Time was, if you read books, you’d be hard-pressed to escape the Jonathans. Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer: white American men hewing to a midcentury model of novelist as public intellectual. Jonathan Ames, despite being named Jonathan, is not a Jonathan. But Michael Chabon is a Jonathan, and so is Jeffrey Eugenides. Franzen is the über-Jonathan, most apparently concerned with protecting the citadel of fiction from populist encroachment. The books the Jonathans published between 1999 and 2003 occupied that rarefied sliver of the market where literary fiction and huge cash cow overlap. This sliver is smaller now. The demographics have also been shifting, though not as dramatically as you might imagine. One reason must be that publishing is the most hidebound and retrogressive of all culture industries. The other reasons are even more depressing.

Back when the Jonathans first roamed the earth, Amazon was just getting its bearings, social media didn’t exist, review coverage thrived, and it was not remarkable to encounter an all-male masthead or awards committee. Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, featuring a narrator named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to Ukraine to discover his Jewish family’s tragicomic history, presaged the recent autofiction boom. Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude created nostalgia for a pre-gentrification Brooklyn and made genre flourishes trendy. And Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections, portentously published on September 1, 2001, traced Albert and Enid Lambert and their miserable adult children through over 570 action-packed pages. This Midwestern clan came to stand for a fin de siècle way of life that the author probably never intended to hold up as a model, except of exactly how close close third-person narration can get. Though the golden age of the Jonathans is far gone, the templates created by their best sellers still sway how novelists write, marketers market, and publishers publish today.

Return to V.F.’s Y2K bonanza

Modern American book publishing began to take shape in the early 1900s. Highly educated, overwhelmingly male editors and agents did handshake deals over three-martini lunches at the Century club, then went back to the office and sexually harassed their secretaries. This continued until two weeks ago, or maybe the late ’90s/early ’00s, when Bertelsmann bought Random House, Viacom took control of Simon & Schuster, and publishing started acting slightly more like a corporate industry than a perpetual Yale reunion. But lunches, while less boozy, are still the site of agents’ and editors’ most important work. Novels can sell at auction for well upwards of a million, sometimes based on little more than a hunch. The dearth of market research prevents literature, for now, from being packaged based on algorithms, reverse engineered—like an Olivia Rodrigo album or a CBD soda in a lavender can—to appeal to a specific demographic. But the Vegas-style unpredictability increasingly makes it impossible for novelists to have careers as novelists.

Most authors have day jobs, which is nothing new; Herman Melville worked as a customs inspector. The difference in 2021 is that traditional side careers are less viable and also less “side.” My 50-plus-year-old friends worked as typists and came home with creative juice left in the tank. Employers today demand 24/7 access to your mind and soul and claim to be “like family,” which is accurate in the darkest sense. The competition for tenure-track MFA jobs is so intense that candidates are virtually clawing one another’s eyes out over the chance to move to, for example, Arizona. The other way authors used to make a living was journalism. In 2021, that’s like working as an aspiring actor to subsidize your true passion, waiting tables.

As in Vegas, there are still a few winners. But recent jackpot strikers have had to provide the people shelling out for their books with a “platform,” a social media following or a sound-bitey backstory. The Jonathans didn’t have to contend with that. Wunderkind emeritus Safran Foer aside, they published apprentice books that didn’t sell oodles but weren’t required to, and then hit it big with more mature novels. Now, a literary author’s highest advance is often their first, ginned up by hype and hope and, crucially, a lack of past failure. The Jonathans’ career model is the literary equivalent of working at the same firm for 50 years and retiring with a gold watch and a pension.

Because of all this, it’s easy to see why the Jonathans’ mere continued existence makes novelists and the people who love them go absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs—and why they can’t get over Franzen’s primal sin.

Most people who care think that Franzen refused to appear on Oprah to promote The Corrections, but what actually happened was worse. The novel was anointed a book club pick (an honor that, when the show was on network television, could conservatively increase book sales by a factor of 10), and preparatory B-roll was shot in Franzen’s hometown of St. Louis. Then, in a preceding Fresh Air interview, he said, “I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience, and I’ve heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say, ‘If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.’ Those are male readers speaking.” Oprah’s response: “Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict.” No one has ever been told to fuck off and die more politely.

In that Fresh Air interview, Franzen said the quiet part out loud: Serious novels were by—and for—men like him. Whether that was untrue by the time he said it or had never been true or stopped being true because he said it, the culture of fiction has been shifting ever since. Book clubs, overwhelmingly comprising women, are still one of the biggest drivers of American fiction sales, and while the books they choose now aren’t always by women, they’re certainly less likely to be by Jonathans.

Books by people other than straight white men have lately dominated prizes and review coverage to such an extent that think pieces are asserting things like “Female novelists replaced white male authors in the 2010s” and, much less credibly, that men are being “shut out” of publishing. It’s true that the U.S. paperback of Sally Rooney’s Normal People sold more than 325,000 copies in just over a year, and during a pandemic. Louise Erdrich took home the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first time a woman has done so since 2014. But novelists are still fighting over crumbs of a smaller and smaller pie. Last summer, Jesmyn Ward revealed that the advance for her follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones was a mere $100,000—for Sing, Unburied, Sing, which also won a National Book Award. It’s telling that you can win American publishing’s highest honor and still (after taxes and agent fees) make not quite enough up front on your next book to buy a late-model Lexus sedan.

It might be too optimistic to think that we’ve shown the Jonathans the door in order to celebrate the Jesmyns and Sallys. More likely, the Jonathans saw the writing on the wall and got one foot out of this godforsaken business, following the money west to Hollywood. Lethem enjoyed an adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn in 2019 and is still churning out genre-inflected literary novels every few years, but it’s probably his faculty position at Pomona College that’s paying the bills. Safran Foer’s early novels became forgettable movies, and his emails with fellow plant eater Natalie Portman, his coproducer of the documentary based on his nonfiction best seller Eating Animals, are legendary. The sale prices of his lavish Brooklyn homes speak volumes about the cash he’s bringing in; the volumes in question are not in any sense literary.

The odd man out is Franzen, whose collaboration with Noah Baumbach on a Corrections miniseries was killed by HBO in 2012 after shooting part of the pilot. Luckily, he is the only Jonathan still wholly vested in writing enormous, risky novels. Crossroads, his newest out this fall from FSG, is the first in a planned trilogy. In the announcement, his publisher deemed Franzen the “universally recognized…leading novelist of his generation.” Twitter lost its mind. But I defy even his staunchest haters to read this symphonic intergenerational saga and disagree.

This is the problem with dismissing the Jonathans: Franzen, at least, is really great. His nonfiction is pessimistic and snobby, but his fiction is passionately inclusive. His main trick, which never gets old, is to reveal his characters’ inner lives at the moment of their most visceral humanity. He follows them into the bathroom and bedroom and confessional and we all emerge together, exalted and disgusted. Lethem and Chabon also have their moments, but their early-’00s books feel musty now. The Corrections holds up, a 2001 hit that bangs as hard as Is This It. If you’re trying to write a sprawling, ambitious book with dozens of vividly drawn characters, you could do worse than use it as a model. But why would you want to do that? Writing novels is for suckers!

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