As to writing teams, Nicholas Pileggi wrote the novel Wiseguy, which became the beyond amazing film Goodfellas. His wife Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay for My Blue Heaven, which described the absurd situation of a wiseguy in witness protection somewhere orders of magnitude - or should that be ordures of magnitude - worse than purgatory.
I recall in college playing with the "fortune" program on Unix and getting one the stated, "Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out." I think that adequately describes our intelligentsia, and has so for quite awhile...likely resulting in that very quote.
18% White-male; a 2024-produced list of best recent books coming out as 18% White-male is suitable to the current state of .S. culture. The low White-male rate is well BELOW the relevant population-level (of those actively writing in English in the USA. But White women are represent more than proportionally.
This suggests: (1.) men are inferior writers to women in writing; and (2.) White-males in particular are no good at writing.
What caused this strange "feminization" of writing?
An open-ended list of best books produced in the 1910s: dominated by Straight White-Male authors (85%?+). A comparable 2024 list gives us 18% Straight White-Males.
As a matter of social-history: At what threshold-point (year or decade) do such lists begin to reliably drop BELOW 50% White-Male? In these somber year after the murder of George Floyd, it's of course impossible to even imagine such lists at 51%+ White-male. What about the 1980s? 1990s? 2000s? When did the field of "writing" turn against White-maleism?
Women wrote 30-40% of the bestselling novels of the first few decades of the 20th Century. But the 1919 combination of Women's Suffrage and Prohibition turned bohemian cultural elites in a misogynistic direction. Then WWII came along and gave male authors a few decades worth of bestseller-worthy material. So male domination of bestseller lists peaked in the second half of the 20th Century:
I have to make the argument for one of the 21 books by blacks: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. While it mostly is about blacks, it's not about mean white ladies and touching hair but about a more exiting black issue: Jamaica in the 70s. Drug running, gangs, coups and Jamaica at the height of it's Marley induced cultural relevance.
It's basically a James Ellroy novel transported to Jamaica, which is not bad thing to be. One of the 100 best novels of the 21st century? Maybe, maybe not, but a very fun read. Could have used a more stringent editor and the use of Jamaican patois can be hard to follow.
Among the POV characters there probably half-a-dozen non blacks: White politicians, Latino drug lords and my personal favorite: A white CIA agent trying to keep the Jamaican government aligned with US interests. While he resembles what a black lefty gay writer imagines a CIA guy to be he's not a one-dimensional caricature and not much worse than most of the black characters.
I liked the book “Guerillas” by V.S. Naipaul. Set on an unnamed Caribbean island, it ends with a black guy killing a white woman. Kind of grim but atmospheric.
He doesn’t seem to have made their list. Although he did win the Nobel Prize. No doubt Coates is better.
Another good source of data re: "stated preferences on Book Quality by writer-demographic," and the changes thereof over time: Lists of book awards.
It varies by prize category, but generally we can see this: Starting some time in the 2010s, there is an eerily noticeable shift away from White-male authors winning these book prizes. There is a shift towards an ideological factor. Most recent books that win are anti-White-Heterosexual Patriarchy literary efforts in some way. That was not true back as of the 1990s, and only a little true in the 2000s.
In the 2020s, there appear to be no White-male-writer winners at all, and only a few runners-up, who produced ordinary (non-politicized, outside-Wokeness) writing.
Someone should get to the bottom of this: What caused the White-male writing skill collapse of the early-21st century?
I recently filled out a publisher's questionnaire that asked about "underrepresented voices." In a literary workshop on publishing, the agents -- all female with vocal fry -- stated quite clearly that they "embrace" "underrepresented voices." In another panel put forth by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the three presenters spoke almost exclusively about "queer" fiction. One panelist claimed that the best query letter she ever received started with: "I'm a big fat black dyke," and when I dared suggest that the identity of the writer doesn't matter, she said, Sorry, it does, and if you don't believe that, you've been lied to all your life" or something to that effect.
Well, it has never mattered to me, a person in my early 60s, who focuses on the content and quality of the writing and if the book impresses me, I get interested in the writer and will read their biography. However it's almost never the race of the author that interests me, with the exception of Zora Neale Thurston, who described in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a town established by blacks for blacks that was supposed to be some utopia, but protagonist and her new (white acting) husband arrive to find a bunch of indolent people, no lights, no grocery, no nothing. The (white acting) husband then takes it upon himself to install street lights and a grocery store, much to the consternation of the black resident utopians.
In an effort to be "inclusive" they EXCLUDE, perhaps worse than in the days of the so-called "patriarchy."
I responded to the "underrepresented voices" question that the phrase makes me throw up in my mouth a little, and that I just want to read well-written, great stories.
I've read one on the new list, Wolf Hall, but can't remember if I read the sequel or just watched Claire Foy, so it wasn't life-changing. I've heard of the TNC book, which is more than I can say of nearly all of the others.
Speaking of Jim Crow, I inherited a china figurine of a crying white toddler sharing a chamber pot with a grinning black toddler. I'd be afraid to put it up for sale.
"Wolf Hall"'s first fifty pages initially defeated me. For some reason I gave it another, earnest go - and was filled with wonderment: "someone still knows how to do this".
Another husband-wife creative team was director Peter Bogdanovich and his set designer wife Polly Platt. I read a plausible case somewhere that she was the reason for most of his early success, particularly in Last Picture Show. When he divorced her the quality of his output nosedived.
Confession: I am the white lady who spoke to Coates' kid.
No, just joking, but a couple of incidents like that did happen to me. One day I'll write about them. They were very similar to the (possibly fictional) incident in the Coates book.
I did have a conversation with Gordon Lish once. He told me to be ashamed that I wanted to write a screen play. I was mad at him but he was right.
More striking than the various authors’ identities diversity is how repetitive, boring, and derivative the books are on the list. Nothing Christian, let alone spiritual. Nothing controversial to leftist ideology. Nothing truly culturally significant- think about how Anthony Bourdain upended all of restaurant culture with Kitchen Confidential launching a change in our country’s food. The NYT chose some pretty flat and predictable people to then in turn expose how lame their taste truly is
The counterpoint, the great history of white flight, will never be written. Clybourne Park, which is a takeoff on Raisin in the Sun, sort of tells it by indirection.
Thanks for that interesting review of Vanity Fair. It's one of my absolute favorites (though I think Middlemarch tops it for Greatest English Novel). I've never read Gone With the Wind, so I can't speak to that comparison. And whatever happened to Spotted Toad?
"I suspect the NYT’s 1915 poll choices will endure longer than its 2024 poll choices." No doubt, but part of the reason is that the novel is much less central -- hell, literature is much less central -- than it was in 1915. Speaks well of the 1915 voters that they'd already spotted D.H. Lawrence.
Twitter has pretty much destroyed my attention span for getting through giant Victorian novels, so the fact that I read every bit of "Vanity Fair" a couple of years ago is testimony to how entertaining it is. (I tried "Middlemarch" a decade ago, but didn't make it past the first 100 pages. That's not George Eliot's fault, of course, it's mine. Same for "War and Peace.")
I'm not on Twitter, and I'm having difficulty finishing even normal articles despite nothing else to do, so maybe it's age. Tried rereading Joyce's "Dubliners," which I enjoyed 40 years ago, and bailed after a few pages. Can still reread Trollope novels, but skip over the really long-winded parts.
I also finally read one of Trollope's novels recently, one of his lesser ones, The Warden (IIRC). Not as entertaining as Vanity Fair, but I very much enjoyed Trollope's names for characters based on Dickens ("Mr. Popular Sentiment") and Carlyle ("Dr. Pessimist Anticant," which would be a great name for Mencius Moldbug).
The sequel, Barchester Towers, is funnier and made Trollope's name. My favorite of the later Palliser "political" novels (Phineas Redux) refers to the Disraeli stand-in's "probably not temporary insanity."
That Carver link was freshly fascinating to me (despite the fact that I had read it years ago lol). I'm not that familiar with him beyond thinking that - if this, if he, if these characters are laconic - then you don't know laconic. And that's without ever having read the more florid unedited versions.
Great titles though.
Gordon Lish strikes me as having perhaps no more than an ethnographer's interest in Carver and his people. Like: I can make use of their melodrama, by juxtaposing it with this atmosphere of stuntedness and not-enough-to-do. As if he had little use or enthusiasm for the more loquacious "longing" which was real to Carver (were they not "Beginners" at something important?). Lish does not seem to have found the stories "devastating" to use a word people began to routinely apply to fiction around then. It's almost like the stories being so (theoretically) "clipped" is mostly Lish's judgment on the banal musings they contain, which I cannot dispute the verismilitude of, not having any knowledge of that milieu. They do seem very 70s to me, no matter the decade, but that is more influenced by my recollection of (movies/TV/"Can This Marriage Be Saved?") than of how anyone I knew ever talked.
(The settings don't seem totally unfamiliar to me. I recall being brought along, the baby girl, the brothers fled - to certain places, as a small child in the 70s, that struck me as "not-nice": the drinking I was used to, but sometimes there'd be a different note of sleaziness, like maybe some place where people were gambling on horses, in a low-rent Texas way; certain times I recall being stuck in a bar, which has nothing to offer a child; though worse was sitting outside the bar, on a bench, waiting; or in a Winnebago, which was a shocking way to live to little curmudgeonly me. Even a bar, though sometimes occasioning necessary dread, had a familiarity; more disturbing was going someplace, a party, perhaps, probably a perfectly nice party, where there were people whose lives yet bespoke a hedonism that seemed threatening and irrevocable, if it should ever be married to the alcoholism and mental instability that were the central feature of my family's life. "Please don't get divorced.")
A weird little incident: I attended an elementary school that drew from both the solidly middle-class single-family homeowners (of course, all the parents younger in those days) and also from a world of hastily-built apartments, neither charming nor charmingly located, this all being in postwar suburbia - whose residents tended to be transient. So there were kids who came and went. I remember one such girl, who described her father's business as making or selling photographs.
One day she brought into school - into the 3rd grade that is - a manuscript. A type-written manuscript of what seems in memory to have been like 300 pages. It was heavy and awkward to carry home, which I did because she said her dad wanted me to read his screenplay. (I had not before heard the word "screenplay".) It was mostly dialogue. I was embarrassed to bring this into my house. I do remember glancing over it. I registered adult themes and swear words. I was not the savant she took me for, and it made no sense to me.
Looking at a Raymond Carver story - unrealistic-dialogue-heavy Gordon Lish version anyway - invariably brings this thing up out of my subconscious.
Robin DiAngelo's career teaching at obscure directional state colleges in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest reminds me of Raymond Carver short stories ... until she suddenly has the Happy Ending and becomes rich and famous.
We can know it's fake because "Noticing" is nowhere to be seen.
Oh, yeah, you're right. I hadn't noticed that.
Substack needs an LOL/Ha Ha button... :-D
As to writing teams, Nicholas Pileggi wrote the novel Wiseguy, which became the beyond amazing film Goodfellas. His wife Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay for My Blue Heaven, which described the absurd situation of a wiseguy in witness protection somewhere orders of magnitude - or should that be ordures of magnitude - worse than purgatory.
We need to stop pretending that we don't live in a civilisation who's intelligentsia has mostly disappeared up its own backside.
I recall in college playing with the "fortune" program on Unix and getting one the stated, "Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out." I think that adequately describes our intelligentsia, and has so for quite awhile...likely resulting in that very quote.
18% White-male; a 2024-produced list of best recent books coming out as 18% White-male is suitable to the current state of .S. culture. The low White-male rate is well BELOW the relevant population-level (of those actively writing in English in the USA. But White women are represent more than proportionally.
This suggests: (1.) men are inferior writers to women in writing; and (2.) White-males in particular are no good at writing.
What caused this strange "feminization" of writing?
That’s your take? Really?
An open-ended list of best books produced in the 1910s: dominated by Straight White-Male authors (85%?+). A comparable 2024 list gives us 18% Straight White-Males.
As a matter of social-history: At what threshold-point (year or decade) do such lists begin to reliably drop BELOW 50% White-Male? In these somber year after the murder of George Floyd, it's of course impossible to even imagine such lists at 51%+ White-male. What about the 1980s? 1990s? 2000s? When did the field of "writing" turn against White-maleism?
Women Suffrage?
Women wrote 30-40% of the bestselling novels of the first few decades of the 20th Century. But the 1919 combination of Women's Suffrage and Prohibition turned bohemian cultural elites in a misogynistic direction. Then WWII came along and gave male authors a few decades worth of bestseller-worthy material. So male domination of bestseller lists peaked in the second half of the 20th Century:
https://www.takimag.com/article/distaff-writers/
I have to make the argument for one of the 21 books by blacks: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. While it mostly is about blacks, it's not about mean white ladies and touching hair but about a more exiting black issue: Jamaica in the 70s. Drug running, gangs, coups and Jamaica at the height of it's Marley induced cultural relevance.
It's basically a James Ellroy novel transported to Jamaica, which is not bad thing to be. One of the 100 best novels of the 21st century? Maybe, maybe not, but a very fun read. Could have used a more stringent editor and the use of Jamaican patois can be hard to follow.
Among the POV characters there probably half-a-dozen non blacks: White politicians, Latino drug lords and my personal favorite: A white CIA agent trying to keep the Jamaican government aligned with US interests. While he resembles what a black lefty gay writer imagines a CIA guy to be he's not a one-dimensional caricature and not much worse than most of the black characters.
I just feel the need to say that "Jamaican patois" struck me as charitable; I usually describe it as "not-even-mono-lingual."
I liked the book “Guerillas” by V.S. Naipaul. Set on an unnamed Caribbean island, it ends with a black guy killing a white woman. Kind of grim but atmospheric.
He doesn’t seem to have made their list. Although he did win the Nobel Prize. No doubt Coates is better.
Another good source of data re: "stated preferences on Book Quality by writer-demographic," and the changes thereof over time: Lists of book awards.
It varies by prize category, but generally we can see this: Starting some time in the 2010s, there is an eerily noticeable shift away from White-male authors winning these book prizes. There is a shift towards an ideological factor. Most recent books that win are anti-White-Heterosexual Patriarchy literary efforts in some way. That was not true back as of the 1990s, and only a little true in the 2000s.
In the 2020s, there appear to be no White-male-writer winners at all, and only a few runners-up, who produced ordinary (non-politicized, outside-Wokeness) writing.
Someone should get to the bottom of this: What caused the White-male writing skill collapse of the early-21st century?
I recently filled out a publisher's questionnaire that asked about "underrepresented voices." In a literary workshop on publishing, the agents -- all female with vocal fry -- stated quite clearly that they "embrace" "underrepresented voices." In another panel put forth by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the three presenters spoke almost exclusively about "queer" fiction. One panelist claimed that the best query letter she ever received started with: "I'm a big fat black dyke," and when I dared suggest that the identity of the writer doesn't matter, she said, Sorry, it does, and if you don't believe that, you've been lied to all your life" or something to that effect.
Well, it has never mattered to me, a person in my early 60s, who focuses on the content and quality of the writing and if the book impresses me, I get interested in the writer and will read their biography. However it's almost never the race of the author that interests me, with the exception of Zora Neale Thurston, who described in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a town established by blacks for blacks that was supposed to be some utopia, but protagonist and her new (white acting) husband arrive to find a bunch of indolent people, no lights, no grocery, no nothing. The (white acting) husband then takes it upon himself to install street lights and a grocery store, much to the consternation of the black resident utopians.
In an effort to be "inclusive" they EXCLUDE, perhaps worse than in the days of the so-called "patriarchy."
I responded to the "underrepresented voices" question that the phrase makes me throw up in my mouth a little, and that I just want to read well-written, great stories.
Is there anything more annoying than vocal fry? If there is, you’d have to prove it.
What are vocal fry? Noisy young fish?
Whew, I’d be hard pressed to create less important lists…
Well Done
I've read one on the new list, Wolf Hall, but can't remember if I read the sequel or just watched Claire Foy, so it wasn't life-changing. I've heard of the TNC book, which is more than I can say of nearly all of the others.
Speaking of Jim Crow, I inherited a china figurine of a crying white toddler sharing a chamber pot with a grinning black toddler. I'd be afraid to put it up for sale.
"Wolf Hall"'s first fifty pages initially defeated me. For some reason I gave it another, earnest go - and was filled with wonderment: "someone still knows how to do this".
"Wolf Hall" is about as traditional in subject matter as you can get: it's a historical novel about Tudor politics.
Another husband-wife creative team was director Peter Bogdanovich and his set designer wife Polly Platt. I read a plausible case somewhere that she was the reason for most of his early success, particularly in Last Picture Show. When he divorced her the quality of his output nosedived.
Confession: I am the white lady who spoke to Coates' kid.
Really?
No, just joking, but a couple of incidents like that did happen to me. One day I'll write about them. They were very similar to the (possibly fictional) incident in the Coates book.
I did have a conversation with Gordon Lish once. He told me to be ashamed that I wanted to write a screen play. I was mad at him but he was right.
Heather Mac Donald’s last three books have all been masterpieces. I really hope she’ll get the mainstream recognition she deserves one day.
Absolutely...I reviewed The Diversity Delusion here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
More striking than the various authors’ identities diversity is how repetitive, boring, and derivative the books are on the list. Nothing Christian, let alone spiritual. Nothing controversial to leftist ideology. Nothing truly culturally significant- think about how Anthony Bourdain upended all of restaurant culture with Kitchen Confidential launching a change in our country’s food. The NYT chose some pretty flat and predictable people to then in turn expose how lame their taste truly is
Look... not to be that guy... but Warmth of Other Suns?
No
The counterpoint, the great history of white flight, will never be written. Clybourne Park, which is a takeoff on Raisin in the Sun, sort of tells it by indirection.
Here's my 2011 review of Bruce Norris's Steppenwolf play "Clybourn Park."
https://www.takimag.com/article/son_of_a_raisin_in_the_sun/
Thanks for that interesting review of Vanity Fair. It's one of my absolute favorites (though I think Middlemarch tops it for Greatest English Novel). I've never read Gone With the Wind, so I can't speak to that comparison. And whatever happened to Spotted Toad?
"I suspect the NYT’s 1915 poll choices will endure longer than its 2024 poll choices." No doubt, but part of the reason is that the novel is much less central -- hell, literature is much less central -- than it was in 1915. Speaks well of the 1915 voters that they'd already spotted D.H. Lawrence.
Twitter has pretty much destroyed my attention span for getting through giant Victorian novels, so the fact that I read every bit of "Vanity Fair" a couple of years ago is testimony to how entertaining it is. (I tried "Middlemarch" a decade ago, but didn't make it past the first 100 pages. That's not George Eliot's fault, of course, it's mine. Same for "War and Peace.")
I'm not on Twitter, and I'm having difficulty finishing even normal articles despite nothing else to do, so maybe it's age. Tried rereading Joyce's "Dubliners," which I enjoyed 40 years ago, and bailed after a few pages. Can still reread Trollope novels, but skip over the really long-winded parts.
I also finally read one of Trollope's novels recently, one of his lesser ones, The Warden (IIRC). Not as entertaining as Vanity Fair, but I very much enjoyed Trollope's names for characters based on Dickens ("Mr. Popular Sentiment") and Carlyle ("Dr. Pessimist Anticant," which would be a great name for Mencius Moldbug).
The sequel, Barchester Towers, is funnier and made Trollope's name. My favorite of the later Palliser "political" novels (Phineas Redux) refers to the Disraeli stand-in's "probably not temporary insanity."
That Carver link was freshly fascinating to me (despite the fact that I had read it years ago lol). I'm not that familiar with him beyond thinking that - if this, if he, if these characters are laconic - then you don't know laconic. And that's without ever having read the more florid unedited versions.
Great titles though.
Gordon Lish strikes me as having perhaps no more than an ethnographer's interest in Carver and his people. Like: I can make use of their melodrama, by juxtaposing it with this atmosphere of stuntedness and not-enough-to-do. As if he had little use or enthusiasm for the more loquacious "longing" which was real to Carver (were they not "Beginners" at something important?). Lish does not seem to have found the stories "devastating" to use a word people began to routinely apply to fiction around then. It's almost like the stories being so (theoretically) "clipped" is mostly Lish's judgment on the banal musings they contain, which I cannot dispute the verismilitude of, not having any knowledge of that milieu. They do seem very 70s to me, no matter the decade, but that is more influenced by my recollection of (movies/TV/"Can This Marriage Be Saved?") than of how anyone I knew ever talked.
(The settings don't seem totally unfamiliar to me. I recall being brought along, the baby girl, the brothers fled - to certain places, as a small child in the 70s, that struck me as "not-nice": the drinking I was used to, but sometimes there'd be a different note of sleaziness, like maybe some place where people were gambling on horses, in a low-rent Texas way; certain times I recall being stuck in a bar, which has nothing to offer a child; though worse was sitting outside the bar, on a bench, waiting; or in a Winnebago, which was a shocking way to live to little curmudgeonly me. Even a bar, though sometimes occasioning necessary dread, had a familiarity; more disturbing was going someplace, a party, perhaps, probably a perfectly nice party, where there were people whose lives yet bespoke a hedonism that seemed threatening and irrevocable, if it should ever be married to the alcoholism and mental instability that were the central feature of my family's life. "Please don't get divorced.")
A weird little incident: I attended an elementary school that drew from both the solidly middle-class single-family homeowners (of course, all the parents younger in those days) and also from a world of hastily-built apartments, neither charming nor charmingly located, this all being in postwar suburbia - whose residents tended to be transient. So there were kids who came and went. I remember one such girl, who described her father's business as making or selling photographs.
One day she brought into school - into the 3rd grade that is - a manuscript. A type-written manuscript of what seems in memory to have been like 300 pages. It was heavy and awkward to carry home, which I did because she said her dad wanted me to read his screenplay. (I had not before heard the word "screenplay".) It was mostly dialogue. I was embarrassed to bring this into my house. I do remember glancing over it. I registered adult themes and swear words. I was not the savant she took me for, and it made no sense to me.
Looking at a Raymond Carver story - unrealistic-dialogue-heavy Gordon Lish version anyway - invariably brings this thing up out of my subconscious.
Robin DiAngelo's career teaching at obscure directional state colleges in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest reminds me of Raymond Carver short stories ... until she suddenly has the Happy Ending and becomes rich and famous.
Gordon Lish would have cut that ending right out.