A Conversation with John Pistelli

His new novel, 'Major Arcana,' is a significant work of literature

One of the unexpected pleasures of the last six months has been discovering self-published novels. I was never a snob about such things, but I had assumed, for a long time, the cream usually rose to the top. It’s not that the novels getting pumped out by the conglomerates and prestigious indies were better, but it seemed unlikely to me that there were a great number of undiscovered gems. With enough new books to catch up on in a given year, how could I also track those that were thrown up by writers themselves—sans gatekeepers like agents and publishing house editors? One of the great innovations of Substack has been making it easier to unearth talent that, in a healthier literary climate, would have been uplifted by the traditional publishing machinery. I am increasingly convinced most publishing houses don’t know how to cultivate or promote rising writers and that talent itself—the best, the brightest, the most ambitious—is not getting where it needs to be. Twenty or thirty years ago, individual editors were empowered to pluck authors from obscurity and work with them until they were publishing books that could move the culture. Influential editors like Gordon Lish, Sonny Mehta, and Gary Fisketjon were permitted to follow their tastes; novels then weren’t sifted through sprawling committees or merely acquired for their potential as IP. I don’t mean to idealize twentieth century publishing conditions too much, but this reality can’t be handwaved away. For daring novelists, it’s tough out there.

Over the last year, the novelist, academic, and literary critic John Pistelli has been serializing his new novel, Major Arcana, on Substack. I’ve become a fan of Pistelli’s newsletter, which is a mix of literary and cultural insights, and I was drawn to the concept of publishing new chapters of a larger work each week. I did not read the novel-in-progress because, when it comes to literature, I prefer physical books to screens. But once Pistelli finished the serialization and made Major Arcana for sale on Amazon, I immediately purchased it. I was, at the minimum, intrigued. It helped, too, that I had recently read two excellent self-published novels (a review on both is forthcoming) and I had mostly shed whatever elitism I maintained about publishing gatekeepers.

As Chris Jesu Lee recently put it, why do we accept, so readily, the self-publishing of nonfiction (Substacks, Twitter threads, Tumblr) but still stigmatize the self-publishing of fiction? Luckily, that stigma is melting away as publishing itself begins to default to its nineteenth and early twentieth century roots. Leaves of Grass was self-published. Virginia Woolf’s canonical novels were published by Hogarth, a press she founded with her husband, Leonard. Both serialization and subscription-based models were the norm of nineteenth century publishing. I believe, in the coming years, we will see more of this because the modern publishing industry has grown stagnant and risk-averse and has mostly lost interest in promoting new, original voices. How many of you have read hyped novels that, inevitably, do not meet the hype? I don’t think that’s an accident.

Major Arcana arrived to me with no hype, no fanfare. I was a regular reader of Pistelli’s Substack but knew nothing of his prior work, the novels he had already published. I opened the novel, which clocked in at more than 700 pages, and began to read.

What I found, perhaps, is the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century. Pistelli is sweeping and satiric, tender and deliciously strange; a fine melding of Don DeLillo, Alan Moore, and the great-noticers of the human condition who came barreling through the nineteenth century. Major Arcana is a tremendous and serious book. It will linger with me for a long time and my belief is that it will eventually find many new readers. It is better than almost any fiction being produced today.

Major Arcana opens with a suicide: a college student, in the 2020s, shoots himself in the face as his friend, Ash del Greco, films away. Ash is an online occultist. Her father might be Simon Magnus, one of the acclaimed comic book writers of the last century, a curious individual who has rejected all genders—he has no pronouns—and teaches at the very university where the suicide takes place. Simon is the author who richly reimagined Ratman (the world’s Batman stand-in) and Overman (the world’s Superman stand-in) for darker times, and he has courted controversy since. Pistelli roves between the 1970s and the present, telling the story of Simon’s evolution—and the century’s progression—through the eyes of his old editor and lover, Ellen Chandler, and the doomed pairing of Diane del Greco and Marco Cohen; Cohen is Simon’s deeply left-wing and frustrated artist. Politics, art, gender identity, magic, and the meaning of suicide are all grist for Major Arcana, which is both a novel of ideas and compulsively readable.

Below is my conversation with Pistelli, the latest in my series of exchanges with working novelists.

In a good way, you’ve consciously attempted—and I think largely succeeded at—writing a great American novel for this strange phase of the twenty-first century. What were your ambitions, exactly? What did you hope to do?

My main ambition was to restore ambition itself to the American novel, particularly the idea that the novel is a form perfectly suited to encompass the complexities and possibilities of the present, even if this present threatens, as Philip Roth complained in 1961, to outpace the novelistic imagination. This ambition necessarily includes writing about many different types and classes of people and milieux, of daring to use an omniscient narrator, rather than the consciously limited voice of the “I” that has become so prominent over the course of this century with its autofiction vogue and its fears about “cultural appropriation.” A literature cannot thrive under such conditions of modesty and timidity, cannot live in a world of fear. The novel especially flourishes the more reality it has to feed on and to transfigure. Without nostalgia, I wanted to hark back to—and to update for the present—the kind of American novel that was celebrated as recently as the 1990s with such works as McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Morrison’s Paradise, Roth’s American Pastoral, Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys, or DeLillo’s Underworld, novels and novel-series obviously built on the high model of American Romantic and cosmopolitan modernist fiction (Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, To the Lighthouse, Invisible Man, etc.) rather than tailoring themselves to suit the transient demands of activists or the supposed preference of readers for easier televisual pleasures.

Why serialize the novel on Substack first? Is there a certain value to a book arriving in real-time, in chunks, Dickens-style? What can Substack do for books?

The novel has long been a serial form—even difficult modernist works like Ulysses were serialized first—and a platform like Substack gives us an ideal opportunity to update this practice, considering the ease with which it allows both monetization and immediate access to readers. Serialization made me conscious as a writer—more conscious that I might otherwise have been—that each chapter had to work both as an integral artistic unit of its own, since any given chapter is all a reader gets for a week, and had to keep the story in suspenseful motion if readers were going to return for more. This push-pull dynamic highlighted by serialization—this demand to make each page the best page it can be while also advancing the action the whole time—allows the literary novel to maintain both its integrity as a work of art and the tension and intensity of an exciting narrative that can reach a broader public.

How would you characterize the state of contemporary American fiction?

On the sociology of the matter, I can’t add much to such critiques of the business of American fiction offered, for example, by Christian Lorentzen in “At Random” (Harper’s, March 2023), with its report on corporate consolidation and the dire state of all but the biggest bestsellers at the major publishers—or, more explosively, Alex Perez’s famous 2022 Hobart interview with its lament over the narrow class, race, and gender basis of mainstream literary publishing, its preference for well-behaved fiction appealing to the professional managerial class. This is, therefore, a good time to use platforms like Substack and other online venues, not to mention new experiments in print in journals like County Highway or The Mars Review of Books or various small presses and independent publishing ventures, to try to broaden the appeal of literature in America today beyond its narrow metropolitan base.

As implied in my answer to the first question above, though, I have a smaller but still significant complaint about American literary fiction of the last 10 to 15 years, which is not so much about the vogue for autofiction per se but about the broader tendency behind it to look to late-modernist models of the European novel (Sebald, Houellebecq, Knausgård) that are, with their often blank prose styles and their aforementioned preference for the “I,” not necessarily adequate to capture the whole panorama of what DeLillo called “American magic and dread.” Obviously there are exceptions, but many of the best and most acclaimed novels of this 10-15-yeard period, from Teju Cole’s Open City to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Tao Lin’s Leave Society, have been written in this chastened and sometimes chastening mode of the quiescently autobiographical (even if the novels do not represent their authors’ life stories). Hence my conviction that it’s time to try something new, something bigger and more lively, even at the risk of venturing again into that notorious territory James Wood derisively labeled “hysterical realism” two decades ago. (This is not a literary nationalist argument, by the way: I welcome influences from abroad. But if we are to have German influence, e.g., then why not the rambunctious Grass instead of the world-weary Sebald?)

Simon Magnus achieves acclaim and infamy for writing a series of graphic novels that are a bit like Batman and Superman, only far darker and more violent (and, arguably, more imaginative.) The Fool, the Joker stand-in, even rapes Sparrow (the Robin stand-in) in Simon’s most notorious graphic novel. How do comics and literature intersect for you? How do each, in your view, shape American culture? Why decide to reinvent the Batman mythos?

The idea to write about a comic-book author who gained fame for dark portrayals of American superheroes was the germ of Major Arcana in the first place. I wondered why no one had really followed up on Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with its rollicking canvas of the early comic-book industry and its defense of superheroes as archetypes of escape in a nightmarish century. In the 1980s, comics creators like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, and others took these superheroic archetypes of American escape or even innocence and subjected them to the degradations of the real world. With Simon Magnus’s story of The Fool raping Sparrow, I only slightly exaggerated what actually happened in those ’80s comics, and so my excuse is verisimilitude. In fact, the Joker literally beats Robin to death with a crowbar in the Batman story A Death in the Family; the Joker also shoots, paralyzes, and sexually assaults Batgirl in The Killing Joke, taking photographs of her naked, wounded body to show her father, Commissioner Gordon. (This period in American superhero comics is aptly called the Dark Age.)

Such grim takes on the superhero would inform influential cinematic versions of these characters in the Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder films, but I would argue that they also had a broader influence on popular culture with their application of a cynical and noirish moral ambiguity to former children’s entertainment. I wanted to use my novel form to think through the motivations of a writer in attempting such a drastic reinvention of popular culture. (By making my fictional Dark Age scribe Simon Magnus a New Englander, I connected the phenomenon to the broader Gothic strain in the American imagination going back to Hawthorne or Lovecraft, which has always shadowed our sunnier American optimism.) I wanted to examine as well the potential regrets such as writer might experience as he witnesses his grisly inventions colonizing so much of popular culture, to the point where whole generations of children grow up on such visions of rape and murder, as I did. In the end, what are the responsibilities of the artist? Portraying a popular artist with an enormous cultural influence focuses this question better than depicting the typical type of artist who appears in literary novels, i.e., a literary novelist.

As for me, comics, and particularly the Dark Age comics of Miller, Moore, and Morrison, were my earliest literary influences, and I still value the intelligence with which they deliberately infused complex modernist and postmodernist formal strategies into popular entertainment. Moore’s Watchmen, in particular, still stands as one of the greatest literary works of its era, not notably inferior to comparable fiction by DeLillo or Pynchon. When writing Major Arcana, however, and despite the novel’s several reflections on how comics can portray time more adeptly than any other medium by turning it into the gridded space of the paneled page, I was mainly conscious of the difference between graphic novels and novels—of how much more depth of characterization the novel affords the writer, whatever the disadvantage of lacking spectacular visuals.

(I should note that the novel doesn’t require readers to have any knowledge about comics or superheroes beyond a basic idea of who Batman, Robin, the Joker, and Superman are. All other relevant information is given in the text. I had to invent my own versions of these archetypal characters in the novel for obvious copyright reasons.)

Ash del Greco, one of the novel’s protagonists, becomes quasi-famous online as a manifesting coach—a very real thing people do now, promising anyone can change their lives with enough thought, enough intention. What inspired you to delve into manifesting, revision (the belief that the past can be actively rewritten) and newer age magic in Major Arcana?

Once I decided I wanted to write about a Dark Age comics writer, I also knew I wanted to consider the influence Dark Age comics had on the next generation—on the youth of the 21st century. Then it occurred to me that two of the most significant Dark Age comics writers—Alan Moore and Grant Morrison—were practicing occults who construed (especially in Morrison’s case) their own comics as magical spells targeted at western culture to transform it according to their own aesthetic and political vision. Moore and Morrison both routinely cite the notorious English magician Aleister Crowley, who defined magic as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” In other words, these writers understood art itself as a form of manifestation. What they most wanted to manifest with their art was the spread of magical thinking among a populace they thought otherwise too conservative and trapped in conventional Christian or Enlightenment thought. Given the popularity of manifestation and other occult practices today—Tarot, astrology, etc.—I’d say they succeeded!

Major Arcana critically examines these magical practices rather than simply dismissing or demonizing them. Can I will a million dollars into my bank account with the power of my intention alone? I’m certainly still trying, but maybe not. On the other hand, is it really false to observe that we often tend to get not so much what we want as what we expect? Or that art and other forms of mass communication can change the way people think and therefore change the way they act—and, in so doing, change the world? My novel is a novel and not a sober piece of reportage—did I mention the “hysterical realist” element yet?—so I often portray magic working rather directly in the narrative, less because I believe magic does work in such a literal way than because it’s a vivid metaphor for the problems we all experience when we try to materialize our will, or when we try to discover what our true will even is, a mystery that magical thinking can actually help clear up by demanding that we express what we want in the most careful and decisive of terms, lest we talk the universe into granting us only a crude approximation.

You have a Ph.D. in English and the novel brims with allusions to the Romantics and the Modernists. How did your study of literature inform your writing of fiction?

The best thing the study of literature can do for writers is to broaden their sense of what’s possible by providing a wider range of models than writing pedagogy tends to. I don’t have an MFA, and I don’t want to indulge in yet another rote denunciation of MFA programs, but my sense is that they remain dominated by a narrow craft-based conception of fiction writing, a pedagogical simplification and codification of what worked for Flaubert and James in the 19th century and was adapted by Hemingway and O’Connor for the age of cinema in the 20th. This tradition is fine when taken on its own terms—I admire the four writers I’ve named—but it can’t be emphasized enough that there are other traditions and other ways. I am more likely to look to other models of fiction-writing myself, whether Hawthorne or Eliot or Dostoevsky or Mann in the annals of 19th- and 20th-century literature, even if my resultant 21st-century novel has elements—omniscient narration, for example, or a willingness to be discursive or essayistic in the third-person voice—that make it look rather formless in the light of MFA pedagogy with its cult of the sentence and its prose of concrete particulars. As for my allusions to poetry, sometimes that’s not even conscious. Reading poetry makes a novelist’s prose deeper and wider by placing it in a longer lineage of charged uses of the language. The alternative, too often, is a bare language of reportage without color or texture. Hemingway, it should be remembered, loved Shakespeare, Donne, and the King James Bible.

Gender identity is another intriguing leitmotif of the novel. Simon cross-dresses and declares himself, in middle age, completely non-gendered—no pronouns can be used. Ash’s best friend is trans (and later detransitions, becoming something of an anti-woke Catholic.) Ash longs to escape her body, though not necessarily to become a man. How did you think about integrating gender into Major Arcana? How did contemporary debates impact its development?

This theme, too, derives from real aspects of Dark Age comics. Grant Morrison famously wanted to have the Joker cross-dressed in Madonna’s black cone bra in the 1989 graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, which DC Comics vetoed on the theory that readers might get the wrong idea about Jack Nicolson, then starring as the character in theaters. Morrison and Neil Gaiman featured sympathetic transgender characters in their 1990s comics series The Invisibles and Sandman, at a time when trans characters tended more often to appear in media as serial killers or objects of derision. More recently, Morrison has been essentially “adopted” as nonbinary by the queer comics community (though I would note that Morrison has not exactly claimed this identity and has cautioned young activists against the peremptory application of labels and identitarian reductivism—and, for what it’s worth, so would I). As with their occult predilections, so with their gender politics: the Dark Age comics writers were again in the vanguard of culture. I decided therefore to explore the influence of such visions on youth today through Ash del Greco and Ari Alterhaus’s negotiation of their complex gender identity in the late 2010s, with both adopting (and each abandoning, though in different ways) nonbinary identity. It seemed to me that nonbinary identity in particular would be an intriguing lens through which to look at what Coleridge and Woolf acclaimed as the inherently androgynous soul of the artist.

Doing so, however, meant defying activist strictures that such subject matter must be portrayed solely in the light of a civil rights issue—as if the question of the soul’s gender could be disposed of so easily! I didn’t hesitate to satirize some of the questionable practices of the last decade, from compulsory pronoun-sharing (which seems to me to reify rather than to expand a person’s potential identities) to such advances in gender medicine as “nullification” surgery. But I also didn’t want to write some kind of conservative anti-woke screed, because conservatives’ “a man’s a man, a woman’s a woman, and that’s that” attitude has never applied to everyone, not even to conservatives—think only of Trump’s queenly and diva-like persona!—and not even before gender identity gained the social salience it has today. Also because the novelist should be more than a satirist—should be willing to explore with sympathy the needs and longings of the personae of the present.

To speak more personally on the subject, I wrote in part from my own adolescent experience of working through these questions of identity—there was no nonbinary identity when I was teen reading Sandman and The Invisibles, but I might have been drawn to it if there had been, though I doubt I’d have found “they/them” the world’s most persuasive linguistic intervention even then—and from more recent experiences as a college instructor in the last decade that gave me a front-row seat to the gender revolution among Zoomer youth. This aspect of the novel was not researched, exactly, but written directly from experience and observation. I think readers will appreciate a nuanced, sympathetic, but non-pious and non-polemical look at this most polarized, contentious subject.

Major Arcana is a big, long book. 2020s literary publishing seems afraid of bigness. Tell me about your writing process and how you decided on such an expansive scope.

When I started, I thought it might be a novella! And in a way, it is two novellas (the Simon Magnus story and the Ash del Greco story, Parts Two and Three of the novel) with Part One as the set-up and Part Four as the denouement. It’s certainly the longest novel I’ve written, longer by two-thirds than the next largest among my works. The scope basically decided on itself when I realized that I was telling a multi-generational saga, however. I simply don’t think a shorter novel could have contained the events of the story with its 50-year timespan from Simon Magnus’s youth in the 1970s to the present day. I won’t deny that the prospect of serialization did make me favor an expansive vision to give my readers the richest experience for their money: if a digression into the exciting life of a side character or a flashback to a main character’s early experience offered themselves, I didn’t decline the offer!

My process? It's haphazard until it’s not, and it works by accretion. I write until I find the story; then I write the story. I wish I could say I have to catch rainbow trout at dawn before the words will come, or that I write each draft three times in three different colors of hand-ground ink, or something equally picturesque, but I wrote the novel by typing on my laptop for about two hours every day until it was finished. The process took around eight months; I didn’t want to over-work the surface of the text, the way so much contemporary literary fiction is over-worked with mannered, portentous phrasings and a heavy pace. My readers will be the judge, but I believe the speed of composition is reflected in the urgency of the novel’s tempo and the immersiveness of its phantasmagoria.

What’s the purpose of the novel today? Technology races forward, yet it endures.

Internet historian Katherine Dee has recently proposed in her Substack piece “What Is Default Friend All About?” that literature has been superseded by “the collaborative storytelling that goes into creating an Internet persona,” and she might be right. I certainly consider that possibility in the novel itself, with manifestation influencer and online persona Ash del Greco’s inability to read a novel and skepticism of the very form. Moreover, I have not shied away from creating an Internet persona for myself either, in addition to writing novels. Nevertheless, the internet, like other technologies of spectacle before it, threatens to prove ephemeral (I think of how much of earlier cinema is gone, dissolved with the very film rolls). The book in general and the novel in particular is still the best way to create a permanent record of where we’ve been and where we’re going, and its variousness, its capacity to articulate every kind of language and encompass every type of character, ensures that it still has the potential D. H. Lawrence saw in it when he called it “the one bright book of life.” Even if the internet goes out in some apocalyptic flash, I imagine a future traveler chancing upon a charred copy of Major Arcana in the ruins of our civilization and paging through it to learn who we were and what we wanted.

Suicide is another leitmotif. At the start of the novel, Ash’s close friend, Jacob Morrow, shoots himself in the eye. The suicide, of course, is filmed. But he doesn’t do it out of desperation or sadness. He and Ash, it seems, want to feel something greater or even transcend their bodies. How did you come to write Jacob and wrestle with this sort of conception of suicide?

Partially inspired by the 2010 case of Mitchell Heisman, a philosophy student who shot himself in Harvard Yard to demonstrate the autonomy of human consciousness (he makes the argument in his remarkable 2000-page Suicide Note, which I confess I’ve only perused), I wanted to think about suicide as a philosophical act: the demonstration of one’s conviction about life, even one’s conviction of life’s worth. In the novel, however, it is Ash del Greco who wants to kill herself to prove the superiority of mind over matter, and Jacob Morrow, in love with her, who offers his life in her place of hers, thus elevating love in the purest sense, the willingness to die for another, over even the desire for personal transcendence. (I don’t want to belabor any obvious symbolism, but I believe I stress several times in the narrative that Jacob Morrow wears sandals and has long hair!) Ash del Greco’s and Mitchell Heisman’s argument seems sound to me, but it’s not an argument requiring that blood be shed, whether one’s own or another’s. You can demonstrate the superiority of mind over matter in many other and more salubrious ways—by choosing to become a writer rather than anything more lucrative, for example. In our therapeutic age of self-concern and self-care, however, Jacob Morrow’s choice to sacrifice himself so that another might live seemed like the more radical proposition and one worth exploring. While I’d advise anyone in real life to take any other course of action, in the arena of fiction I’m not sure I condemn his choice. “Whatever is done for love,” the philosopher said, “is beyond good and evil.”

Did you think about shopping the novel around at all? Or was it the sort of novel that you felt would’ve worked best if it bypassed the traditional publishing apparatus altogether?

After shopping around some of my earlier novels about 10 years ago, I became disillusioned with the process. While some agents were encouraging about my work, mainstream publishing seemed too oriented toward giving readers what they were already presumed to want—or else an experience akin to prestige TV. I think there's more potential in going directly to readers. In addition, Major Arcana’s subject matter is timely—there are already survey reports that young people identifying as nonbinary has sharply declined, just as the superhero era of pop culture appears to be on the wane—so the cumbersome process of traditional publishing would only threaten to delay the novel until it's moment has passed. (Not that the novel can’t be equally effective in the future as a record of an era that has ended.)