Adventures in [Woke] Bookstores

My Search for That Mysterious Thing We Once Called Serious Art

Well, I’ve been sending out emails (100 so far) to bookstores around the country, trying to get them to sell The Crew, my punk-literary novel, available HERE on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Baker & Taylor, Smashwords, Fable, and many other places (including Goodreads).

So far emails have gone out to bookstores in Ventura, Ojai, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, San Diego, Idaho, Montana. Plenty more to go out.

Unsurprisingly and yet somehow still surprisingly, I have been faced with one of the saddest truths in the contemporary American literary landscape: Art is dead. From insisting that readers and writers care deeply about BLM, being a feminist or being Pro-Palestine and Anti-Israel, to same re “antiracism,” to making it clear that a certain bookstore was for women and “non-binary” writers and that they’d consider a male writer but his work would have to be really really really exceptionally good.

More than once the words “Is this even legal” flitted through my tired, irritated mind. At one store I made the mistake of clicking under the “YA/For Kids” section on the website and was greeted with pure satire: A way, way too long list of every non-white demographic just to make sure that you know that THEY know that being white is evil.

When did this all happen? Look, I have no beef whatsoever with bookstores marketing non-white writers. Please do so. And yes, I recognize the dreaded “historical imbalance.” I grasp the nuanced, complex context of literary (not to mention social) history and how it’s been “before.”

But that is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

How did we get to this odd place in the book world where talent meant so little, and racial makeup/pigmentation meant so damn much? The media—largely run by rich white young elites who make up a tiny fraction of America and represent an even tinier percentage of American racial and political beliefs—has succeeded, sadly, in carving us all up into little fragmented, cloistered cliques, and each clique is assigned a literary belief system and a literary and moral worth.

I realize that Orwell said everything is political, and that the 1960s made “the personal is the political” popular and trendy, but at the end of the day readers want a good book. People generally don’t want to be preached at and proselytized to. They want to be respected, treated as autonomous adults who can think for themselves and form their own opinions. Readers want to be pushed to think, not *told what to think.* (There’s a massive chasm between the two.)

That said far fewer Americans read at all in 2024. Most literary agents are young white rich women. Most readers are women. Most publishing houses are made up of white women. (Minus CEOs/presidents.)

This small universe of avid readers has in many ways shifted from serious literature to books like White Fragility. The new film American Fiction is a brilliant parody of this phenomenon. Directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright (brilliant acting), the film explores the absurdity of our current literary world. Wright is a smart, sophisticated, middle-class “Black writer”—he sees himself as an individual, simply as “a writer”—who writes serious literary novels. But he grasps that the current market—in the film—has become profoundly and tragicomically racialized to a degree never before seen since the blatantly racist Jim Crow 1950s.

If one were Black now, one was expected to write of “The Black Experience,” whatever that was. As if all Black Americans or people globally were somehow the same: They had the same past, the same feelings, the same family types, the same aspirations, the same white resentments, the same historical context and past, etc. This seems to be The New Far Left Point of View which is, if you pause for even just one nanosecond, clearly racist stereotyping.

Obviously, not all Black people are the same. Like all human beings, Black people are individuals. Sure, there may be some similarities culturally among particular groups, but at the end of the day your skin pigmentation says nothing about who you are as a person. But the New Left needs to break everyone down into despicable, non-nuanced, overly simplistic, black-and-white (pun intended) social categories.

In American Fiction, Monk—the central character played by Wright—decides in a display of emotional satire to set aside his precious and serious literary style for a racially-stereotyped novel “about Black people” which is so over-the-top as to be pure theatre. (Complete with guns, crime, poverty, idiocy, etc.) He even names the book “FUCK” in an attempt to move the absurdity needle even further. (Originally the novel had been titled “My Pafology.”)

What happens? Sure you can guess: The rich white publishers eat it up, and soon the rich white readers do, too. Because to them, Black people are nothing but a boring racial stereotype; Black people aren’t individuals, they’re simply political and socioeconomic pawns to be used like a cat toying with a mouse for the bored amusement of White America. Simultaneously, the Whites in power look at themselves as virtuous soldiers fighting an antiracist war against bigotry and racism (while perpetuating both).

The film is of course dripping with intelligent, rich irony. In categorizing a whole population you ultimately deprive them of their humanity. You keep them in a social cage from which they cannot break free. James Baldwin and MLK in the 1950s and 60s were deep, potent thinkers who were able to grasp this nuance. But white elites today simply cannot.

This brings us full circle back to my novel and bookstores. Readers in general, now, are seen as one big exploitable entity. Until about 20 years ago, readers were expected to be challenged; writers of all races and stripes were publicly praised but also criticized; there was at least some notion of thinking for yourself, being an individual, not being told how/what to believe in.

But, like the fate of “Black Americans,” American Readers have now become the next social victims on the chopping block. Like Lefties who believe that only citizens in NYC and the Bay Area are real people and therefore are the only ones who should be allowed to vote in political elections, bookstores apparently now believe that readers are stupendously dumb dupes who deserve nothing but mockery, contempt, and ideology smashed down their idiotic, naïve throats. There is no more respect left for readers. That bumper-sticker which says Think Now Before It’s Illegal seems a little too right on the nose in 2024.

I didn’t become a writer—or is ‘become’ the correct word?; Was I always one and simply had to shed my skins to locate my talent over the years?—to be racialized, categorized, placed in a tight, dark box and told what to say, think, do, be. I became a writer because everything else outside of writing was already doing that. Writing was the one open path forward for serious, deep thinkers, a place where people can shock, tell uneasy truths about ourselves, mirror and analyze society, ask hard questions, challenge, push back against accepted truths and norms, and prod people to think more independently and deeply.

It would seem that those days are more or less over. Or, to be more precise with my critique: Those days are over….for traditional publishing. Thank God for Substack. Thank God for self-publishing. Thank God for the growth of alternative media like Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press,” and for podcasts and new small publishers who genuinely want to bring back Art for the sake of Art, without the pathetic, blathering Woke ideology.

I’m currently reading through Norman Mailer’s collected letters. Right now I’m in early 1964. Man, what a different time for writing. Novels were still taken seriously at that time! You could say whatever you felt you needed to say. There were still obscenity trials, and publishers sometimes pressured writers to delete a libelous line or two…but for the most part you could think openly, publicly and independently. Novelists even got paid back then. Imagine that.

Much of the problem with all of this is generational: Gen-Z reads far fewer books than any generation prior, and they’re stuck on iPhones and social media like TikTok. How can a novel compete with TikTok? As Gen-Z has entered the work force, this has created a bigger vacuum for the injection of political ideology and social-media fanaticism. And that’s exactly what we see, with literary agents, with major publishers, with traditional media, and, sadly, with bookstores.

Maybe one day we can find our way back to sanity and individualism. We’re in the midst of the most conformist generational shift probably since the 1950s and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Brains are now expected to be turned off and switched on in a different area, and totally tuned to The Cause. This makes for bad Art, or rather no Art at all. We live in a post-Art, post-Truth, post-Reality world. As Americans we’ve run out of deeply serious problems to solve and so, being rich and privileged, the younger generations have decided to create fictitious problems that aren’t actually happening.

This would be great, theoretically, for novels. But it’s terrible for real life.