing tie-in novels to movies and television shows. But, again, this is more like getting staffed on a Saved by the Bell reboot than it is being Joyce Carol Oates or Irvine Welsh.

So, the economic space for the writer of mainstream, literary or non-genre fiction is precarious as ever. What about the cultural space? There was a time, when you made a political satire like the movie Bob Roberts where you held a spot in the cast for Gore Vidal. Or, when you made a silly movie like Back to School, you brought in Kurt Vonnegut for a gag and people got the reference. There was a time where mainstream media might well ask Paul Auster for his political take not because of any particular political expertise but because of his authority as a storyteller and empath.

The writer as public intellectual in the style of Voltaire, Vonnegut, or Mark Twain seems to have lost relevance. A recent New Yorker article about the moral component of David Foster Wallace’s later work also recaps his personal failings. Maybe those flaws, which Wallace grappled with in his fiction, are why Wallace was the last of the public intellectual writers. We no longer tolerate their messy lives. Oh, Jonathan Franzen tries to fill the public intellectual role every now and then, but something about his tone makes people mock him for it, so it doesn’t work.

One point of view is to say “So be it.” Creative writers are just entertainers, after all, and so their musings about society and politics have no more value than those of an actor, athlete or musician. The Middlebrow disagrees here on a two grounds. The first is that we still regularly give an outsized political voice to famous people from other forms of art and entertainment. If Kim Kardashian’s politics matter, then Jonathan Lethem’s damned well should, too. The second is that the “shut up and sing” line given to the Dixie Chicks back during the Gulf War sequel was always wrong. Everybody should have a voice.

But are novelists especially qualified? The Middlebrow says yes. Writing fiction is a kind of scenario planning for life. So people who do it well and carefully gain a loot of insight. They can draw on not only the experience of their own lives, but of their imagined lives, in ways that others surely can, but mostly don’t.

We should also consider, as we’ve moved the novelist out of the public sphere that a vacuum hasn’t been left behind. Business leaders, both founders and executives, have always had a voice here and always will. In some senses, this is fair. They need a voice because to advocate for their companies and they get a voice because they fund bth politics and media. But running a business successfully is not practice for running an open society because businesses are, by design, driven by rank and power. They mostly practice life in a world where they can do what they think best, without much deference to others, which is the opposite of the scenario planning of fiction, where the good author considers the needs and desires of all the characters.

Novelists are also pushed out in favor of specialized journalists. Again, these are people who need and deserve a voice in the conversation, but people who cover politics and define the boundaries of the national conversation are not a good substitute for well-studied outsiders who might broaden the national conversation.

Finally, there are the charlatans — string readers who oversimplify literary concepts and turn them into societal commentary, like Jordan Peterson who has emerged as a low-rent Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, or Rollo May.

We really must bring the serious person of creative letters back into the national conversation. We’re missing out on a huge and important voice.