The Anointed

Imagining success

News! My novel, Glass Century, is out May 6. It is, as the novelist Nell Zink says, about “the only taboo kink left, adultery.” You can pre-order here and get the audio book here. A book tour is taking shape. I will be launching the book on May 6 at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan (more information on that soon) and taking the show on the road. I have tour stops tentatively scheduled in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. If you want me to come to you, let me know!

If you’re interested, I now write a column, twice a week, for New York Magazine. You can read my latest on Trump and also check out my latest in the New Statesman, where I will have a column that will run several times a month.

And have a listen to my appearance on the Nostalgia Trap podcast, where I talked about the state of our culture.

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When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to be anointed. Success would come as a whir, a montage, one act to make my life cohere as it should. An editor would find my manuscript and call me a genius, or a professor would declare I was the best student they ever had. Someone—a person or an institution—would have to elevate me. It was only a matter of time, of having timing, and if it didn’t happen at a certain age, I’d be out of luck.

In my mid-twenties, I would take long train rides from where I lived, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to the Midtown offices of the weekly newspaper where I worked. I would hunch over a journal and scrawl out my wishes—for success, above all, as a writer. Success, the sudden kind—to come now, already. A lightning bolt from the sky, like the divine energy that transformed Billy Batson into Captain Marvel, the god of my father’s youth. At twenty-four, I didn’t feel young. Not at twenty-five, either. I was in a hurry, you see. To go from here to there, to that nebulous realm of success, my face in a newspaper, or even the fleeting egoist’s dream of walking into a party and having people turn toward you, whisper about you, their eyes lighting up, you are you, you are somebody.

None of this is good to feel, but I felt it. I remember many restless mornings on the subway, the B clattering over low-slung Brooklyn, jagged antennae on all the little rooftops and the morning sun slashing through the smoky windows. I had a book, or a crumpled Times with me, and I was sure soon, if life progressed as it should, I wouldn’t have to do this anymore. A book would pay my way, and I’d be borne aloft somewhere. Where? Literary Valhalla. I just had to get there.

A decade on, still in the mix, I am sure there is no single moment of making it. Or there is, but it doesn’t happen to most people. If you are lucky—and I consider myself lucky—there is merely steady accumulation, a publication here, a job here, an inching upward that beats a backslide. I believe in my talent, and in my most delusional moments I bat around the term genius in my head—what is it and can I have it?—but I can’t say that alone has allowed me a career. No. There are other talented human beings. I think, just as much, my bullheadedness must be credited. I’ve been rejected a striking amount, and I’ve managed to only take it personally for so long. Every publication I’ve written for has also rejected me—many times. I cannot tell you how many publishers have turned down books of mine. When I used to submit short stories, the rejections were enormous. Until my thirties, I was rarely recruited or “poached,” an editor reaching out from the void to take me to my next station. If I was going to write somewhere, I had to send the email, make the introduction, have the idea, and beg. Well, ask—but the line between the two was never very bright. In almost every instance, I was making the first move. I was not being courted.

Survival is a virtue unto itself. I’ve never not known precarity in the media industry, where I’ve been employed, and never not wondered when whatever I was doing would no longer be possible. I watched as the ladder I climbed burned below me. The first two newspapers I worked at no longer exist, and another I proudly freelanced for only exists on a technicality. I’ve never known a media golden age. If I fantasized about being vaulted into the literary stratosphere, I was always more of a realist when it came to journalism: I probably wasn’t even going to get golden handcuffed. What I did understand, intuitively, was that I would have to keep swimming. If I stopped writing, I’d be done. Whatever opportunities were out there, I’d have to chase after them. If I had a byline, I had life. And if not, I’d be putting my career in the grave.

I could admit, by the end of my twenties, I had come to like this. Perhaps it was because I was making money and setting my own hours, if these hours would alienate the median human being. I don’t have any trouble writing late at night. I can write in crowded places and quiet places; I can write on my couch, in the backseat of a car, on a train, or, truly, anywhere. For whatever reason, I don’t get easily distracted. I don’t require “conditions” for writing: I merely do it, and I need no mood or mind-state to start producing words. I’ve got the rotor spinning inside, urging me onward. If I don’t know what I’m doing, I write anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? If words, in one sense, are precious to me—they pay my rent, my groceries, and fuel whatever fun I have—they are in another way entirely expendable, ready at a moment’s notice to be spewed out of me. I am not going to sit and sit and sit and not write. I admire that discipline, if it also sounds like constipation.

I admit, in my less charitable moments, I feel schadenfreude about the collapse of 2010s digital media. BuzzFeed, Vice, Gawker … well, they didn’t want me, so this is what happens. The child inside gloats. I wanted little more, as a young reporter at a local newspaper in Queens and later at the New York Observer, to be anointed by them. It’s not that I especially enjoyed their writing (“content”) or aesthetic, but I wanted to go where it was hip. I wanted to feel fast, young, and important. To work at BuzzFeed was, naturally, to be on the rise. The future had chosen you. Back then, Ben Smith, their thirty-something editor, was plucking young twenty-somethings like me for staff positions and unleashing them upon America. They covered presidential elections, traveled the world, and cultivated enormous Twitter followings. My ultimate dream was still to be a highly successful novelist, but hanging at BuzzFeed or Vice or lobbing bombs from the Gawker mothership seemed like an intriguing way to spend time. In the high school cafeteria of 2010s media, they were the cool kids, and I was at a publication that, while still good enough, was no longer at the vanguard. I waited for that phone call, that email—Ross, we’d like you to join BuzzFeed/Gawker/Vice because of your fine writing and reporting skills … My Twitter then, my social currency, was a fraction of the size of their stars’, and if I got there, it’d balloon. That I was sure of. And if it ballooned, what couldn’t I do? It didn’t matter that my sensibility didn’t align with theirs and I found their style gauche. I only wanted to be cool.

A decade on, digital media has collapsed and I’m here. I am a prideful person, and a competitive person, so I do take stock of the landscape. I’m glad to still be standing, and I also wish the outlets had survived because we need more professional journalists. We need publications, too, with functioning business models. Luckily, those are starting to emerge. HellGate, in New York City, has the Gawker spirit, and brings in enough revenue to pay their staff a living wage. More publications must build themselves this way: raising revenue from their readership and scaling up reasonably. In an ideal world, there would be generous public funding for news as well, but we aren’t there. In the interim, there are excellent nonprofits, and more publicly interested wealthy people who understand it is worthwhile for our democracy to pump cash into local news and investigative projects. It would be great, also, if our millionaire and billionaire patrons of culture recognized that it was a wise idea to fund publications that review, champion, and critique new books, music, film, and TV. The old newspapers had arts sections. The new nonprofits newsrooms aren’t terribly interested, or their donors don’t want them going there.

Does anointment still work? This is something I’ve been pondering of late. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, mainstream cultural institutions were capable of producing stars. An elite publisher decided a new novelist was going to be “major” and a publicity campaign could get him or her there, as long as the writer displayed some talent or ability. Record labels broke out new artists all the time. Hollywood, of course, was the dream factory.

To survey the landscape today is to find it bereft of A-listers. At first, I thought this was a literary phenomenon, as I’ve increasingly struggled to name acclaimed literary novelists under the age of forty. (Yes, I can reel off several, but this would have been much easier to do in the 2000s or even 2010s.) Scroll through the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 honorees over the last fifteen years and you’ll find the large majority of writers aren’t known today. Some haven’t published in years. The publishing industry itself certainly makes it harder on writers. Consolidation has meant fewer independent imprints competing against one another and editors are overworked and underpaid. Many veterans have left the industry. I’ve had novels on submission that took months to even get read and I’ve stopped taking this personally because I’m told, in the post-pandemic era, that’s becoming industry standard. But even if you do clear these hurdles, it’s no longer apparent the major imprints know how to promote books. Some of this has to do with the mass die off of book review sections, which I am personally trying to rectify by founding a literary review publication (The Metropolitan Review launches on Monday), and some of it is, simply, a lack of creativity and ambition. There are many people who still like to read! The success of Substack, with its millions of newsletter subscribers, many of them arguing like AP Lit nerds, is evidence of that. If the publishing industry can’t tap into that, they’ve gone sclerotic in such a way that there is no recovery.

Beyond literature, the elite cultural institutions aren’t minting stars like they once did. The number of true Hollywood A-listers under the age of thirty is quite small, especially when compared to the count of inordinately famous actors and actresses who came of age in the 1980s through 2010s. Where is today’s Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, or Brad Pitt? Or the twenty-something who matches Jennifer Lawrence’s run of massive hits? What about the showrunner who is becoming Gen Z’s Lena Dunham? It can’t all be Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, or Sydney Sweeney, who seems most famous for the anxious cultural reactions to her breasts. The auteurs aren’t breaking out, either. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas were all making major movies in their twenties and early thirties. No equivalent exists today—not even of Darren Aronofsky, whom I can take or leave. In pop, there are younger superstars, like Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter, but even there, it’s a paucity of genre options. There are no new rock stars, but it’s become even harder to find the breakout hip hop and rap heroes, chart-toppers who are redefining the culture for those under thirty. In music, as Ted Gioia has written, life itself is a nostalgia act, and much of the energy in the streaming era is funneled into legacy acts. The already famous devour the young.

In my own life, I seek out more people like me. Once, it was not uncommon to write novels and essays, reportage and columns. Most leading journalists, at some point, tried their hand at a novel, and literary lights would find themselves opining on politics or even doing some reporting themselves. As a career ideal, I always held up Gore Vidal: the elegant, acerbic, and deeply heterodox novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, and candidate for political office. Notice how many descriptors I had to affix to that sentence? I didn’t set out to copy Vidal, but I’ve been drawn to the concept of versatility and the inherent voraciousness that comes with it. I could only live one life, and if I got the chance, I would try to experience as much of it, within this career context, that I could. I would do the beat reporting and the traditional journalism that I liked but never loved. I would write my fiction, the true passion, and make money through nonfiction, since that offers a greater market. I would range into the essay, another passion, and the opinion column. Curious, in the 2010s, about political office, I would run once myself. This all felt natural to me. What I found, in my thirties, were fewer and fewer writers who were consistently producing fiction and nonfiction—or trying to, at least. Specialization had taken hold, or the novel had lost its allure. Certainly, journalists and essayists and pundits seemed less interested in making the attempt to write one.

I found, eventually, I could stop worrying about anointment and simply do the work I wanted to do. For one, I don’t know that anointment, for most, is possible any longer, not with the rise of news silos and the devolution of the mass cultural consciousness. We are a world of thriving microcultures and a mainstream that isn’t keeping up as it should. I feel tugged between both, and I don’t mind that. As long as I can keep writing. Wherever, however. There is little more sacred. I’ll do it as long as I’m upright.