Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
Such is the case with Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Esquire recently published an extended interview with McGurl that praised his “lucid and well-argued prose.” The Los Angeles Review of Books referred to his “intellectual fireworks” and “comic bravura.” This praise can only plausibly apply to McGurl’s reputation and professional status as the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford and author of The Program Era, winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. It cannot refer to the text of Everything and Less, a lazy, self-satisfied, and infuriating book, the publication of which is unintentionally revealing of the status games that dominate American literary culture.
Amazon has changed the way books are marketed and sold, capturing enormous market share in the process. It also has growing ambitions as a trade publisher, including, through its Amazon Crossing subsidiary, a large and somewhat quixotic bet that it can grow the market for literature in translation. A book by an award-winning critic like McGurl about the company’s impact ought to be an enticing prospect. One can imagine the following sequence: a short, breezy book proposal, comprised of some familiar critical idioms (“the commodification of experience,” “materialist historiography”) and a
