The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books Edited by C. Max Magee and Jeff Martin

Magee and Martin have assembled a talented bunch of young, happening authors (including Joe Meno, Benjamin Kunkel, Victor Lavalle, Emily St. John Mandel, Deb Olin Unferth and Reif Larson), along with a few seasoned veterans (David Gates and Jonathan Lethem), to ponder the question of how the book will be affected, in the coming years, by changes in technology and society. The quality of the work here varies quite a bit, as you might expect from this type of anthology – some pieces are affecting and/or exhilarating, some are bland, and there a couple of pieces that are sub-McSweeney’s throw-aways. Overall, however, this collection is extremely interesting and offers a broad view of what some future literary stars think might happen in their future.

One of the more interesting aspects on this book is the confusion displayed as to what it is, exactly, that they are supposed to be writing about. The main divide seems to be between those who focus on the death of the physical book (even if the book lives on in some sort of digital capacity) and those who are focus the death of reading itself. But even within the latter camp, there are many divisions – are we talking about the eradication of all sustained reading? Or just of the “right” kind of reading (i.e. “literature”). Also, many of the authors here seem to conflate the death of the book with the death of the novel, which I suppose is somewhat understandable since most of these pieces are written by novelists.

Each author here seems to be writing about a different thing entirely, as they ponder the future of the book, and some of the individual pieces are filled with all manner of contradictions and ambiguities in themselves. But perhaps this muddle is appropriate when talking about an unknown future, and most likely it is exactly what the editors had in mind – since this confusion is contained right there in the book’s title and subtitle.

-Eric