The darling of contemporary fiction, Sally Rooney, is also a Leftist political activist. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the inner workings of the publishing industry. When Rooney refused to have her best-selling novel Normal People translated into Hebrew in 2021, she was voicing an opinion which was consistent with the (obviously autobiographical) opinions expressed in that very novel. Israel is a genocidal and illegitimate state, she believes, and the government of Gaza is justified in its murderous attacks against Israelis. This is a view she has restated alongside several other leading contemporary writers since October 7. Rooney believes that it is not only appropriate but dutiful for a fiction writer, and by extension an artist, to voice such views in the public square and in the fiction itself. Her most recent contribution to political discourse is her claim that America is ruining global ecology by failing to sufficiently cut back on carbon emissions, because of, well, capitalism. This is a claim which ignores the inconvenient fact that America’s use of fossil fuels is far more restrained that that of China (famously not a bastion of the political capitalism which Rooney decries).
Why has Rooney, whose prose is unexceptional at best (I include a judicious review of her latest effort, Intermezzo, which could be even harsher) become such a star? One reason for her continued celebrity is that publishing houses are gatekeepers and engineers of what society reads. By “society” I mean young women, who make up the vast majority of buyers of contemporary literature: while about 80% of staff in publishing houses are women (typically of the White Woke and Wealthy variety) and have been for at least the last decade, women account for about 80% of fiction sales. Harnessing the arena of fiction for Left-leaning political activism is not remotely controversial in the mainstream publishing institutions which sell bestsellers to young women, mutually reinforcing the kinds of politics which those women are likely to have. Rooney’s audience of young women are more likely to align with political complaints attacking the USA for being capitalistic, patriarchal, racist, etc., so it’s perfectly unsurprising that she continues to churn out tired woke talking points in order to please that audience. Alienating young male readers or any readers who are not particularly inclined to enjoy this kind of overt platitudinous virtue-signaling in contemporary fiction is not a concern for publishers like Faber, who helped to launch Rooney’s career.
It is common for prizes and lists of “bold new voices” to comprise women only. The literary division “Vintage” only included women on their 2021 list of exciting new authors, among them Sally Rooney. But when they don’t champion women, they only champion men who toe the woke line. Look at the lists of star writers on publishing house websites: radically racist anti-white activists Ibram ‘X’ Kendi, radically bad Instagram poet Rupi Kaur, and un-radically identitarian poets like Ocean Vuong rake in media buzz and literary awards as a matter of course. In particular, over the past decade, Kaur has had a significant hand in defining the aesthetic norms of a politically captured art form: her short poems, sometimes one or two lines long, focus entirely on her identity and “lived experiences” with dating and being “marginalized” for her ethnic background. When she publicly turned down an invitation to a Diwali celebration at the White House last year as a form of protest — since the US government would not simply stand by in passivity as Israel suffered its worst attack in a generation — it surprised nobody.
When you fill a work environment with woke white women, they will probably hire other woke white women (not to mention diversity hires of equally woke politics), causing a stifling political culture to set in quite rapidly. I also suspect that “hiring down” affects feminized industries in particular: anti-competitive (but personally highly competitive) behaviour leads to lower-caliber hires, cluttering industries with writers and staff of mediocre quality but conformist politics. And, since aesthetics and politics are difficult to separate from one another (or so most Left-leaning activists believe), the kind of books being published are downstream of that office culture. In April 2021, more than 200 employees at S&S in the US asked their employer to pull out of a book deal with former vice president Mike Pence. When J. K. Rowling’s new crime novel was given the go-ahead by Bloomsbury, staff revolted: some did little more than cry in the toilets over the prospect of publishing the work of a gender-critical (thus anathema) author, while others threatened to go on strike. This kind of political pressure makes headlines, given the fame of the authors involved; think of how many smaller authors will have had their work effectively blacklisted for failing to toe the party line.
Sometimes pressure from staff doesn’t prevent big publishing houses from censoring books which woke white women dislike: staff at PRH Canada complained about Jordan Peterson’s book Beyond Order in 2020, but publication went ahead anyway. Simon & Schuster president Jonathan Karp told staff protesting about Pence that “we come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make” – but reports from an S&S town hall showed this did little to calm the workforce. Once again: in these cases, the authors had sufficient fame and institutional influence, despite being countercultural in the world of publishing, such that seniors in the publishing houses could justify their book deals. But at the lower level, and particularly in the creative arts, these considerations don’t apply. And, when you walk into a previously academic-leaning or Classics-focused bookshop, the prominence of politically-oriented titles and displays is immediately obvious: I encourage anyone living in Oxford, UK to visit the previously high-caliber bookshop Blackwell’s, where the once-multilingual and virtuosic “Philosophy” section is now 90% social anthropology and reliably right-on political theory. More sinisterly, entire bookshelves devoted to trans literature now appear in several corners of Blackwell’s, and the aesthetics are always the same: oddly infantile, pastel or neon in color, these books are designed to appeal to impressionable teens.
Few people discuss the obvious feminization of the publishing industry beyond celebrating it. One beacon of reason in the world of journalism (including literary journalism and arts commentary) is The Critic, in which Myke Bartlett published this moving piece on why boys have been left behind by the institutional feminization of publishing. He reveals that the situation in Australia is identical to that in the USA and the rest of the Anglosphere, but notes that there is some hope: Hachette’s Sharmaine Lovegrove has spoken out about the obvious alienation of men in the publishing industry (and as a result, in the world of fiction reading). It is also clear that boys will continue to read the kinds of things which interest them, if they are not discouraged: graphic novels and books published in previous generations about swashbuckling adventures have not fallen out of fashion entirely. But without more voices from within the industry pointing out the feminized rewards and incentives for writing PC fiction, the wildly asymmetrical services being rendered in the world of bookselling will only continue apace.