When George Eliot wrote her merciless takedown of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in 1856, she did not intend the genre to survive her attack. This wasn’t a mere hatchet job, where the axe takes out a few chunks from the body only for the thing to stagger on, but a complete decapitation inflicted by a sharpened machete. How vexed Eliot would be to learn that this monstrous genre has recently grown a new head.
In their 21st-century guise these novels inevitably look different, but bear the unmistakable marks of the original silly breed diagnosed by Eliot: they mistake “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality”, they treat the less enlightened with “a patronising air of charity” and, despite their obvious mediocrity, are hailed by the critics, in the “choicest phraseology of puffery”, as “stunning”, “magnificent”, a “tour de force!”
Whereas the original silly novels were romances, the new breed come to us in the form of a genre dubbed “sad girl lit” (romances of the self, perhaps), otherwise known as millennial fiction. And in place of the original “lady” author we have the cool girl novelist.
Like the silly novels of Eliot’s day, the newest iteration has come to dominate the literary scene, indeed, it seems to be a prerequisite for publication today that young women writers are incurably downcast. Just a cursory look at Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list (judged by the godmother of cool girl novelists, Rachel Cusk) will give you an idea of the genre’s ubiquity.
In Britain alone, the depressed and alienated woman is the subject of such novels as Eliza Clark’s *Boy Parts*, Jo Hamya’s *Three Rooms*, Chloë Ashby’s *Wet Paint*, Natasha Brown’s *Assembly*, Sarah Bernstein’s *The Coming Bad Days* and Daisy Lafarge’s *Paul*. In America, the terminally sad girl is the subject of Ottessa Moshfegh’s *My Year of Rest and Relaxation* and Halle Butler’s *The New Me*. Irish examples of the genre include Naoise Dolan’s *Exciting Times*, Nicole Flattery’s *Nothing Special*, and, it almost goes without saying, any novel by Sally Rooney. This is only a brief overview of a trend that has continued to lure new disciples for coming up to a decade now. Time enough for the genre to coagulate into parody.
While the silly novels of the 19th century were “frothy” and “prosy”, their heroines inclined to “rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric”, cool girl novels are uniformly spare, and their depressed protagonists hardly speak at all. If Eliot’s silly novelists forged their prose style in rooms adorned with silk ribbon and taffeta trim, the cool girl novelists of today write from white Scandi-inspired rooms, their prose monochromatically dull.
The anti-heroine of these novels is usually a PhD student (or at least an MA), crucially distinguishing her from the common undergraduate masses. Her knowledge of intersectional theory has left her crippled by a near constant anxiety about power imbalances and inequality. She is also perpetually worried, to the point of exhaustion, nay burnout, about the plight of the individual under capitalism. Her eyes have an unmanned look about them, while her brain anxiously jumps from one devastating indictment of our society to the next. Words like ecocide and patriarchy thrum inside her skull.
Her body, she understands, having read the second-wave feminists, is chronically objectified. She has no agency (a favourite word of hers), and passively submits to whatever misfortunes assail her. The residual power she does have over her body is concentrated on the act of nail biting, which she does constantly and savagely. There is always something the matter with her tongue, her skin crawls, her stomach is tight, her eye twitches, her throat is swollen. She loses hours in the day watching the light move across her bedroom wall, taking enormous notice of her breath and the sombre shadows cast by her succulent plants.
If the American novelist Henry Miller was narrating from inside the whale – a metaphor for passively accepting civilisation as it is; fatalism, in short – then these novels come to us from a sunken whale that will never again rise to the surface. Passivity is taken to its logical extreme, in that our (anti) heroines either pointlessly die, play dead, or feel dead. The contemplation of suicide is never much more than a page away, to the extent that the reader is inclined to remind the novelist of Camus’ advice: decide promptly “whether life is or is not worth living”. Henry James said that tell a dream and you lose a reader, and the same goes for tales of disassociation.
Yet the “most pitiable” type of silly novels, as Eliot observed in her essay, are the ones she calls the “oracular species – novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories”. Such novels are the inevitable consequence of a writer’s head being stuffed with “false notions of society baked hard” and left to “hang over a desk a few hours every day”. We might have hoped that a university education (not to mention the proliferating Master of Fine Arts programmes) would have cured writers of producing such novels, but it has only served to bake in a different set of orthodoxies.
Unlike the great writers who, Eliot opines, “thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are”, silly novelists are forever trying to give us a moral lesson – to force us to eat our greens. Each character is served with a side salad of left-wing evangelism, each scene accompanied by instructions on how to behave progressively, paragraphs are given over to sermons on privilege or unconscious bias. But, as the novelist Jonathan Franzen has come to realise in the latter half of his career (having served up a few bowls of broccoli), readers “don’t want a lesson, they want an experience”. We don’t go to the novel to improve our health, but for the far humbler reason that we wish to be entertained. Novels, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “are there to be devoured”. Their health benefits should be the furthest thing from our minds.
The silly novelist has no desire to entertain, she wants to do something far worthier: to impress us. It is for this reason that the cool girl novel is glutted with irrelevant references to artworks and philosophical texts, sewn in like badges on a Brownie sash to display the accomplishments of the writer. It is for this same reason that we are often presented with etymologies or paragraphs on the mating patterns of molluscs. Like the student in a class, their arm stretched so high it begins to quiver, all these novelists want is for someone to say: “Well done! Top marks! Haven’t you read a lot!”
These writers, however, also know that it’s deeply uncool to be so eager, which is why they carefully mask it with a veil of teenage angst. If Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the original novel of existential angst, the adult version, then these books are written by his decadent great-grandchildren. The exiled artist, once a revolutionary figure, has become a brand. To be an exile, these writers believe, is not only a guarantee of your artistic sensibility, but of your social status. Alienation is cool. Our (anti) heroines are never at home – not in their bodies, not in their houses and not with other people. It would, after all, be a sign of unexamined conservatism to be anything other than deeply unhappy under capitalism.
Egged on by the publishing industry – which appears to be working under the deluded notion that angst and alienation amount to the entirety of human experience – young women writers have, for too long now, been engaged in the practice of “onedownmanship”. This fallacy, which Martin Amis warned against back in the Nineties, deceives writers into thinking that “unless you’re depressed, you’re a frivolous person”. If only a handful of the writers of the aforementioned novels, some of whom are clearly very talented, would withdraw from this death spiral and chart a route upwards. This would likely involve opening some windows, going outside, meeting other (different) people and reading something besides Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath and Annie Ernaux. By such means, their novels would claw their way back towards the light, and away from the joyless mud they have all been wallowing in.
What would cure these novels at a stroke would be a huge helping of humour, not the sophisticated funnies these angsty novelists mistake for humour, but that which Clive James said is “just common sense, dancing”. We find the same call for common sense in Eliot’s essay: she calls it a knowledge of “just proportions”.
Those with common sense, who see themselves and the world in “just proportions” have “absorbed… knowledge instead of being absorbed by it”. They do not write to “confound” or to “impress” but to “delight”. They understand that the novel is not a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, or for preaching, but a place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition.
In angsty novels by cool girl novelists it is the student condition, not the human condition, which is rendered. Perhaps it’s time to finally leave the quad and graduate to adulthood, not least because, to paraphrase the poet Robert Lowell: we are tired. Everyone’s tired of your turmoil.
masterofunfucking on
that’s kind of how I feel about the most recent Sally Rooney novel
whisperingelk on
Honestly, this seems sexist to me. There are some valid criticisms out there of the trend of literary contemporary novels about feminine rage and depressed women, like that it overrepresents white, wealthy, attractive women and that were less likely to see books do as well in this sub genre from POC writers. However, this article would not be written in this same tone about male writers. It was not written about in this way when, for example, tough guy shock novels became a bit of a trend after Palahniuk hit his success in the 2000s.
Loviataria on
Holy crap Charlotte you just killed 50% of the female student population.
bravetailor on
Some of this trend also stems from the popularity of YA novels amongst adults in the past 10 or 15 years. As such you get “adult” novels that utilize many elements used in YA fiction. The problem of course is that YA novels are often about teenagers who are frequently “clever” and “misunderstood”, but also moody and alienated. This has carried over into the “adult” novels that take inspiration from the YA genre but applied to so-called adult characters instead.
SoothingDisarray on
I think this article is trolling and dumb. I love a meanspirited meta-review take down. But this casts its net so wide that it’s just pretty much lumping any book written by a woman about women together. I mean… putting Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney into the same category is insane. There are definitely authors in this list I don’t like but there’s no real connection between many of them
The biggest problem I have with it is there are no counterexamples. That’s a big reason why it just feels like an angry hit piece. There’s not a single contemporary book written by a woman about women that this person finds worthy? Feels like a category issue and that’s on the person writing the article, not the books.
I’d be up for a more reasonable critique of the tiktok targeted low effort contemporary novel but this ain’t it.
[Edit: fixed a typo.]
RickardHenryLee on
So, Charlotte is complaining about a trend in novels she doesn’t like – she doesn’t want to hear about young women being depressed or alienated and she doesn’t like that these novels seem to be preaching at her; she wants to be entertained, she wants to laugh.
Am I getting this right? Is this article saying anything other than that? “I don’t like this style of novel because reading it is not fun for me”?
LamentableTrousers on
Ottessa Moshfegh does not live on the same planet as Sally Rooney and I will die on this hill.
SuperCrappyFuntime on
Not my cup of tea for fiction, but if I can come somewhat to the defence here, this “nobody wants to be preached to, just entertain me” stance reminds me of all the people in the film community who whine about movies “getting political” and yearning for a time when movies were (supposedly) not political. I often have a fun time pointing out to them that so many of the movies they think were apolitical were actually very political. Lest we forget George Lucas saying outright that the Empire was America and the Ewoks (i.e. the good guys) were the Viet Cong. The idea that novels of the past were simply ment to entertain, and that modern writers oughtta stop trying to comment on society in their books, is laughable. Hell, Charles Dickens will be mentioned in just about any conversation about great novelists. Just about every book of his was grinding an ax against some element the 19th century British society, whether it be the legal system, the rich/poor divide, working conditions, schools, debtor’s prisons, etc.
It’s fair to say that, should an author wish to “preach”, they should seek to make their work entertaining as well as preachy, but to treat any attempt to touch on political topics such as patriarchy and privilege as an immediate turnoff frankly makes me draw some conclusions about the people who consider them so, and these conclusions aren’t good.
floating_down on
>The residual power she does have over her body is concentrated on the act of nail biting, which she does constantly and savagely. There is always something the matter with her tongue, her skin crawls, her stomach is tight, her eye twitches, her throat is swollen. She loses hours in the day watching the light move across her bedroom wall, taking enormous notice of her breath and the sombre shadows cast by her succulent plants.
She doesn’t sound fun at parties, but neither was the Underground Man.
Recently I read *The Idiot* by Dostoyevsky and felt something I hadn’t about a book for a very long time, it touched me so deeply (in part because it found me at a seemingly perfect time in my life) that I felt shaken for weeks after, but it is yet another book that sinned by way of religious, philosophical, and moral essays/rants. Honestly, this just makes me stan silly authors. I am 100% here for this silly shit, I love it, I even loved Ippolit.
A standout book from my teenage years was *Les Misérables*. I read it, unabridged, in only a few days. I was obsessed. I can remember the psychic scream of wishing he’d get back to the plot while I was stuck in the trenches of an essay about nuns or whatever, but I regret nothing. I was born silly, silly or die.
>If only a handful of the writers of the aforementioned novels, some of whom are clearly very talented, would withdraw from this death spiral and chart a route upwards. This would likely involve opening some windows, going outside, meeting other (different) people […]
Well, that’s awkward because I am pretty sure Hemingway did actually try all those things and still decided to quit life. I guess he was ahead of the game, he didn’t even need to read recent feminist authors to be depressed.
>all these novelists want is for someone to say: “Well done! Top marks! Haven’t you read a lot!”
Isn’t that why anyone bothers to read Infinite Jest or that one book with the stream of consciousness about potatoes? Maybe I should read less silly books and give Colleen Hoover a chance.
>They understand that the novel is not a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, or for preaching, but a place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition.
O Brave new world that has such people in it.
but, ladies, cool girls! enough of the politics and your depression!! Be more fun and entertaining! *Smile!*
Honestly, I haven’t actually read any of the authors ~~mentioned~~ “taken down” in this article and always got the impression that their work was kind of dull and not my thing, but maybe I’m being too hard on the younger generation of writers – perhaps some of them would actually be silly enough for me.
edit: I could better see the angle of academia rewarding women for only a narrow range of literary expression, but why not focus on that if so? Give me more actual data to convince me. Tell me more about which authors are just cashing in on a trend, give me the dirt and give me some voices you think need to be raised that aren’t getting attention. but what do i know, i’m just a literary peasant who likes silly books and vegetables
Knuraie on
Internalized misogyny is so depressing. I recommend the book **“how to suppress women’s writing”** by Joanna Russ to anyone impressed with this article.
p14gu3 on
Honestly, I agree with the article, but did not mesh with the writing style. It seemed needlessly obtuse (like the author is saying “look at me! I can write!”) And the phrase “silly girl” was repeated enough times to make me question how the author feels about other women in literature in general.
I normally don’t read contemporary fiction but decided to give it a try with “My year of rest and relaxation” and that has got to be the worst book I’ve personally read so far. The article perfectly describes how I felt about it.
blue-bird-2022 on
I mean being depressed and alienated is very understandable with living through what feels like the slow motion downfall of western civilization. Like I get why these protagonists feel so relatable for many people.
tofu_appreciator on
I get the feeling that the writer of this piece is a fan of James Wood’s famous ‘hysterical realism’ takedown (right down to bemoaning encyclopedic lists of obscure factoids). The difference is that Woods continuously refers to the texts he is critiquing – including quoting them directly – to build his argument. He links the books together to capture a common thread and then explains why he finds it artistically barren.
The author of this piece points to a scribbled list of hot names (not even specific books, barring Moshfegh) and rolls out some mean-spirited vagaries that are more reminiscent of stand up comedy than serious criticism. It’s possible that what she says is true (although the books I’ve read by these authors only fit her critique very superficially) but she utterly fails to actually make the argument or explain why this is a problem.
Kaia455 on
Has anyone considered that young women might just genuinely be sad and disaffected?
Further: why is there no critique about the ubiquity of sad and disaffected male novelists/novels? There are plenty of them, Jesus. But it’s now a problem when women are doing it/gaining notoriety for it.
zumera on
Women can’t do shit without being boxed into some category of woman.
miggymo on
“Backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.” Don’t read any of these authors, so I don’t know shit about how accurate this is. This is just another whiny critique that just boils down to “thing bad,” instead of any deeper point being made. May as well be a YouTube video with a sarcastic bearded guy talking into a camera about why the new Star Wars movies suck.
vibraltu on
American novelist Henry Miller is a curious cite, considering that his 20th-century macho-lit style has gone way out of fashion these days. Unless the wave has started curving back and I haven’t heard about it yet.
mormagils on
I don’t think it’s a particularly revelatory take that some authors aren’t all that good and only stand out in the cultural environment that got them published. “Classics” are held in high regard not because they are old, but because they have relevance and resonate well past their original expiration date. If you read as much current fiction as you can, some of it will be good and some of it won’t.
khandragonim2b on
Why does this seem like a bojack horseman plot point
oatmeal28 on
I don’t think there’s enough lube in the world to cover this circle jerk
eikon_basilike on
This feels like the lit-crit equivalent of telling women to ‘smile more’. Men have been writing moody fiction about alienated intellectuals for centuries. No one is complaining about that.
I’m a man, but this article reeks of internalised misogyny to me. I guess women should stay in their lane and just write beach-read romantic novels and YA fiction?
The most depressing thing is, I don’t even believe that the author really thinks what she writes here. This is just a deliberate piece of quasi-culture-war shit-stirring.
paripazoo on
I feel like this kind of critique of any other genre would be considered pretentious gatekeeping, but it’s okay because here the target is “cool girls” (formerly known as “sad girls”). John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair wrote books with a heavy dose of left-wing morality and no one dismisses them as “silly”.
These books do well because they are relatable. “Depressed and alienated” is exactly how a lot of young people feel, having grown up through pandemic lockdowns, housing crises and social media mindfuckery. I don’t know why it would be shocking that people want to read about characters who feel as empty as they do.
That’s not to say I personally love this genre – I think the only book I have read of the ones mentioned is *Normal People*, and while I liked it I wasn’t inclined to pick up any of Rooney’s other novels. But people like different things.
Raibean on
You could not pay me to care if women are writing shitty little novels. Men have been doing it for centuries and being celebrated.
Next_Extension8328 on
I HATED my year of rest and relaxation!!! And even moreso, that fake accounts book…
Even so, isn’t it understandable that we’re (women of the modern world) sad, idk why there has to be think pieces and hand wringing over that…
this article talks about these female authors namedropping and writing books about overeducated insufferable whiny people and then goes on to talk about Jonathan franzen… doesn’t he do the same thing?
prettyinpurp on
Is this really even an issue though if it is encouraging younger people to read? I often feel the same, after reading (and watching) Normal People, I felt like the whole genre is bland, boring and oftentimes pretentious. Then I took a step back and thought about it. If these books that consist of mediocre prose, writing and are completely created from depressing, nihilistic viewpoints, are still entertaining a whole demographic of readers, who cares? Do people really need to read meaningful, factual accounts? Life can be senseless, banal and boring. Reading is often second to activities such as video games and watching tv, we should be actively encouraging people to read, regardless of how shit we personally believe it to be
FuriouSherman on
>Her prose is bare, her characters are depressed and alienated.
And since that’s been the expectation for prose and characters in American literature ever since Hemingway and Faulkner, you can see why books that feature these become bestsellers so often. Don’t hate the author, hate the standards that they’re forced to conform to in order to pay their bills.
27 Comments
By Charlotte Stroud
When George Eliot wrote her merciless takedown of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in 1856, she did not intend the genre to survive her attack. This wasn’t a mere hatchet job, where the axe takes out a few chunks from the body only for the thing to stagger on, but a complete decapitation inflicted by a sharpened machete. How vexed Eliot would be to learn that this monstrous genre has recently grown a new head.
In their 21st-century guise these novels inevitably look different, but bear the unmistakable marks of the original silly breed diagnosed by Eliot: they mistake “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality”, they treat the less enlightened with “a patronising air of charity” and, despite their obvious mediocrity, are hailed by the critics, in the “choicest phraseology of puffery”, as “stunning”, “magnificent”, a “tour de force!”
Whereas the original silly novels were romances, the new breed come to us in the form of a genre dubbed “sad girl lit” (romances of the self, perhaps), otherwise known as millennial fiction. And in place of the original “lady” author we have the cool girl novelist.
Like the silly novels of Eliot’s day, the newest iteration has come to dominate the literary scene, indeed, it seems to be a prerequisite for publication today that young women writers are incurably downcast. Just a cursory look at Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list (judged by the godmother of cool girl novelists, Rachel Cusk) will give you an idea of the genre’s ubiquity.
In Britain alone, the depressed and alienated woman is the subject of such novels as Eliza Clark’s *Boy Parts*, Jo Hamya’s *Three Rooms*, Chloë Ashby’s *Wet Paint*, Natasha Brown’s *Assembly*, Sarah Bernstein’s *The Coming Bad Days* and Daisy Lafarge’s *Paul*. In America, the terminally sad girl is the subject of Ottessa Moshfegh’s *My Year of Rest and Relaxation* and Halle Butler’s *The New Me*. Irish examples of the genre include Naoise Dolan’s *Exciting Times*, Nicole Flattery’s *Nothing Special*, and, it almost goes without saying, any novel by Sally Rooney. This is only a brief overview of a trend that has continued to lure new disciples for coming up to a decade now. Time enough for the genre to coagulate into parody.
While the silly novels of the 19th century were “frothy” and “prosy”, their heroines inclined to “rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric”, cool girl novels are uniformly spare, and their depressed protagonists hardly speak at all. If Eliot’s silly novelists forged their prose style in rooms adorned with silk ribbon and taffeta trim, the cool girl novelists of today write from white Scandi-inspired rooms, their prose monochromatically dull.
The anti-heroine of these novels is usually a PhD student (or at least an MA), crucially distinguishing her from the common undergraduate masses. Her knowledge of intersectional theory has left her crippled by a near constant anxiety about power imbalances and inequality. She is also perpetually worried, to the point of exhaustion, nay burnout, about the plight of the individual under capitalism. Her eyes have an unmanned look about them, while her brain anxiously jumps from one devastating indictment of our society to the next. Words like ecocide and patriarchy thrum inside her skull.
Her body, she understands, having read the second-wave feminists, is chronically objectified. She has no agency (a favourite word of hers), and passively submits to whatever misfortunes assail her. The residual power she does have over her body is concentrated on the act of nail biting, which she does constantly and savagely. There is always something the matter with her tongue, her skin crawls, her stomach is tight, her eye twitches, her throat is swollen. She loses hours in the day watching the light move across her bedroom wall, taking enormous notice of her breath and the sombre shadows cast by her succulent plants.
If the American novelist Henry Miller was narrating from inside the whale – a metaphor for passively accepting civilisation as it is; fatalism, in short – then these novels come to us from a sunken whale that will never again rise to the surface. Passivity is taken to its logical extreme, in that our (anti) heroines either pointlessly die, play dead, or feel dead. The contemplation of suicide is never much more than a page away, to the extent that the reader is inclined to remind the novelist of Camus’ advice: decide promptly “whether life is or is not worth living”. Henry James said that tell a dream and you lose a reader, and the same goes for tales of disassociation.
Yet the “most pitiable” type of silly novels, as Eliot observed in her essay, are the ones she calls the “oracular species – novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories”. Such novels are the inevitable consequence of a writer’s head being stuffed with “false notions of society baked hard” and left to “hang over a desk a few hours every day”. We might have hoped that a university education (not to mention the proliferating Master of Fine Arts programmes) would have cured writers of producing such novels, but it has only served to bake in a different set of orthodoxies.
Unlike the great writers who, Eliot opines, “thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are”, silly novelists are forever trying to give us a moral lesson – to force us to eat our greens. Each character is served with a side salad of left-wing evangelism, each scene accompanied by instructions on how to behave progressively, paragraphs are given over to sermons on privilege or unconscious bias. But, as the novelist Jonathan Franzen has come to realise in the latter half of his career (having served up a few bowls of broccoli), readers “don’t want a lesson, they want an experience”. We don’t go to the novel to improve our health, but for the far humbler reason that we wish to be entertained. Novels, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “are there to be devoured”. Their health benefits should be the furthest thing from our minds.
The silly novelist has no desire to entertain, she wants to do something far worthier: to impress us. It is for this reason that the cool girl novel is glutted with irrelevant references to artworks and philosophical texts, sewn in like badges on a Brownie sash to display the accomplishments of the writer. It is for this same reason that we are often presented with etymologies or paragraphs on the mating patterns of molluscs. Like the student in a class, their arm stretched so high it begins to quiver, all these novelists want is for someone to say: “Well done! Top marks! Haven’t you read a lot!”
These writers, however, also know that it’s deeply uncool to be so eager, which is why they carefully mask it with a veil of teenage angst. If Jean-Paul Sartre gave us the original novel of existential angst, the adult version, then these books are written by his decadent great-grandchildren. The exiled artist, once a revolutionary figure, has become a brand. To be an exile, these writers believe, is not only a guarantee of your artistic sensibility, but of your social status. Alienation is cool. Our (anti) heroines are never at home – not in their bodies, not in their houses and not with other people. It would, after all, be a sign of unexamined conservatism to be anything other than deeply unhappy under capitalism.
Egged on by the publishing industry – which appears to be working under the deluded notion that angst and alienation amount to the entirety of human experience – young women writers have, for too long now, been engaged in the practice of “onedownmanship”. This fallacy, which Martin Amis warned against back in the Nineties, deceives writers into thinking that “unless you’re depressed, you’re a frivolous person”. If only a handful of the writers of the aforementioned novels, some of whom are clearly very talented, would withdraw from this death spiral and chart a route upwards. This would likely involve opening some windows, going outside, meeting other (different) people and reading something besides Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath and Annie Ernaux. By such means, their novels would claw their way back towards the light, and away from the joyless mud they have all been wallowing in.
What would cure these novels at a stroke would be a huge helping of humour, not the sophisticated funnies these angsty novelists mistake for humour, but that which Clive James said is “just common sense, dancing”. We find the same call for common sense in Eliot’s essay: she calls it a knowledge of “just proportions”.
Those with common sense, who see themselves and the world in “just proportions” have “absorbed… knowledge instead of being absorbed by it”. They do not write to “confound” or to “impress” but to “delight”. They understand that the novel is not a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, or for preaching, but a place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition.
In angsty novels by cool girl novelists it is the student condition, not the human condition, which is rendered. Perhaps it’s time to finally leave the quad and graduate to adulthood, not least because, to paraphrase the poet Robert Lowell: we are tired. Everyone’s tired of your turmoil.
that’s kind of how I feel about the most recent Sally Rooney novel
Honestly, this seems sexist to me. There are some valid criticisms out there of the trend of literary contemporary novels about feminine rage and depressed women, like that it overrepresents white, wealthy, attractive women and that were less likely to see books do as well in this sub genre from POC writers. However, this article would not be written in this same tone about male writers. It was not written about in this way when, for example, tough guy shock novels became a bit of a trend after Palahniuk hit his success in the 2000s.
Holy crap Charlotte you just killed 50% of the female student population.
Some of this trend also stems from the popularity of YA novels amongst adults in the past 10 or 15 years. As such you get “adult” novels that utilize many elements used in YA fiction. The problem of course is that YA novels are often about teenagers who are frequently “clever” and “misunderstood”, but also moody and alienated. This has carried over into the “adult” novels that take inspiration from the YA genre but applied to so-called adult characters instead.
I think this article is trolling and dumb. I love a meanspirited meta-review take down. But this casts its net so wide that it’s just pretty much lumping any book written by a woman about women together. I mean… putting Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney into the same category is insane. There are definitely authors in this list I don’t like but there’s no real connection between many of them
The biggest problem I have with it is there are no counterexamples. That’s a big reason why it just feels like an angry hit piece. There’s not a single contemporary book written by a woman about women that this person finds worthy? Feels like a category issue and that’s on the person writing the article, not the books.
I’d be up for a more reasonable critique of the tiktok targeted low effort contemporary novel but this ain’t it.
[Edit: fixed a typo.]
So, Charlotte is complaining about a trend in novels she doesn’t like – she doesn’t want to hear about young women being depressed or alienated and she doesn’t like that these novels seem to be preaching at her; she wants to be entertained, she wants to laugh.
Am I getting this right? Is this article saying anything other than that? “I don’t like this style of novel because reading it is not fun for me”?
Ottessa Moshfegh does not live on the same planet as Sally Rooney and I will die on this hill.
Not my cup of tea for fiction, but if I can come somewhat to the defence here, this “nobody wants to be preached to, just entertain me” stance reminds me of all the people in the film community who whine about movies “getting political” and yearning for a time when movies were (supposedly) not political. I often have a fun time pointing out to them that so many of the movies they think were apolitical were actually very political. Lest we forget George Lucas saying outright that the Empire was America and the Ewoks (i.e. the good guys) were the Viet Cong. The idea that novels of the past were simply ment to entertain, and that modern writers oughtta stop trying to comment on society in their books, is laughable. Hell, Charles Dickens will be mentioned in just about any conversation about great novelists. Just about every book of his was grinding an ax against some element the 19th century British society, whether it be the legal system, the rich/poor divide, working conditions, schools, debtor’s prisons, etc.
It’s fair to say that, should an author wish to “preach”, they should seek to make their work entertaining as well as preachy, but to treat any attempt to touch on political topics such as patriarchy and privilege as an immediate turnoff frankly makes me draw some conclusions about the people who consider them so, and these conclusions aren’t good.
>The residual power she does have over her body is concentrated on the act of nail biting, which she does constantly and savagely. There is always something the matter with her tongue, her skin crawls, her stomach is tight, her eye twitches, her throat is swollen. She loses hours in the day watching the light move across her bedroom wall, taking enormous notice of her breath and the sombre shadows cast by her succulent plants.
She doesn’t sound fun at parties, but neither was the Underground Man.
Recently I read *The Idiot* by Dostoyevsky and felt something I hadn’t about a book for a very long time, it touched me so deeply (in part because it found me at a seemingly perfect time in my life) that I felt shaken for weeks after, but it is yet another book that sinned by way of religious, philosophical, and moral essays/rants. Honestly, this just makes me stan silly authors. I am 100% here for this silly shit, I love it, I even loved Ippolit.
A standout book from my teenage years was *Les Misérables*. I read it, unabridged, in only a few days. I was obsessed. I can remember the psychic scream of wishing he’d get back to the plot while I was stuck in the trenches of an essay about nuns or whatever, but I regret nothing. I was born silly, silly or die.
>If only a handful of the writers of the aforementioned novels, some of whom are clearly very talented, would withdraw from this death spiral and chart a route upwards. This would likely involve opening some windows, going outside, meeting other (different) people […]
Well, that’s awkward because I am pretty sure Hemingway did actually try all those things and still decided to quit life. I guess he was ahead of the game, he didn’t even need to read recent feminist authors to be depressed.
>all these novelists want is for someone to say: “Well done! Top marks! Haven’t you read a lot!”
Isn’t that why anyone bothers to read Infinite Jest or that one book with the stream of consciousness about potatoes? Maybe I should read less silly books and give Colleen Hoover a chance.
>They understand that the novel is not a vehicle for moral lessons, or for the display of intelligence, or for preaching, but a place where human beings can go to laugh at – which is to try to make sense of – the human condition.
O Brave new world that has such people in it.
but, ladies, cool girls! enough of the politics and your depression!! Be more fun and entertaining! *Smile!*
Honestly, I haven’t actually read any of the authors ~~mentioned~~ “taken down” in this article and always got the impression that their work was kind of dull and not my thing, but maybe I’m being too hard on the younger generation of writers – perhaps some of them would actually be silly enough for me.
edit: I could better see the angle of academia rewarding women for only a narrow range of literary expression, but why not focus on that if so? Give me more actual data to convince me. Tell me more about which authors are just cashing in on a trend, give me the dirt and give me some voices you think need to be raised that aren’t getting attention. but what do i know, i’m just a literary peasant who likes silly books and vegetables
Internalized misogyny is so depressing. I recommend the book **“how to suppress women’s writing”** by Joanna Russ to anyone impressed with this article.
Honestly, I agree with the article, but did not mesh with the writing style. It seemed needlessly obtuse (like the author is saying “look at me! I can write!”) And the phrase “silly girl” was repeated enough times to make me question how the author feels about other women in literature in general.
I normally don’t read contemporary fiction but decided to give it a try with “My year of rest and relaxation” and that has got to be the worst book I’ve personally read so far. The article perfectly describes how I felt about it.
I mean being depressed and alienated is very understandable with living through what feels like the slow motion downfall of western civilization. Like I get why these protagonists feel so relatable for many people.
I get the feeling that the writer of this piece is a fan of James Wood’s famous ‘hysterical realism’ takedown (right down to bemoaning encyclopedic lists of obscure factoids). The difference is that Woods continuously refers to the texts he is critiquing – including quoting them directly – to build his argument. He links the books together to capture a common thread and then explains why he finds it artistically barren.
The author of this piece points to a scribbled list of hot names (not even specific books, barring Moshfegh) and rolls out some mean-spirited vagaries that are more reminiscent of stand up comedy than serious criticism. It’s possible that what she says is true (although the books I’ve read by these authors only fit her critique very superficially) but she utterly fails to actually make the argument or explain why this is a problem.
Has anyone considered that young women might just genuinely be sad and disaffected?
Further: why is there no critique about the ubiquity of sad and disaffected male novelists/novels? There are plenty of them, Jesus. But it’s now a problem when women are doing it/gaining notoriety for it.
Women can’t do shit without being boxed into some category of woman.
“Backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.” Don’t read any of these authors, so I don’t know shit about how accurate this is. This is just another whiny critique that just boils down to “thing bad,” instead of any deeper point being made. May as well be a YouTube video with a sarcastic bearded guy talking into a camera about why the new Star Wars movies suck.
American novelist Henry Miller is a curious cite, considering that his 20th-century macho-lit style has gone way out of fashion these days. Unless the wave has started curving back and I haven’t heard about it yet.
I don’t think it’s a particularly revelatory take that some authors aren’t all that good and only stand out in the cultural environment that got them published. “Classics” are held in high regard not because they are old, but because they have relevance and resonate well past their original expiration date. If you read as much current fiction as you can, some of it will be good and some of it won’t.
Why does this seem like a bojack horseman plot point
I don’t think there’s enough lube in the world to cover this circle jerk
This feels like the lit-crit equivalent of telling women to ‘smile more’. Men have been writing moody fiction about alienated intellectuals for centuries. No one is complaining about that.
I’m a man, but this article reeks of internalised misogyny to me. I guess women should stay in their lane and just write beach-read romantic novels and YA fiction?
The most depressing thing is, I don’t even believe that the author really thinks what she writes here. This is just a deliberate piece of quasi-culture-war shit-stirring.
I feel like this kind of critique of any other genre would be considered pretentious gatekeeping, but it’s okay because here the target is “cool girls” (formerly known as “sad girls”). John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair wrote books with a heavy dose of left-wing morality and no one dismisses them as “silly”.
These books do well because they are relatable. “Depressed and alienated” is exactly how a lot of young people feel, having grown up through pandemic lockdowns, housing crises and social media mindfuckery. I don’t know why it would be shocking that people want to read about characters who feel as empty as they do.
That’s not to say I personally love this genre – I think the only book I have read of the ones mentioned is *Normal People*, and while I liked it I wasn’t inclined to pick up any of Rooney’s other novels. But people like different things.
You could not pay me to care if women are writing shitty little novels. Men have been doing it for centuries and being celebrated.
I HATED my year of rest and relaxation!!! And even moreso, that fake accounts book…
Even so, isn’t it understandable that we’re (women of the modern world) sad, idk why there has to be think pieces and hand wringing over that…
this article talks about these female authors namedropping and writing books about overeducated insufferable whiny people and then goes on to talk about Jonathan franzen… doesn’t he do the same thing?
Is this really even an issue though if it is encouraging younger people to read? I often feel the same, after reading (and watching) Normal People, I felt like the whole genre is bland, boring and oftentimes pretentious. Then I took a step back and thought about it. If these books that consist of mediocre prose, writing and are completely created from depressing, nihilistic viewpoints, are still entertaining a whole demographic of readers, who cares? Do people really need to read meaningful, factual accounts? Life can be senseless, banal and boring. Reading is often second to activities such as video games and watching tv, we should be actively encouraging people to read, regardless of how shit we personally believe it to be
>Her prose is bare, her characters are depressed and alienated.
And since that’s been the expectation for prose and characters in American literature ever since Hemingway and Faulkner, you can see why books that feature these become bestsellers so often. Don’t hate the author, hate the standards that they’re forced to conform to in order to pay their bills.