The Great American Novel Is Still Possible
Every decade announces the death of serious fiction. Every decade is wrong. What the current moment in American letters actually looks like — from inside it.
The complaint that the American novel has fallen into a state of refined but inconsequential aestheticism — beautiful sentences, cultivated sensibilities, nothing at stake — is at least forty years old. Tom Wolfe made it in 1989, calling for a return to the social novel in a famous Harper's manifesto that argued American writers had abandoned the Dickensian tradition of large-scale social realism for a retreat into interiority that left the great forces shaping American life unliterary. Jonathan Franzen echoed it in his 2002 New Yorker essay "Mr. Difficult," though his target was different — the difficulty of postmodern experimentalism rather than the smallness of domestic realism.
The complaint has been made so often that it has become a genre of its own — the essay about the failure of American fiction — and its recurrence suggests that it is responding less to specific conditions in the literary world than to a perennial anxiety about the adequacy of aesthetic forms to historical moments that feel catastrophically large.
The catastrophically large historical moment we are actually in — the AI disruption, the democratic crisis, the climate emergency, the fracturing of shared reality — is producing literary responses that are not primarily the ones that literary critics have been expecting. This is normal. Literature takes time.
What is actually being written
The American fiction of the past decade that will survive — that will be read in twenty years with the recognition that it saw something true about its moment — is not primarily the big social novel that Wolfe was calling for or the campus drama that has dominated literary prize discourse.
It is work that has found forms adequate to experiences the dominant forms have consistently marginalized: the fiction of immigration and cultural displacement (Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing); the fiction of the American working class that has been progressively abandoned by the literary mainstream (Richard Russo, Lauren Groff, Ron Rash); the fiction that is finding new structures to hold the experience of the internet and digital life (Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus).
What is less developed — and what the current moment demands — is fiction that can hold the AI question: the prospect of a technology that is genuinely transforming what it means to be human, to work, to know things, to create, to be conscious. The few attempts in this direction have been mostly in science fiction, which has the advantage of generic permission to be speculative but the disadvantage of the genre's conventions and the limitations of its critical and commercial reach.
The attention economy problem
The specific challenge for serious fiction in the 2020s is not the quality of the work being written but the conditions of its reception. Serious fiction — fiction that asks something of its reader, that does not resolve quickly into genre satisfaction — requires sustained attention in an information environment that has been systematically organized to prevent sustained attention.
The evidence that deep reading is declining is robust: time-diary studies show significant declines in sustained reading among American adults since 2000; neuroimaging research suggests that the cognitive mode required for deep reading — what Maryanne Wolf calls "the reading brain" — is a skill that requires regular practice to maintain; and the commercial pressures on literary publishers to produce shorter, faster, more "accessible" books have produced a selection bias against the most formally ambitious work.
This is not a reason to despair about literary culture. It is a reason to be realistic about the conditions under which literary culture operates and the scale at which it can reasonably be expected to function. Great novels are not written for mass audiences; they never were. Moby-Dick sold fewer than 3,500 copies in Melville's lifetime. The Great Gatsby was a moderate commercial success; it became canonical only decades after Fitzgerald's death.
The standards against which contemporary literary fiction is measured — standards that implicitly compare it to a Golden Age that mostly exists in retrospect — are applied inconsistently and unfairly. The American novel is not dying. It is doing what literature has always done: slowly, unevenly, and below the threshold of cultural visibility, finding forms adequate to experiences that journalism and commentary cannot hold.
What AI means for fiction
The AI question, for literary fiction specifically, has two components that are often conflated.
The first is the generation question: can AI produce literary fiction that is genuinely good? Current AI systems can produce technically competent prose, generate plots, imitate styles convincingly. They cannot, yet, produce work that has the quality of necessity — the sense that this specific story needed to be told by this specific consciousness. Whether that quality is achievable by a system without consciousness, or whether it is definitionally unavailable to such a system, is a genuinely open question.
The second is the displacement question: will AI-generated content compete with human literary fiction for readership and cultural attention in ways that make the market for human literary fiction less sustainable?
This question is more tractable and the answer is probably yes, modestly. Generic content — genre fiction, commercial fiction, narrative content that is primarily about plot and pace rather than consciousness and form — is more susceptible to AI displacement than literary fiction, which derives its value primarily from the specific consciousness of its author and the relationship between author and reader that authenticity enables. Whether this is a business argument that publishers will act on remains to be seen.
Aiko Tanaka is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering books, literature, and the literary arts.