Everything and Less

Everything and Less

The Novel in the Age of Amazon

Mark McGurl

First published by Verso 2021

© Mark McGurl 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-385-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-387-8 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-386-1 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardback Edition as Follows

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

for Celeste, for everything

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Bezos as Novelist

Introduction: Retail Therapy

1. Fiction as a Service

2. What Is Multinational Literature? Amazon All Over the World

3. Generic Love, or, The Realism of Romance

4. Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle

5. World-Scaling: Literary Fiction in the Genre System

6. Surplus Fiction: The Undeath of the Novel

Afterword: Boxed In

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share my work in progress on this book with audiences at many institutions in the US and elsewhere. Their queries, suggestions, and criticisms have been a tremendous help. Gratitude is also due to Michaela Bronstein, Ulrika Carlsson, J. D. Connor, Celeste Crystal, Nathan Nebeker, and Sianne Ngai for reading things on short notice. Parts of chapters 1 and 4 have previously appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Public Books, American Literary History, and a volume of essays edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges. I am thankful to the editors of those publications for editorial assistance on those portions of the book. Thanks also to my colleagues and students in the Department of English at Stanford University, who have enabled the research and writing that went into the book in innumerable ways.

Preface

Bezos as Novelist

The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read. But this was not for want of an obvious success in achieving the aims of works of their kind—that kind being literary fiction, so called to distinguish it from more generic varieties. In Bezos’s hands it is a fiction of close observation, deliberate pacing, credible plotting, believable characters and meticulous craft. The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) and Traps (2013) are perfectly good novels if one has a taste for it.¹

The second thing that needs to be noted about them is that, after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, founder and controlling shareholder of Amazon, their author is the richest woman in the world, or close enough, worth in excess (as I write these words) $60 billion, mostly from her holdings of Amazon stock. She is no doubt the wealthiest published novelist of all time by a factor of … whatever, a high number. Compared to her, J. K. Rowling is still poor.

It’s the garishness of the latter fact that makes the high quality of her fiction so hard to credit, so hard to know what to do with except ignore it in favor of the spectacle of titanic financial power and the gossipy blather it carries in train. How can the gifts she has given the world as an artist begin to compare with those she has been issuing as hard cash? Of late it has been reported that Bezos, now going by the name MacKenzie Scott, has been dispensing astonishingly large sums of money very fast, giving it to worthy causes, although not as fast as she has been making it as a holder of stock in her ex’s company. Driven by the increasing centrality of online shopping to contemporary life, its price has been climbing. There are many fine writers of literary fiction, maybe too many—too many to pay close attention to, anyway—but only one world’s richest lady.

For this book, however, the weird disjunction between the subtleties of literary fiction and the garishness of contemporary capitalism and popular culture is the point. The book argues that the rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail. In making that case and pursuing its consequences, the fact that the former wife of the founder of Amazon is a novelist is as good a place to begin as any. On the one hand, as we’ll see, Amazon is nothing if not a literary company, a vast engine for the production and circulation of stories. It started as a bookstore and has remained committed ever since to facilitating our access to fiction in various ways. On the other hand, the epic inflection it gives to storytelling could hardly be more distinct from the subtle dignities and delights of literary fiction of the sort written by MacKenzie Bezos.

It was she who, according to legend, took the wheel as the couple drove across the country from New York to Seattle to start something new, leaving her husband free to tap away at spreadsheets on his laptop screen in the passenger seat. If this presents an image of Jeff as the author of Amazon in an almost literal sense, it surely mattered—mattered a lot—that his idea for an online bookstore was fleshed out while living with an actual author of books or aspiring one. Writing is really all I’ve ever wanted to do, she said upon the occasion of the publication of the first novel in 2005.² By this time Amazon was already the great new force in book publishing, although it had yet to introduce the Kindle e-reader, the device that made a market for e-books. Neither had it hit upon perhaps its most dramatic intervention into literary history, Kindle Direct Publishing, the free-to-use platform by whose means untold numbers of aspiring authors have found their way into circulation, some of them finding real success. It had not yet purchased the book-centric social media site Goodreads, or Audible.com, or founded any of the sixteen more or less traditional publishing imprints it now runs out of Seattle.

That self-published writers have succeeded mostly by producing the aforementioned forthrightly generic varieties of fiction, and not literary fiction, is part of the story this book will tell. Romance, mystery, fantasy, horror, science fiction—these are the genres at the heart of Amazon’s advance upon contemporary literary life. They come at readers promising not fresh observations of the intricacies of real human relationships—although they sometimes do that by the way—but compellingly improbable if in most ways highly familiar plots.

In one recent self-published success, a man awakens to find he has been downloaded into a video game. Rallying himself surprisingly quickly, he lives his version of The Lord of the Rings, but now with a tabulation of various game statistics appearing in his mind’s eye. In another, a young woman is gifted with the power of prophesy, making her a target of the darkly authoritarian Guild. Run, girl, run! In still another, a woman has a job as a secret shopper, testing the level of customer service at various retail stores, stumbling into a love affair with the impossibly handsome billionaire who owns them all. Then there are the zombies. There are as many moderately successful self-published zombie novels as there are zombies in any given zombie novel—hundreds of them. Whether dropping from the air into the Kindle or other device, or showing up on the doorstep in a flat brown box, these are the works that Amazon’s customers demand in largest numbers and which it is happy to supply.

The Testing of Luther Albright is nothing like them, though no doubt it, too, has been delivered to doorsteps by Amazon on occasion. What I find fascinating is how the traces of genre fiction are visible in the novel all the same, if only under the mark of negation. Told in the first person, it recounts the strained but loving relationship of a repressed WASP father to his wife and son. He is a successful civil engineer in Sacramento, a designer of dams, and has built the family home with his own hands. Leaning perhaps too heavily into the analogy between the structural soundness of buildings and of family relationships, the novel has an ominously procedural, even forensic quality, reflecting the quality of mind of the man who narrates it. Luther is not a negligent father or husband, just a painfully self-conscious and overly careful one, so much so that he might be creating the cracks in the foundation of his life it was his whole purpose to avoid.

But no dam breaks and nothing ever crashes to the ground.

Indeed, it can seem that the novel is structured by a systematic refusal of potential melodrama, the kind of thing that would naturally have been at the center of a thriller. He buys his son a nice new car and watches nervously as he drives it a bit carelessly, but no horrific accident ever occurs. His strikingly pretty wife gets a job at a crisis helpline and begins to stay out late. She is acting a bit strange. Is she having an affair? Actually, no, she is just working hard talking people off the ledge. There has been an earthquake near Sacramento. Will the dam he designed break, drowning thousands? No, it holds, despite the best efforts of a local reporter to scare people into thinking it won’t. Best of all: Luther has hidden the gun he inherited from his alcoholic father in a secret compartment in the basement. He worries about it being there. It throbs in his mind like a telltale heart. Chekhov’s law tells us it is required eventually to go off, but it never does.

This is not just literary fiction, but militantly literary fiction, however politely so. It insists on the dramatic tension built into ordinary middle-class life. It is a declaration of autonomy from the ginned-up fakery of genre fiction even as it watches the latter out of the corner of its eye. The same is true of Traps. Told in the present tense, alternating the stories of four quite different women in Southern California and Nevada over the course of a few days, it contrives their convergence at a crucial juncture in each of their lives. It has something of the structure of the modern thriller à la Dan Brown but without the global conspiracies and evil monks and rigorously indifferent prose. Instead it features a subtle background motif of our relation to dogs, those creatures we care for but who can also occasionally be dangerous. It attends to details—"a bulletin board behind her fringed with notes and flyers and a few canceled checks, and on the counter next to the register sit a bowl of peppermint candies, a March of Dimes donation can, and a rack of People magazines, the one with mothers and children on the cover"—with no significance other than as an intensification of what Roland Barthes called the reality effect of realist fiction.³

Unless it be those copies of People magazine: one of the four protagonists of Traps, the easiest to connect to the situation of her author, is a skittish movie star and mother who sees her family life become fodder for paparazzi. Another, we learn, is part of the private security team that protects her as one surely protects MacKenzie herself in real life. Against the luridness of Hollywood gossip, the novel is on the side of the sanctity of private histories and intimacies. It finds interest and even some excitement in the difficult work of maternal care, which can turn the traps of life and love into opportunities for growth and renewal. Like Luther Albright, it is a testament to the decisive importance of family. Family life being some of the favored territory of literary fiction, much less prevalent as a theme in romance, mystery, fantasy, or science fiction. Appropriately, the novel is dedicated to the author’s parents, and its acknowledgments speak touchingly of the personal importance of her four children and then husband, Jeff.

A man who, meanwhile, is known to have a taste for popular fiction, especially for works of epic science fiction, although he has a documented interest in literary fiction, too. Perhaps he was encouraged in that direction by MacKenzie, who studied creative writing with Toni Morrison at Princeton. He attended the same university but studied computer science. As the author (he would prefer the term inventor) of Amazon, he has created something akin to a work of epic science fiction sprung to life. The sprawling logistical networks, state-of-the-art warehouses, superpowered information technologies and interfaces—all of it, to which we might add his personal investment in space travel through his privately held company Blue Origin, an investment said to be running at the rate of about a billion dollars a year. For one commentator, Amazon’s core competence is really "storytelling, not the other stuff. Through storytelling, outlining a huge vision, Amazon has reshaped the relation between company and shareholder."⁴ Has it done the same for the relation between writer and reader?

In the early years of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was very much a showman—a goofily ingratiating alternative to Steve Jobs with a notoriously honking laugh. Amazon was something that had to be sold hard to shareholders and customers alike. These days, with nothing left to prove to anyone, his public persona has cooled, his gaze sharpened, the laugh traded in for a quietly bemused smile. As could have been predicted by one of his ex’s novels, with their suspicion of predatory media, he briefly found himself at the center of a dick pic blackmail scandal involving his new TV-anchor-cum-helicopter pilot girlfriend, but handled it with admirably preemptive efficiency before it could really get off the ground. Even so, the distance Jeff has traveled from domestic life with a camera-shy, preppie novelist wife could hardly have been made clearer. From now on, the founder of what once billed itself as Earth’s Biggest Bookstore would himself be living large, larger than life.

In truth, it’s not quite fair to associate all of this with popular genre fiction, only one sort of which runs toward the epic— the big, the bold, the world-forming. Neither is literary fiction always obsessed with the intimate and small, having its own avatars of epic in writers like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Karen Tei Yamashita, and the like. If works like MacKenzie Bezos’s are sometimes held in contempt for their avoidance of politics in favor of domesticity, the epic versions of literary fiction are harder to criticize on those grounds. As this book will explain, the dynamic opposition of more to less and vice versa has been fundamental to the aesthetic development of contemporary fiction in all its forms, high and low. One might speak, for instance, of how the romance novel, that most generic of genres, is all about the forging of the small world of a marriage as a space apart from the alienations of modern life. This is as opposed to the epic sprawl of Game of Thrones, where marriages are wholly public, wholly political, and deadly; or for that matter a science fiction epic like Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008), whose concerns are so cosmic as to leave that level of human relations behind altogether.

More and less. If the keynote of Amazon is certainly the first, the second is never far behind as a rejoinder to it in an aesthetic economy shadowing the real one. A real one where, in a sense, every meaningful decision is a matter of having or acquiring or selling or spending more or less of something, including of course money. Whether in the form of literary fiction or genre fiction—the first, in the Age of Amazon, being in essence a subset of the second, simply a genre in its own right—the novel will appear in these pages as what I would call an existential scaling device. It is a tool for adjusting our emotional states toward the desired end of happiness, whatever that might look like to a given reader, however complex or simple a state it might be. Fulfilling that task depends upon the rules of genre, upon the implied contract it draws up between author and reader for the reliable delivery of stories of a familiar kind. Genre being a version, within the literary field, of the phenomena of market segmentation and product differentiation. Before that, dating back to antiquity, it was a way of piecing through the different things that stories can do for us and instructing writers to construct them accordingly.

Gravitating as a matter of course toward literary fiction, to the genre that likes to think of itself as non-generic, scholars of contemporary literature have generally been neglectful of this all-important organizing feature of literary life, and no wonder. When it comes down to it, works of literary fiction are more reliable providers of discussable interpretive problems than works of genre fiction, whose interest often snaps into focus only at the level of the genre as a whole. Coming alive in the classroom, works of literary fiction advertise their interpretability in many ways, not least by refusing to fully subordinate the unit of the sentence, with its potentially artful intricacies, to the purposes of plot. Neither do they forgo thematic subtleties, things you could miss on a quick read. That, paradoxically, is their generic appeal.

To be sure, individual works of genre fiction have been known to generate volumes of learned commentary. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) are works of apparently inexhaustible literary interest, however historically belated their recognition as masterpieces by scholars and other arbiters of aesthetic rank. Furthermore, if it were ever really the case, the days are long past when one could safely assume that any given new work of genre fiction must be artistically unsophisticated. Genre categories have by now found themselves internally differentiated into more or less literary instances appealing to relatively distinct if no doubt overlapping audiences. Ironically, this is true even of the category of literary fiction, whose more routinely sentimental examples are no more likely to find themselves the objects of scholarly attention than their more luridly generic brethren. They might even find themselves categorized as something else altogether, as women’s fiction or chick lit or other offshoot of romance.

But artistic complexity of the kind congenial to the classroom is not necessarily what readers of genre fiction require. Just as important, frequently enough, is the work’s reliability as a competent new execution of a certain generic narrative program. That is where it falls in line with the ways and means of Amazon as a paragon of reliable service, and why genre fiction is the heart of the matter of literature in the Age of Amazon. Only as it were accidentally, because it is something a number of readers still prefer, does the company serve up the dignified delights of literary fiction.

This determines the overall shape if not the finer details of the sketch this book draws of the situation of the novel today. Contrary to the usual procedures of literary scholarship, it welcomes literary fiction to the party as one genre among others, insisting that we not divorce it either from the larger system— from the corporate culture, writ large—that facilitates its coming into being or from that system’s more characteristic products. The long-term implications of telling the story this way for the future of academic literary studies are not necessarily encouraging, corporate culture being no friend to the slow-paced reading and rumination on works of genius (or at least of very high quality) for which the discipline has historically been the occasion. Even so, what’s happening on the ground of literary commerce in our time as the result of Amazon’s efforts is undeniably fascinating, a work of genius in its own right.

Positioning literature lower on the hierarchy of human needs than we might like, putting books on the virtual shelf alongside other staples one might order from the Everything Store, the company is not so much anti- as omni-literary, making an epic narrative out of the speedy satisfaction of popular want. What literature loses in that transaction—too much, no doubt, for scholars to accept without a fight—it partly gets back as an endorsement of its everyday necessity. For whole cultures as well as for individuals, stories are of prime importance, and not just on special occasions. They are what guide our purposeful and pleasurable movement through time. Certainly, they have been necessary to Amazon, whose rise as a titan of contemporary commerce would have been unthinkable without the inspiration provided by works of fiction and the market opportunity presented by books.

Introduction

Retail Therapy

Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

—Richard Powers, The Overstory

There are lots of interesting things to be seen on the internet, and equally many things to be said about them, but the internet itself and as a whole has become predictable, a cliché machine. To talk about it is like talking about the weather—which, in a way, is what it is: the weather of our emotional lives, the informational air we breathe, the media environment from which we extract the nutrients of our everyday existence as social, economic, and political beings. A quarter century or more after the internet’s arrival on the world stage, the things we say about it are beset with a deflating sense of déjà vu, of a rightness that is no match for overfamiliarity. I blame the internet for this problem, naturally. With its multiplication and acceleration of the quintessentially modern phenomenon of public commentary on this, that, and everything, observations about the internet drawn forth from its humble individual users long ago ceased to gain meaningful interpretive leverage on it.

Which isn’t to say that the internet is not, after all, important, possibly as vast in its implications as the arrival of the printing press was to the early modern world and carrying just as many unintended consequences in train.¹ Certainly it has been important to my object of study in this book, the contemporary novel, which now, even when it comes to us in the familiar form of the physical book, is as often as not advertised, ordered, reviewed, and discussed there.² It is only to say that any analysis of the novel in online times that seeks to move into fruitfully new conceptual territory needs a better protagonist, or perhaps antagonist, than the internet or even the digital can supply on its own. It needs a vehicle of meaningful focalization, something to lend analytical coherence to what might otherwise seem the impersonal unfolding of scattered techno-capitalist processes.

For this book, that protagonist/antagonist is the retailer Amazon, launched in 1995 as an online bookstore. Amazon has insinuated itself into every dimension of the collective experience of literature in the United States and increasingly of the wider world. It has done this as the purveyor of more than half of the print books sold in the US and the overwhelmingly dominant force in the e-book market, a market it essentially made; as the proprietor of the booming enterprise of Audible.com, which is encouraging a remarkable return of sorts to the original orality of long-form storytelling; as facilitator, through its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program, of the self-publication of countless thousands of works of fiction, and progenitor of a path to a successful literary career independent of traditional presses; as the home of sixteen more or less traditional literary book imprints of its own and proprietor of the book-oriented social media site Goodreads. Increasingly, it is the new platform of contemporary literary life.

Could it be that the torch of cultural experimentation once confidently carried by modernism and the avant-garde is now carried by an online retailer? Does the spirit of innovation now reside in new ways and means of textual distribution rather than of either content or form? To claim so would be a stretch, surely, but would not be entirely outlandish. Has, for instance, anything as consequential as the Kindle happened inside a novel since 2007, when Amazon unveiled its e-reader and instantaneous wireless download system, Whispernet? Granted, the Kindle has not killed off the print book, not by a long shot, but it is something substantially new in the universe of reading, while whatever excitement may once have been associated with, say, postmodernism in fiction long ago subsided into more or less excellent permutations of familiar forms.³ If it were ever true, the narrative of continual innovation running from realism to modernism to postmodernism no longer compels belief that the future of the form will depart significantly from the repertoire of techniques it inherits from the past.

By contrast, set free from the original Kindle device onto the Kindle app used on phones and tablets and laptop screens of all kinds, e-books have gone in that span from rarity to ubiquity as the preferred medium of many millions of readers; readers who are thereby connected as by an invisible umbilical cord to the mother ship of commodity provision in a whole new way. Whether they know it or not, these readers typically do not own the books they have downloaded—you will not find e-books in any used bookstore, and you can’t easily lend one to a friend— having instead been licensed to use them on a limited number of personal devices. As detailed by Ted Striphas, this is interesting in its own right as an event in the colorful history of copyright and intellectual property. On the one hand, it assuages the sense of loss writers and publishers have often felt at the hands of a used book market from which they profit not at all. On the other, it enables the piracy of electronic editions of books available to any internet user with a modicum of navigational savvy.⁴ For Everything and Less, the digital liquidity of the e-book has an even larger significance, one that reflects backward from its relative physical evanescence even to the print version: in either form, it is from Amazon’s perspective not so much an object or even text as the bearer of a service.

Unlike the distributed communicational infrastructure we call the internet, with its trafficking in any and all kinds of information, Amazon’s is a powerfully interested platform—interested in doing business of a certain kind, to be sure, but also interested in narrative. Take the Kindle. Partly modeled on the similar devices that preceded it to market by several years, inspiration for their dramatic improvement was found in Neal Stephenson’s novel of a post-scarcity nanotechnological future, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995). So much so that in the Kindle’s development phase at Silicon Valley’s Lab126, it was codenamed Project Fiona, after the engineer protagonist’s daughter.⁵ She is the inspiration for his design of a new kind of interactive connected book geared to the evolving educational and emotional needs of the individual who owns it. The actual achievements of the Kindle may not equal the book of this nanotechnological future, but (as we’ll explore at greater length in chapter 4) the novel was crucial in inspiring them. And that’s not the only work of literature to have influenced Amazon. As we’ll see in chapter 1, although Bezos is better known as a reader of science fiction and would end up hiring Stephenson as the first employee of his space exploration company, Blue Origin, it would not be entirely crazy to say that we owe the existence of the company to his reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s literary novel The Remains of the Day (1989), which employees of the company have long been encouraged to read.

It is sometimes thought that Amazon started as an online bookstore purely as a matter of convenience, the book market having certain qualities made it the ideal means to Jeff Bezos’s larger entrepreneurial ends. Most important was an extreme number and diversity of distinct titles, a tiny fraction of which could be displayed in even the largest brick-and-mortar store, matched with rigorous trackability by way of their International Standard Book Number (ISBN). In retrospect, we might add to this that book buying, while it is a mass phenomenon to be sure, skews upward in socioeconomic level toward persons with greater-than-average disposable income and who have that all-important prerequisite of convenient online shopping, a credit card. Reading for pleasure is predominantly a phenomenon of the educated middle class in broadest definition, and so is Amazon.⁶

Books and book buying do have some commercially advantageous qualities and may have always been a proof of concept for an intent to sell everything, but as we’ll see, the relation of Amazon to fiction, to story, is more than one of convenience, going to the core of its corporate identity. So much so that we might think of the company 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 (otherwise known as the second half of the eighteenth century) or Ezra Pound was of the Pound Era (the era of literary modernism). Which is to say, only debatably deserving of the honor, but not implausibly so, and helpful in bringing certain phenomena to our attention.

There is no denying the many other sources of external agency in the making of contemporary fiction, beginning with the massive conditioning of the originality of any contemporary writer by the weight of literary history, by the long and illustrious career of the novel as a repository of generic forms and techniques and expectations. It is a thing very much of the present, a platform in its own right. One could also point to the publishing industry more broadly conceived, including the small handful of multinational conglomerates standing bestride the global book market and the smaller independent presses working in their shadow.⁷ To a certain extent, what fiction has been in recent years is only what they and other constituents of the contemporary trade publishing system, most importantly literary agents, have enabled it to be.⁸ And then there is the institution of the school, with its inculcation in some of us of habits of literary leisure from a very young age, and the university creative writing program, my own object of study once upon a time, with its reorganization of the setting and shape of the literary career.

Finally, there is the simple specificity of the historical-existential surround, the way we live now, some of us as recreational readers, almost all of us constantly accessing information on the web. Back in the 1990s, Bezos had an inkling that the new communication medium quickly wrapping the world in its embrace might be made highly consequential to our lives as consumers, first of all as consumers of books, and he was right. It took him a bit longer to realize that it could be useful to marketers of various kinds, including those looking to market the novels they have written. Without denying the many other agents and institutions that coalesce to form the environment of literary life, many of whom will make appearances in its pages along the way, this book will make a case for Amazon, seeing how far that will get us in exploring the fate of the novel in online times.

I spend a certain amount of time each week breaking down cardboard boxes, lots of them from Amazon, getting them ready for the garbage pickup.