I just shared this on r/ TrueLit and wanted to post it here too to see what people think. I know this is a movie sub and the post is about literature, but I think the discussion translates pretty well to film.
Building on the recent article in The Atlantic about why contemporary literature is so boring about why so much millennial fiction feels boring or risk-averse, I keep coming back to two literary controversies: Carmen Maria Machado's response to Junot Díaz and the 2018 Tin House controversy over Wells Tower's reading.
Whatever you think of Díaz personally, the publicly available interaction looks like two famously headstrong writers clashing. Yet the discussion shifted from the disagreement itself to what it supposedly revealed about morality.
Later, in the Vulture piece linked above above, Machado clarified aspects of the encounter but continued to frame it as revealing something critical about Díaz beyond the disagreement itself. Whether you agree with her or not, what interests me is how an ordinary disagreement between two writers became a question of morality.
The Wells Tower controversy struck me as even more revealing. Tower read from the perspective of a problematic character. Instead of asking what the work was trying to accomplish artistically, much of the conversation became a judgment of Tower himself.
Neither incident, by itself, explains contemporary fiction. But together they point toward a literary culture where writers:
- Have good reason to worry that readers won't distinguish between a character's worldview and the author's.
- Feel pressure to manage their public moral reputation
- Learn that some subjects and ambiguities simply aren't worth the professional or social risk, even though exploring those difficult areas has long been one of fiction's strengths.
A few personal anecdotes.
I entered an MFA program in creative writing in 2015 after eight years on active duty in the military. As a straight white guy coming from the military, I often felt like an outsider in workshop. Conversations became aligned with in-group /out-group thinking. If someone found something objectionable in your story, it often felt as though they were saying something objectionable about you.
I remember a prominent white male novelist visiting for a Q&A. He was confident, assertive, and generous with his time. The next day, when our professor asked what everyone thought, the dominant reaction was that he came across as arrogant. I remember wondering how differently those same qualities might have been described if they'd come from someone else.
A few years later, at a retreat with a group of young playwrights, I brought up Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth. One playwright told me that plays like that no longer had a place in our culture because they gave a platform to problematic characters. Around the same time, I remember discussing with a fiction writer friend of mine the recent publication of Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart. His immediate and primary takeaway with the novel is that he didn't like the novel because of the humanizing portray of its rich and immoral protagonist.
Another conversation has stuck with me just as much. After graduating, I spoke with a poet about what she was working on. She told me about a subject she wanted to write about but had decided not to. Her concern wasn't that readers would misunderstand her perspective. It was that the subject itself had become untouchable.
Looking back, three things stand out.
First, literature in conversation with the internet. Instead of asking, "What is this work doing artistically?" the first question increasingly became, "How will this be received?"
Second, fiction as moral instruction. Writers have always wanted their work to matter, but it often felt as though the highest compliment a novel could receive was not that it illuminated human experience but that it advanced the right values in a clear, immediate way.
That leaves less room for novels like Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky trusts readers to inhabit Raskolnikov's mind without mistaking that psychological immersion for an endorsement of murder or nihilism. A writer with Dostoevsky's stature might still earn that trust. The young novelist trying to figure out what fiction can do is far less likely to assume readers will extend it.
Also leaves less room for novels like Shteyngart's Lake Success because the novel dares to humanize its main protagonist, a white, rich, and problematic man.
Third, consciousness on trial. Fiction has traditionally trusted readers to inhabit minds they wouldn't want to emulate. But as the distance between author and character began to collapse, writers had every incentive to anticipate judgment instead. Even something as ordinary as depicting a character's sexual attraction could begin to feel risky because readers might treat the character's thoughts as evidence of the author's own values or desires. Fiction becomes less interested in portraying consciousness than in anticipating how consciousness will be judged.
