Ignore the pessimists – we are living through a literary golden age

New Statesman​

8 hours ago

Photo by Adam Hirons / Millennium Images, UK
Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don't read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right.
There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets.
Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year?
But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won't help.
Let's start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children's writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 'we're going through a bit of a golden age for children's fiction.' He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson.
The bestselling shelves for non-fiction, however, have recently been full of trash. The recent Times list of the bestselling books of the last 50 years was, to say the least, dispiriting. But we don't lack excellent non-fiction. AN Wilson has just written a very good book about Goethe. Frances Wilson's new biography of Muriel Spark is truly excellent, as is Lamora Ash's compulsive book about Christianity, and Helen Castor's new biography of Richard II and Henry IV. Rural Hours by Harriet Baker remains underrated despite winning the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. There is also Question 7, by Richard Flanagan, The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle, Parfit by David Edmonds, What We Owe The Future, by Will MacAskill.
We should also be optimistic about the breadth and variety of what is happening online. Naomi Kanakia, an American novelist turned Substacker, has just had her work profiled in the New Yorker, along with John Pistelli, another Substacker whose new novel Major Arcana is a weird and wonderful account of modern culture. Kanakia has written about the many fictional experiments happening on Substack. Several critics and essayists have emerged on Substack whose work is interesting and original, people like Henry Belger, alongside the established writers like BD McClay. Hollis Robbins is an original and daring academic voice writing about AI. Closer to home, AN Wilson, England's last great man of letters in the George Henry Lewes manner, has a Substack too, which I read religiously.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
On any given day you can read first-rate nonfiction online in places like 'Construction Physics', 'Works in Progress', and from writers like Paul Graham, Noah Smith, and Scott Alexander. In Britain, there is excellent work being done by Saloni Dattani about science and Alice Evans about demography and women's rights. Are you not fascinated to know that Starbucks is a bank? Do you not admire Amia Srinivasan, Sophie Elmhirst, and Sam Knight? We have seen the tail end of a golden age of obituaries, too, notably at the Economist and Telegraph as well as at the New York Times. It is like the days of the periodical and Grub Street and the Westminster Review.
This online culture has real signs of growth. There are now five million paying subscribers on Substack. Library apps like Libby are going through a small boom. BookTok is making all sorts of unexpected books, including classics, into bestsellers. In 2017 the UK publishing industry had revenues of £4.8bn. Now it is £7bn. There are far more independent bookshops now than in 2016 – 1,052 compared to 867.
What we are starting to see, I think, is a tipping point. The decline of literature is coming to an end. The bounce back might be starting from a low point, but it's very real.
On Substack, Beth Bentley has written about the popularity of reading in modern culture. Gen Z read more books than their elders, she reports. There are plenty of other signs that the decline is over. Celebrities and influences are running book clubs. One X user reported their builder listening to George Eliot on the scaffolding. Naomi Kanakia recently wrote about the growing fandom for literature on Substack among people who are disconnected from literary discourse and find it all bewildering.
The fact is that the common reader is still out there. And they can be found in increasingly unlikely places.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Patrick Collison said at the end of 2024 that he had read ten classic novels: Bronte, Dickens, Mann, Flaubert, Melville, Eliot, James, Conrad, Woolf, Grossman. Inspired by this, Matthew Yglesias started reading classic fiction too, finishing all of George Eliot's novels in the first three months of 2025. Kyla Scanlon recently used The Screwtape Letters to analyse the economy. This energy for literature is spreading. Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas. They are reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare. If I want to talk about Iris Murdoch, I am usually better off at a party of STEM and policy nerds than a literature gathering.
Indeed, it is only when I meet literary people that the mood starts sinking. One English literature lecturer, who I encountered at a party recently, has only read 12 of Shakespeare's plays (one third of the total works). Another professor has seriously argued that Taylor Swift is the literary equivalent of Mary Shelley. The editor of the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't plan to. An academic at St Andrews published a piece saying that she thought it was better for students to read fewer books. 'Reading one novel in three weeks, but reading it well,' she said, 'is a perfectly good target.' Likewise, too many of the literary pessimists I spoke to about this piece haven't read many of the modern novels they assume aren't very good.
If we want the rest of the world to take literature seriously, the literati needs to set a good example. The most striking recent instance of this happened on X. When the 4Chan list of the best books they had read in the last decade was published, Zena Hitz shared it, saying: 'Don't know how to break this to you but the 4channers are running circles around the pros, academics and critics.' Her replies were plagued with literary people complaining that the 4Chan readers hadn't read enough women. The very people who believe that not enough young men are reading literature (and that this is connected to the phenomena of their voting for Donald Trump) had little more than complaints and nit-picking to offer when faced with a new constituency of readers.
Whenever I talk to someone who thinks we are living in a desperately bad literary time, they usually do have a favourite living novelist, someone like Tessa Hadley or Ali Smith or Rachel Cusk. These are not writers I care for, but take note that the doomers are simultaneously admirers. English literature is in good enough shape to inspire disagreements about who the good writers really are.
Pessimism about literature is probably more about the question of whether we ought to care about novels anymore. Some 20 years ago, VS Naipaul declared the novel dead. Who can doubt his reasons: 'We've changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.' Terrorism, the fertility crisis, climate change, housing shortage, the fact that we cannot build basic infrastructure without years of bureaucratic delay, the financial crash of 2008, the pandemic, the rising feeling of an inevitable war we're inadequately prepared for – what has fiction had to say about the cycles of disruption in this century?
Perhaps a lot of the low-beat mood among literary people is not actually about the quality of modern books, but simply about the fact that literature simply isn't as significant or important as it used to be. One reason why literary people may feel that we are not living in a great period of writing is that the writing that is truly excellent is not the sort of writing they produce. This sounds harsh, but I include myself in this assessment.
So, I think the overall situation is something like this: there is still plenty of good writing, plenty of literary energy, but it is not always in the same places it used to be, and the literary establishment isn't always well aligned to its audience. We are living through a significant disruption. Instead of responding with despair, we need to adapt. This is fully achievable.
As the world continues to evolve in the direction of uncertainty – caused primarily by AI and geopolitics – literature will only become more significant. It is no coincidence that people are turning back to literature now. The spread of AI will make the most 'human' activities more valuable. The returns to taste will rise. That is what literature excels at. The best work stands out all the more starkly in a world of abundant slop. We have seen this before. People decide to watch less television, scroll less social media, and read classic literature and they are amazed at the benefits. Someone somewhere is always discovering that Tolstoy is gold compared to the tinfoil of Netflix. The literati are poised on the edge of a huge social change: there is no point in asking ChatGPT to read Frederick Douglass on your behalf. Discussing those works with ChatGPT, though, is very valuable. Reading literature will also be a means of connecting with other people.
We have to choose what side of this transition we are on. Do we want young people to read the Bible and Homer or do we want to complain about their choices on Twitter? Middlemarch just went viral on Substack. I see people there reading everything from the Mahabharata to JM Coetzee to Catherine Lacey. Elizabeth von Arnim was recently popular on TikTok. Can we be optimistic about that? If not, we may find ourselves left behind while literature carries on in its new forms of success.
The task for those of us who care deeply about literature is to make it relevant in this new world. Even now, people are trying to find their way to books that will matter to them. Readers from unexpected places are searching for the best. If they find us too often complaining about the state of things, they will turn elsewhere.
It is easy for us to see the dross that fills the shelves. But we ought to be searching as hard as we can for the best work, wherever it can be found. It is easy to regret the loss of the literary culture we all grew up with. But we are faced with the challenge of making something new. It is all too easy to see what we will lose with AI. But as Hollis Robbins told me, 'You can't be pessimistic if you fully grasp the creativity of the human mind. So much sublime work has been lost; some of it will be found. How can anyone be pessimistic when there is so much rediscovery work that AI is helping us do?'
The world is full of aspiring writers. We need to raise their ambition, push them to be greater, showcase their work, be honest about their failures. Someone is always discovering Tolstoy for the first time. We ought to care a lot more about that. Patrick Collison and Matthew Yglesias and thousands of others whose names we don't know are coming to us. We need to welcome them. We need to show them what we have to offer. We need to choose between literature and politics.
What the pessimists and I agree on is that this is a turning point. Where we differ is that I think we need to evangelize for the future, not decry the present. We need to read and enthuse. We need to innovate. We need to be the light that draws others in. It is time for us to shine out like a candle, to be a good deed in a naughty world.
[See also: English literature's last stand]
Related