Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin (2023)

 This is subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. It's part of a series called Literature Now, published by Columbia University Press in New York, which is about literary culture in the late 20th / early 21st centuries. It occupies a space, though, between the academic and the general. There is relatively little footnoting and any theory in it is broadly scoped. Sinykin traces the advent and development of conglomeration in publishing, starting right back with Random House buying Knopf in 1960. Publishing back then was defined in terms of discerning owners and editors regulating taste and exposure through their own enthusiasms, with sales performance used only as an excuse for rejection, and "poorly-performing" favourites still maintained on lists. Then bottom lines and business started their takeover. Now, 60 years later, we have Penguin Random House as 50% of the market if not more, along with four others, and bottom lines insisted upon as not only a key element which it is taken for granted all will obey, but an authorial consideration too. Ditto social media. Basically it's the story of neoliberalism applied to the book world. The main gist, and main recommendation, is historical. He splendidly traces the central players in the saga, who was hired when, and for what reasons, who (editor and writer) had successes with books we all know and why, and how all this was interpreted at the time and subsequently. He is an academic, though, and so smidgins of it creep in from time to time, not altogether impressively. Early on there's one of those classic baggy mentions of how "sameness and difference" echo through these various themes. As well say that "light and darkness" pattern the temporal milieux of the fictions discussed. His thesis is that conglomeration caused not only the folks in publishing to think differently (bottom lines and business) but also authors' thinking being influenced, directly and by osmosis. On the whole I get this, but have a few nags: was it not there in the background always? Was it not simply supercharged by neoliberal dollars-concerns? I'm thinking of the trope of the writer who writes anything that sells, from pulps to Edgar Wallace. What proportion of anticipation was given to income in those cases, and what does it culturally represent? He also makes a case for the repurposing of genre as connected to conglomeration, even though this was set going long before. It's connected, but not a result, is my thinking. The result is the current strength of the thread, not its origin. It would be interesting to trace the joins between the world of publishing pictured very exclusively here and the broader progress of the neoliberal project, the even wider story. The word 'neoliberalization' is the only derivative which appears here, and not until page 210, so perhaps he's shying clear of political talk of that obvious kind, hoping to avoid a "leftie" tag? It's all there, but in other words. On the whole I'd say that the thesis is interesting, but not entirely convincing - bottom lines and business have always been round and about the publishing world, especially in larger houses. Perhaps a survey of publishing outside the United States would bring this into focus? But the current (last 50 years) concentration on it to the exclusion of much is definitely new, and yes, delusively seen as a democratisation. Ditto across all sorts of enterprise, cultural and otherwise. The history is fascinating, the book being worth it for that alone.