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How Trump Is Shaking Up the Book Industry
America's literary bubble is rethinking its identity.
By LAKSHMI VARANASI
Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Lakshmi Varanasi is a writer based in Detroit.
Donald Trump's election victory plunged America's elite, liberal and coastal circles into an identity crisis, as journalists and pundits who had been so sure of a Trump loss grappled with charges of insularity and willful disregard. They penned introspective essays and took deep dives into the statistics only to conclude that they were indeed elite, liberal and coastal.
But in sleek SoHo penthouses, Brooklyn brownstones and Upper West Side cafés, a community that is perhaps the ultimate bubble—the New York fiction publishing industry—is still struggling to come to terms with its isolation. Its members are asking themselves how literature became so detached from the contours of American life in so many parts of the country. The perspectives of the white working classes and the rural poor, the demographics that handed Trump the presidency in 2016, have been largely absent from the novels printed every year. And as these demographics become increasingly central to the country's political conversations, the publishing industry is wondering what it needs to do to change.
"I feel ashamed," Lorin Stein, former editor-in-chief of the Paris Review and former editor at large for publishing house Farrar, Straus, Giroux, told me last year, before he resigned from both positions. "For a long time, the publishing establishment pretended to speak for more people than it really did. And we can't pretend that anymore." He paused, searching for the right words as he admitted, "I wasn't focused on how closed off our worlds have become from one another … but thanks to the election, I have a very different sense of what kind of marketplace we are all in."
Over the past months I spoke with 20 gatekeepers in the fiction world—agents, editors and publishers—to see whether they anticipate a change in the types of stories that shape the American novel. While they were apprehensive about making generalizations, most, if not all, seemed shaken by the realization that they are out of touch with a significant portion of the American electorate. And for several, the only way to remedy that is by actively seeking out stories from Trump country.
They have something of a model in the 2016 runaway hit Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir by J.D. Vance, a self-described "hillbilly" who escaped the jobless, heroin-laced fate offered by his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, in exchange for the U.S. Marines, Yale Law School and Silicon Valley. It clearly struck a nerve during the election—with 40 straight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Although Vance's book was nonfiction, some in New York's fiction word see it as a model. "Simply on the basis of economics, you're going to want to pay attention to that success," said Gerald Howard, vice president and executive editor at Doubleday. "So, I would say, yes, our attention has been seized."
There is, however, a vocal minority of agents and editors who have turned in the opposite direction. They too have been stirred by the election, but they are responding by reaching out to the exact voices that Trump's victory silenced—the foreigner, the disabled person or the transsexual. They worry that the administration will further disenfranchise these communities, many of which have never had a proper footing in the political arena—or in literature. And they hope that fiction might represent these groups at a time when politics cannot. As an editor at Simon and Schuster, who asked to remain unnamed, insisted, "I'm absolutely looking for voices that might be oppressed otherwise … the stories of immigrants … those who are having a more difficult time because of the color of their skin. Just as citizens, I think it's all of our duties to disseminate these viewpoints. Now, more than ever."
The turn of political administrations has always brought changes to the literary landscape. The dystopian narratives of the late 1980s like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Alan Moore's V for Vendetta were seen as a response to the fundamentalist politics of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Gore Vidal's Burr and Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird are often considered allegories to Watergate, while the global instability that accompanied 9/11 and the Bush years was captured in John Updike'sTerrorist and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. Even the subtler themes of the Obama era made their way into the litany of novels catalogued by New York Magazine's Christian Lorentzen last January.
But Trump, a president so unlike any of his predecessors, has jolted society in a more fundamental way. Despite branding himself as a New York City billionaire, he bypassed barriers of class and geography, and captured the presidency by bringing the grievances of small-town America to the fore. Suddenly, the voices of Pittsburgh steel factories have begun to echo in book-lined Manhattan offices.
The New York publishing industry has long been presided over by cadres of Ivy League exports, self-proclaimed aesthetes and offspring of the literati. In other words, the exact opposite of what we now think of as "Trump voters." And their audience is no more diverse. Veteran publisher Adam Bellow, son of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and current head of All Points Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, believes that readers of literary fiction—the kind of work that merits academic or artistic praise—comprise about 3 percent of the population. "They are educated, they skew liberal and urban and coastal, and they like to read books that reflect their experience, their lifestyle and their problems," he said.
Rebecca Saletan, vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, has always been troubled by this exclusivity. "There's too much heard from the East Coast, the elites," she said. In its two-and-a-half decade tenure, Riverhead, a division of Penguin Random House, has made a name for itself as one of the industry's progressive publishers—constantly seeking out international writers, writers of color and female writers, but also writers that represent regional and class diversity. People like Claire Vaye Watkins, who hails from rural Nevada, or western Pennsylvania author Amy Jo Burns. "For a long time, the white working class was this underrepresented slice of American life. The kind of diversity that could often get bypassed," Saletan said. Last year, Riverhead bought Shiner, a novel about an Appalachian mountain community. The book's editor, Danya Kukafka, took on the book because she believes it "casts light on a part of the country often overlooked in literary culture—a contemporary rural America that feels human, and illuminating."
Stories about the "Trump voter" are not entirely new to the realm of literary fiction. Writers from the Deep South are known for Southern Gothic novels, such as Jamie Kornegay's Soil and Michael Bible's Sophia, while Appalachian writers like Ron Rash and Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone, loosely fall into a category Howard terms "rural noir." But oftentimes, Howard pointed out, these types of novels feature a narrow cast of characters. "I'll get novels from agents that try to use the phrase 'rural noir,' and generally they are crime novels about pretty woebegone nasty people … caricatures of toothless tweakers up there in the hills, shooting at you with their shotguns," he said.
But it seems as though, now, in the aftermath of the election, that is beginning to change. "If you're asking whether the lives of the white working class might now come in for more probing and sympathetic representations in our works of fiction," Howard said, "I think they will." Saletan seemed to agree, saying that she finally feels "vindicated" by the growing attention the rest of the industry is paying to the kinds of stories Riverhead has always been interested in.
Over the past few years, The Paris Review has been publishing the short stories and essays of Kentucky-born writer J.D. Daniels. In January 2017, FSG collected these pieces into a slim debut: The Correspondence. Daniels' work ripples with many of the same currents as Hillbilly Elegy—a rough blue-collar upbringing, alcoholism, ubiquitous violence—perhaps best exemplified in the book's third item, "Letter from Kentucky."
And it's not just letters from Trump country. In May, FSG published The End of Eddy, an English translation of an autobiographical novel by the French writer Edouard Louis. The book charts the early years of Louis' life in the far-right, working-class French village of Hallencourt in the late 1990s—one of the few regions where Marine Le Pen's anti-globalization platforms were popular. Louis later leaves the village to attend boarding school and ultimately finds his way into the ranks of the bourgeois—not unlike J.D. Vance—but he warns along the way that if the voices of the white working classes and the rural poor are not heard, "they will have their revenge." Stein said he signed Louis before he knew "any of this was coming" but he acknowledged that its political resonance cannot be ignored. So far, the book—which was a bestseller in France—has received positive reviews in The New York Times, NPR and Slate.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, an agent at DeFiore and Company, said the election encouraged her to take tales from Trump country more seriously. She recently sold to Random House a nonfiction piece set in Appalachia by West Virginia essayist Catherine Moore. The book tracks the history of the region from "the violent West Virginia Mine Wars and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, up to the politics of today." She has also contracted a second book by Moore of "literary creative non-fiction essays" centered around Appalachia.
Trident Media's Ellen Levine, who is also Woodrell's agent, is looking for works that capture the plight of small-town Americans, the jobless and the distraught—"those who have just generally had a very rough life." Levine mentions Russell Banks, another writer of hers who sheds light on the hardships facing communities in upstate New York—Trailerpark (1981) and Affliction (1989) are a couple of his titles. The changes brought by the Trump administration, Levine observes, directly correlate to a rising interest in this "rough life" category, and she expects that publishers will take note.
Nathaniel Jacks, an agent at Inkwell Management who represents acclaimed Rust Belt writer Donald Ray Pollack, believes that these types of novels have been well-received by the literary public for years—a minority opinion among the people I spoke with. Jacks maps the current intrigue of the white working class onto a larger movement, one that he thinks began back in 2008, when Pollack published his first book, Knockemstiff. Within these times, however, Howard believes that a fictional counterpart to Hillbilly Elegy—a gripping, social-realist take on the Trump voter—would be an entirely new kind of phenomenon. "I'm certain something like that is going on right now," he said. "It's in the air. It's conspicuously in the air."
Others posited that these perspectives may be better off as memoirs. Adam Bellow recalled that over a decade ago he published a young author from Detroit named Paul Clemens, who, he said is exactly the kind of writer that can follow the success of Hillbilly Elegy. He is actively looking for rural writers as well, with the hope of humanizing the spectrum of Trump voters for the liberal literary public. However, in an industry that still operates by whom you know and word of mouth, finding those voices through traditional methods of outreach—long lunches with old colleagues and abundant conversation—may prove difficult.
Cameron McClure, an agent specializing in science fiction and fantasy, often represents stories of marginalized communities and people who are threatened by Trump. Last year however, she sold a book that she describes as "sort of masculine, testosterone filled, guys in a guys world, lots of dick jokes" kind of book. "We've all gotten used to being so incredibly careful, like 'Oh, is there a racist undertone here? Or is there a sexist undertone there?'" she said, "that to read something set in such an in your face-misogynistic world, was a little bit refreshing in a weird way." Though there is a heavy masculine energy running through the book, in both its vulgarity and its irreverence, she notes that there are also strong female characters who fight against and overturn these old sexist conventions.
Movements though, are always multifaceted, and several figures within New York's literary scene bemoan the recent fixation on groups that they have always seen as being in the spotlight.
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"White identity is very well curated in the literary space," literary agent Nicole Aragi wrote me in an email. Of the 3,500 books published in the U.S. in 2014, only 84 were by black authors, and just 180 featured black characters. And on the other end of the spectrum, African-American novelist Roxanne Gay, reported in 2012 that almost 90 percent of the books reviewed by the New York Times were written by white authors. Aragi is somewhat of a legend in these parts, having represented acclaimed authors Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Julie Otsuka and Colson Whitehead. Born to a mother from Britain and a father from Lebanon, she's lived in Libya, London and, now, New York. "I don't know what you want to call me, but not a white American, that's for sure," she said. She acknowledged that her background, at least in part, dictates the kinds of authors she takes on and the kind of authors she doesn't take on—emphatically telling me that she does not represent anyone who voted for Trump. This is not because she denies the legitimacy of their experience, but because she cannot empathize with it. "I don't understand that feeling of, well I haven't got a job, why haven't I got a job, some other has taken this job." In fact, the election of Trump has steered Aragi in the entirely opposite direction. She lamented, for example, the way Trump handled protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. "I have a comics writer who is writing about the Dene First Nations tribe," she said, "and most recently I took on a book by a young native writer who discusses the urban native experience as opposed to the reservation experience. These are the stories I urgently want to tell."
To Chris Jackson—who edits Ta-Nehisi Coates and recently opened One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House devoted to providing "a home for authors … who seek to challenge the status quo, subvert dominant narratives, and give us new language to understand our past, present, and future," the chasm created by the election is rife with opportunities. Not necessarily around the white working class though. "I don't think we need to suddenly fetishize this one group of people, as if they're an exotic, unexplored territory. They've been fairly, thoroughly covered." What Jackson finds more compelling are the ways in which Trump voters have created space in the political conversation for heretical ways of discussing class, gender and race. In that spirit, he is looking to contribute by putting forth as many fresh, new viewpoints as possible through One World. In terms of fiction, that means taking on a work like trans novelist Jordy Rosenberg's 18th-century picaresque about a master thief. Though historical, Jackson feels the novel is relevant in its examination of contemporary issues like "policing, ethnic nationalism, and gender fluidity as a force of revolution."
Frustrated by the election of George W. Bush, Dennis Johnson and his wife, Valerie, established the independent imprint Melville House in 2001. Since then, Melville House has built up a fiery social-media presence and a reputation for disrupting the establishment. But as much as he dabbles in the radical, Johnson, who is white, confesses that he is just a "working-class guy"—an assertion that makes his unapologetic rejection of the Trump voter all the more significant. He rephrased a question about rising interest in the white working class to "the terror of the white working class," and added, "I think people voted for Trump because they were racist or misogynist or homophobic." So, I asked him instead about what he thinks is important right now, and he conjured up images of Argentina under the junta, and tumult in the Middle East. "Those are periods of history that I think we should be looking back at and learning from."
In January 2017, Melville House released Glaxo by Argentian writer Hernan Ronsino. The suspenseful thriller follows the interwoven lives of four young men through romance, government death squads and murder. Johnson also noted that Melville published A Beautiful Young Woman in November 2017—Julian Lopez's harrowing tale of a young boy who finds that his mother, an undercover political activist, has gone missing during the Argentinian "dirty war." "To me," he said, "these stories just feel really salient."
Johnson is especially interested in looking for writers internationally. That's how he came across Basma Abdel Aziz, author of The Queue and perhaps one of the most fearless writers on his list. Aziz, a practicing psychiatrist for trauma patients in Egypt, turned to the novel as a way to catalog her personal experiences. But the book she produced was also a castigation of the Egyptian government that briefly threatened her own security in the country. Johnson is eagerly waiting to see how Aziz's next novel will grapple with these globally uncertain times.
While Trump's influence certainly appears to have permeated the most aloof corners of the country's social consciousness, it's less clear whether the resulting changes in the fiction world will make any difference. The working-class memoirs, rural love stories or Argentinian thrillers that might come out of this period will probably circulate only within the literary stratosphere. To Howard, who draws on almost four decades of experience, there is no work of fiction strong enough to heal our differences. "The cultural divide between the world that we live in and the world that Trump voters live in is so deep that I don't think it can be bridged," he said. "But we need to try."
Bellow agrees. "When I was young," he said, "it was not uncommon for people like Normal Mailer, and Gore Vidal and E.L. Doctorow, and my father, to come out and engage in public controversy and arguments about politics and society." Yet in the past several decades, Bellow has watched writers retreat into impenetrable universes of their own, universes, he contends, that are wholly inappropriate to the moment at hand. "Like actors who feel that they have a responsibility because they are public figures," he said, "it is time to see more writers commenting on current events through fiction."
This article has been updated to reflect the full context of Cameron McClure's views.
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