The End of Prestige

Art and ambition in the 2020s

Philadelphia! I’ll be coming to the City of Brotherly Love on May 12 to discuss Glass Century with the great Adrian Nathan West. Please reserve your ticket now if you want to come. My novel, as a reminder, is out on May 6, less than one month from now, and I strongly urge you to preorder a book that has been called the long-awaited great Millennial novel and “a marvelous paean to NYC and a spectacularly moving novel,” according to Junot Diaz.

And don’t forget, I’m having a book launch with the legendary Adelle Waldman on May 6th in Manhattan. Details below. Buy your tickets here. You cannot get in without a ticket and they will go fast!

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When I was young, I wanted to be a successful novelist. Success, in this sense, took on superficial, external forms that were predicated on a wholly twentieth century concept. Born in the last months of the 1980s, I was distinctly a child of that time—the digital was subservient to the analog, and nothing had the whiff of accomplishment quite like newspaper agate. Oh, to catch your name in the paper. To see your book in a bookstore. At around age fourteen, I realized, quite suddenly, I was never going to be a professional baseball player and whatever longing I had for that dreamworld would, painfully, remain just that: a wish never fulfilled. There was an anguished liminal period, the late high school years, and I arrived in college with no distinct idea of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. And then, with little forethought, I decided I would be a writer. The ballplayer ambition had simply been transposed: I knew, of course, I would not get rich writing like I could playing center field for the Yankees, but I’ll say that money never interested me all that much. I did not want to be poor—I was no monk, and my socialism would not keep me from wanting to buy nicer dress shoes or an elegant coat—but the concept of landing on a best-seller list, while appealing, wasn’t the ultimate goal. Plenty of writers I respected did sell well, but just as many popular writers held no appeal for me. I never liked Harry Potter, I didn’t read thrillers, and I’d only want my book in an airport if I didn’t have to compromise my artistic vision.

I craved prestige. As a Millennial, I probably belonged to the last generation that had a working memory of literary novelists enjoying a sizable degree of clout and fame. I remember, quite viscerally, when Jonathan Franzen landed on the cover of TIME. I remember when Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith were writers everyone, for a period, seemed to talk about. I remember most literate nineteen-year-olds knowing who Junot Diaz was, right after he published The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I remember when winning an award or fellowship—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, a McArthur—not only won a writer plaudits in the literary world but plainly vaulted them beyond it. There was a halo that seemed to surround a certain kind of writer, like Jonatham Lethem (so many Jonathans!), Jennifer Egan, or Michael Chabon. Yes, they sold well, but more importantly there was an inarguable gravity they held. They published in acclaimed magazines and gave well-attended talks and their whole ouevres, in glimmering blurb-stuffed paperbacks, were available at Barnes & Noble. The New Yorker was always happy to gobble up one of their short stories. What a life they seemed to lead, and it would be mine, one day, surely.

There was a recent essay on the vanishing white male Millennial literary writer that kicked up quite a bit of predictable controversy. The writer, Jacob Savage, argues quite convincingly that white male writers born after 1984 or so have mostly disappeared from the upper echelon of literary fiction. Savage writes well and with nuance, and his conclusion is, to me at least, difficult to debate. It is not an anti-woke screed, despite its framing, and Savage does not come off as especially aggrieved; he even indicts the white men for their own artistic failure. I found success as a writer in my twenties, but it was through nonfiction, not fiction. That was how I was known, and it’s still how most people come to me—through my reportage, essays, and columns. If I felt bitter, at some point, over the phenomenon Savage writes about, I resolved around turning thirty that it would only matter so much if I simply kept writing. No one was going to stop me from writing fiction and if the large publishing conglomerates wouldn’t hand me six-figure advances, I would plug away and find smaller outlets for my work. For Glass Century, my novel due out next month, it isn’t lost on me that it probably would have secured far more money from a much larger publisher if it appeared in 2005 instead of 2025. Ambitious social novels were in vogue then, and if I only had the “luck” to be a Gen X writer, I may have cashed in. But I’m thirty-five, not fifty-five, and this is the world I’ve inherited—one I’ve come to lament much less of late, despite its challenges. Glass Century is a book I am immensely proud of, and I believe, shedding the posture of faux humility that today’s elite novelists seem to relish, it is one of the best books published in recent times. Some smart people agree with that assessment, and more might if they get a chance to read. Would I prefer more acclaim for Glass Century? Sure. But as an art object, it pleases me, and that counts for a lot.

The best analysis I saw of the Savage essay came from another white male Millennial writer named Caleb Caudell. Caudell, a talented novelist and short story writer on the literary fringes who has always reminded me a bit of a Midwestern Henry Miller, did not disagree with Savage but offered a perspective that few on the internet, warring from their usual camps (woke, anti-woke), did not seem to consider: what would it really matter if these white male Millennials were suddenly granted prestige? If, all of a sudden, the New Yorker publishing credits and forty under forty lists and major awards were handed out to them, as they were for their cohort born before the mid-1980s, would anything change? “What’s interesting here isn’t the absence of straight white men from prestigious publications. It’s that no one cares about these prizes and lists in the first place,” Caudell wrote. “Quick, name one writer from the New York Times notable fiction list from the last ten years off the top of your head. Name a Wallace Stegner fellowship recipient. Tell me you knew such lists and fellowships even existed before reading this article. Then tell me about a Nigerian Prince who has some lucrative remote secretarial work for me to do.”

“Even if a couple of slots opened up for big white novelists, I wouldn’t be included, so why exactly should I feel represented, vindicated or even encouraged by one or two big names in a thoroughly shrunken field?” Caudell asked. “Do I see myself in Don Delillo? Dear god no….”

Even if I see myself in Don DeLillo—he’s an influence on my fiction—Caudell is, in essence, correct. We are in a post-prestige era for fiction. Never have literary prizes meant less. One of my favorite novelists, Joshua Cohen (b. 1980), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 and I’ve only heard less from him since. He enjoyed more fame (major newspaper profiles, large magazine commissions) a decade ago. The same is true of most award recipients in the 2020s. I’ve reeled off the names of recent National Book Award winners to people who read fiction regularly and, for many of these winners, I’ve gotten nothing back but blank stares. Stegner fellows, McArthur fellows, and Times Notable Book “winners” are not driving much conversation, either. Fiction does still sell and certain books do penetrate the culture, like Miranda July’s All Fours and Percival Everett’s James. Largely, though, the kind of institutional prizes that used to guarantee a degree of straightforward literary success are no longer resonating with ordinary people. This, to be fair, is not just a challenge for fiction. We live in a fractured era—one with a surging microculture and diminished macroculture—that makes conventional fame much harder to achieve. There are fewer enormously famous pop, movie, and athletic stars under thirty. The NBA, the fame league, is still held captive by a slew of elder Millennials (LeBron, Curry, Durant) while its best under twenty-five crop, like Anthony Edwards or even Victor Wembanyama, fail to achieve the same level of cultural dominance as LeBron James circa 2005. And it goes without saying today’s Hollywood cannot match the era of Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Sandra Bullock. The machines of Empire are sputtering. It can be argued whether this is welcome, but the trend lines are no longer up for debate.

Of late, I’ve felt liberated by the decline of literary prestige. In ways I did not expect, it’s created new openings, especially as the literary world itself grows more insular and self-satisfied. My new book and culture review publication, The Metropolitan Review, has found success because there are fewer incumbents to crush it and a real hunger has emerged for a fresh kind of writing that is hard to find in today’s magazines. It’s a throwback, in many ways, to the twentieth century culture, but it operates a Substack and therefore taps into the current revolution occurring in the realm of the essay. As the power of old institutions withers, vacuums open up, and even in a world where the serious reader is in shorter supply, there are still many thousands—if not millions—of human beings who want to engage in something approaching the life of the mind. Roy Price, the founder of Amazon Video and Amazon Studios, has written about the mistake Hollywood has made of intentionally trying to seek too broad of an audience—of assuming, strangely, after the success of shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, that art should not be too layered or “difficult” any longer—and I think of that now in my artistic pursuits, how I am gratified that I’ve found a small space to scrap out a career on my own terms. It isn’t easy, by any means, but I’m freer.

Writers today coming up should still want to win a prize—give me a prize, give me ten prizes—and build relationships with other writers, but they need not fret the literary establishment’s judgment any longer. The establishment means well, but it’s frail. It cannot birth stars like it once did; its anointment powers have dried up. Your book’s performance won’t be impacted by that choice indie bookstore—the one that tends to book the fashionable writers of the hour—turning you away. For a period, I lamented both not being anointed and the slow slide of the machine that would bestow me all the accolades and honors I believed I deserved. Then I shifted my perspective. What if, for example, you were not one of the anointed ones of the twentieth century but perhaps you deserved to be? Plenty of mediocrities, then, rose to the top. Plenty of award winners are forgotten today. There’s a discussion to be had, too, about white men—and men, broadly—attempting to play the sort of identity games that other groups, in liberal spheres like publishing and media, have exploited over the last decade. Naomi Kanakia said it best: a male writer cannot will a literary audience into being, not when the readership tends to be college-educated women. Some of these women (not all of them, but a significant chunk) are just not terribly interested in what young men have to say, and may not want to spend hours of their time with male interiority. The solution to this isn’t to wallow: it’s to publish anyway, either through self-publishing or independent presses. Build the constituency you want to have. Lay the groundwork how a politician might. In time, you may cultivate a tangible following.

My own concern for the male reader and writer—and this does transcend race—is that this country is going to get much worse if men completely remove themselves from the humanities. Yesterday’s litbro bragging about his postmodern bookshelf is today’s red-pilled podcast bro, trending towards inceldom. There’s not a 1:1 relationship here—I have certainly not undertaken any scientific studies—but I can tell you, anecdotally, 2000s heterosexual men still regularly discussed novels, harbored literary aspirations, and used books to meet women. Aspiring pick-up artists should know being well-read is still a great way to meet attractive women, especially as men fade from the arts and the number of eligible bachelors who know anything about Catherine Lacey, Emma Cline or Clarice Lispector rapidly approaches zero. But here is where prestige does matter: men, especially white men, still make plenty of money and enjoy a great deal of power in this country. Today’s male teenager is enthralled by crypto billionaires, start-up founders, famed YouTubers, and popular streamers on sites like Twitch. They like action and fast money. Once upon a time, they may have found some of that in Norman Mailer, Philip Roth or John Updike—men who seized their pot of gold and were never wanting for sexual partners—but they have no literary idols in the 2020s. Young novelists aren’t famous anymore, and none swagger about since that behavior is considered uncouth or outright toxic. They have good, predictable politics and they exist to get along, as politely as possible, with others. I myself did not become a writer because I admired Roth’s sex life or Franzen’s ability to command the discourse every once in a while, but it didn’t hurt that they were out there, stars burning bright. Roth was still publishing books when I was in college. I wonder about what I would have been like were I born ten, eleven, or twelve years later, if I came of age when novelists no longer seemed like especially important people. How hard would I have tried as a writer? How much of aspiration is raw ego? I hope more men read and write because the alternative is the passive of consumption of substandard media and, in some cases, reactionary politics. I am not encouraging reading to produce more liberals and Democrats, but I do believe, even if you’re right-wing, the act of reading high literature will increase your cognition and make you more of a serious person. MAGA’s growing incoherence springs, in part, from its limp intellectual foundations.

Our politics shouldn’t actually be cleaved by gender, with women racing left and men swerving right. For most of history, it was never like that, and the future grows darker if the greatest indicator of a person’s politics is, in fact, gender. Women shouldn’t want the reading public to only be women. They shouldn’t want their men watching AI porn and gambling on basketball games at one in the morning on their phones. For me, now in my mid-thirties and mostly attaining the career that I wanted, the decline of literary prestige is fine: I’m free of anxiety and I’ll have an audience as long as I write. It is challenge for solving the problem of getting boys into books and getting literature an audience that isn’t polarized along gender or party lines. Novels shouldn’t be merely entertainment for a thin slice of the leisure class. They should be greater and grander. They should be aspirational. A new model of prestige, at least, would beat an old one.