Anna Kornbluh reviews Big Fiction

Dan Sinykin. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 328 pp.

Review by Anna Kornbluh

20 June 2024

Big Fiction’s sterling big idea is that conglomeration of book publishing shaped literary form, genre, and meaning in late twentieth-century America. One corollary is the displacement of the author as romantic loner by the conglomerate octopus: books are made not by writers but by writers-agents-editors-marketers-buyers-publishers-businessmen; “authorship is social and distributed widely . . . the author is not solitary but suffused with social plenitude” (pp. 8–9). Another is that conglomerate novels often allegorize their conditions of production, such that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) can be reread as beef with corporate homogenization of culture, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) reapproached as an industrial freedom struggle haunted by market demands for genre. While familiar from studies of more overtly collective media like film, television, and music, the company allegory approach strikes fresh paydirt in the realm of fiction. Moreover, Sinykin embeds the argument in a bustling, location-laden, vignette-rich narrative teeming with jib cuts, ego trips, and guest lists strenuously squirreled from diaries, letters, records, and interviews. Hence an irony tugs: authorial death only for resurrection in charismatic captains of industry. Enter Sessalee.

“Sessalee was a southern woman . . . the most important figure in the book business—or second only to Oprah. No one used her last name. Like Madonna, she was just Sessalee. . . . Sessalee’s favorite was Barbara Kingsolver. Her favorite kind of author, that is, was middlebrow” (pp. 66–67). So many round personae and their spindly ladder climbs—compensation for the systems theory of distributed authorship.

“The Conglomerate Era” emerges as a new periodizing category capable of uniting blockbuster bestsellers, postmodernism, the rise and fall of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the expansion of creative-writing education, Oprah’s Book Club, philanthropic nonprofit lists, and the literary prize industrial complex. A question becomes posable: does the period commission a distinct mode of fiction? Primarily Big Fiction relays the prevalence of corporate allegory in successful novels; corporate house titles incorporate implicit significations of conglomerate publishing. Secondarily the framework provides a sociological explanation for the increasingly noted merger of literary fiction and genre fiction: the conglomerate bottom line promoted works straddling literary distinction and mass affect. And tertiarily the counterportrait of nonprofit publishing opens many avenues for reappraising a paradoxically institutionalized avant-garde and burgeoning multicultural canons.

Unposed questions: allegory is a limited lens, too pat—as Sinykin almost admits in sentences like “What we have here is an allegory” (p. 50). The one-to-one exchange of milieu for milieu, meaning for meaning, enacts at the level of criticism the optimized throughput of conglomeration. Do not conglomerate-era fictions engage their conditions of production through different, more frictive figures? “Middlebrow” repeatedly shorthands the modal impact of conglomeration; how to critically assess this triumph of the aesthetic middle in the same period of the widely observed vitiation of economic and political middles? Amid new organizational flowcharts, how fared the wages and working conditions for the mail clerks and interns, the littlest of the “social plenitude”? Big ideas beget more. Scale is king.

And it’s memorably the lunches at The Four Seasons that are the most fun.