I was listening to an Australia-based podcast yesterday. It concerns itself with literature, choosing as its guests a wide variety of authors/academics/critics from around the world who typically grapple with writing at the margins. The conceit of the show caught my attention in a sea of audio dreck (big publications like the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and NYRB are temperamentally incapable of not-smarm, the shows dedicated to particular authors are simply recorded hagiography, and people who are striking out on their own are probably insane (see: me)). After about 45 minutes of listening to its year-end special, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a good literature podcast, this Aussie product included.

What did me in? The backslapping, the blank endorsement of every book the hosts read as being, “smart, timely, beautiful, moving”, and a conspicuous (maybe purposeful?) absence of that vanishing desire to critique/criticize anything anyone makes. Consider my back officially broken when one interviewee claimed that the recent 900 page (two volume!) novel of another interviewee on the call was, and I quote, “perhaps the greatest Jewish American novel ever written.” Yes, I’m intolerant, but anyone with the temerity to make that kind of blanket statement automatically loses credibility as a serious reviewer. Hell, it could even be true! And yet the book isn’t even published yet — you can say something complimentary about a peer’s work to their face without elevating it to a place in the canon before the public has even seen it.

This doesn’t even begin to get in to the idea that any 900 page (did I mention two volume?! Unbelievable) tome being published today is worth the attention it would demand of any reader. We live in an era of English-language literary fiction whose content weight is ever more thin between the pressures of mass-market publishing and an apparent drive to write beautifully for the sake of writing beautifully. If prose is not deemed sufficiently, “beautiful,” (whatever that means) it is consigned to being boring, vacuous, and not worth the time. This mindset encourages writers to mine solely for pretty turns of phrase when single sentences are at their lowest value ever. It should be enough that someone’s writing is not a chore to read and, critically, is building upon itself to say something.

How much can a 900-1000 page (TWO VOLUME!!!!) novel in 2023-2024 say that matters? Or will we open this tome and find that it, like so many others, tells a pretty story that is incapable of going past the skin-deep? If we are the unfortunate soul who spent months or years writing this, at least we can take comfort in the fact that nobody will have the courage to say a bad word about it when it hits the market.

What a waste.