The life, death, and afterlife of literary fiction
What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers  experienced the world after. It was an intimate experience.  Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate. It&#x27;s a homegenous voice. We used to laugh about the engineering students who would say without irony, &quot;why would I want to read something someone just made up?&quot; Now, engaging with books comes at the opportunity cost of missing internet points and time spent not promoting your brand, so I don&#x27;t see it coming back among younger people.<p>I spent a lot of years practicing to become a writer like many of the men I looked up to growing up, and when I look at writers today, there is no <i>there</i> there anymore. You&#x27;re only ever as good as your last tweet, and part of the promise of literary culture was that the esteem of the people who were a part of it was valuable and enriching. For a while it was. It&#x27;s not now. Books were a great thing to have in common and a way to find people who were really just interesting. They were a social glue. Now, authors remind me of those old soviet olympians propped up as representatives of their ideological system to be proof their system could produce peers to western athletes whose talent was the effect of freedom and desire.<p>I think the literary novel had its moment. It was a couple of centuries, but I think it will become what victorian cameos and shadow drawings are to photos. Art assumes a level of mystery that I don&#x27;t think can exist in a homogenized culture like we have online, as without an apprehension of something greater than the concrete and material, it&#x27;s just another picture or inpspirational quote on a wrapper for something cheap.