The Editorial Assistant Book Club
Monoculture, Moby-Dick, and Movie Trailers
The Editorial Assistant Book Club (EABC): The Guest by Emma Cline
The Monoculture is Everything and Nothing
The consensus is that our society is well past the hey-day of “monoculture”, the idea that any one cultural item—movie, show, song, event—can be the focal point for popular discussion and attention. Amidst a declining monoculture, books as well as other forms of art have experienced a fascinating phenomenon. Publishing, like television and film, has turned into a sort of niche monoculture. The central idea of coalescing around one piece of art hasn’t changed for media or consumers, but the consensus has grown distinctively smaller.
More than a half dozen people I’ve spoken to in the past week—serious book readers, film buffs, generally voracious consumers of culture—haven’t even started or watched a single episode of Succession. But if you scour the Internet, Succession would appear to be the biggest thing going, with articles about the clothes they wear on the show, easter eggs, fan theories, the music score, cast interviews, etc. The finale aired last Sunday and 2.9 million people watched it live (it is probably more like 8 million with delayed same-week streaming factored in for apples-to-apples comparisons). The finale of Game of Thrones—often pegged as the last gasp of monoculture—had around 19 million viewers. 50 million people watched the finale of Friends two decades ago and 76 million the finale of Seinfeld before that. In books, for comparison, not so long ago we had our Dan Browns, our Fifty Shades, our Gone Girls.
Maybe you don’t care for trends, pop songs, or blockbusters and you are wondering: what’s the loss here? The truth is that when there was a happy medium of monoculture (after there were like three television stations and five movie studios) there was a greater space for the fringe—think indie bands, movies—art that was, ironically, considering where we are now, comprised of fairly sizable groups of people. What were “fringe” interest groups are now probably closer in size to the groups that care about the biggest piece of monoculture going at any one time in the 2020s. Now, everything that breaks through the bubble of indifference and becomes popular only rises to the level of what would have once been considered a cult classic. Monoculture, Indies—it’s all the same thing now. The unfortunate part of this equation is everything else—in books, in film, in television, in music—that doesn’t reach the reduced relevance of a Succession-level cultural talking point is just a tiny blip. What used to be fringe and hip with a sizable counterculture is now just a few people’s arcana.
A crude illustration of Monoculture
Book Clubs
This fracturing hasn’t so much meant democratization as one might hope, but rather a ramping up of a “winner takes all” mindset. Within the world of books, the continuing trend is that relatively few books get all of the media attention. We have largely three consistent visible “book clubs”, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Jenna Bush on the Today Show, and Good Morning America. Also Oprah, who pays a visit to our little book fiefdom to mint a bestseller every once in a while. The other lever of visibility to the non-publishing world is one I am guilty of referencing all the time in the “biggest” news segment each week—the New York Times bestseller list. Throw in tv/film adaptations and other than that there’s not a lot of book-dedicated media that moves the needle in a significant way. Not to denigrate book media—these hits are important and eventually do add up—but no one magic review or feature has the power to sell lots of copies anymore.
It’s with that guilt weighing me down about monoculture that I am starting a monthly club of my own. The first week of the month, I’ll be choosing a book published the previous month to read and highlight. A book that isn’t picked by a major book club and is not on the NYT bestseller list. We’ll be choosing books in the tradition of how editorial assistants read, a kind of indie, old-school thing where you know who the cool writers to read are, pass around early copies of their books that we’ve snagged, and want to talk about them even if they don’t sell a million copies.
EABC June Pick: The Guest by Emma Cline (May 9, 2023)
This first pick of our little indie club is Emma Cline’s The Guest, in honor of the first publishing “it” book that I read my first summer in NYC at the Columbia Publishing Course, which I attended to help work my way into the industry. Someone from Random House—the largest book publisher—came in to speak to the program and told us about their “big book” that summer, 2016, The Girls by Emma Cline. I forget who the speaker was but it was pretty genius move by them, as every student ran out an bought a copy that day. A hundred students all desperately grasping for anything that would help us understand what real, exciting buzz books were like.
The Girls was a wake-up call to all of us uninitiated, publishing babies at Columbia: primarily, that the contemporary world of books is far different from our school or reading experience as young adults. Whether we liked The Girls or not, it opened our eyes to the fact that contemporary literature is messy and different from the classic classics and the modern classics that dominate the reading habits of most young bookish people (even the contemporary books we had read were mostly the “best of the best” books that stick around year-after-year like Station Eleven, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Goldfinch). The Girls was the first time many of us had read a hot new book that hadn’t yet survived the rounds of culling and dismissal that usually follow a publishing season.
Overall, reading The Girls was the first of many reminders that publishing’s primary function isn’t about finding books that will be read ten or fifty or in a hundred years’ time—those are exceedingly rare and can’t be planned. Our job is to keep the culture of literature going by publishing books that attempt to do something new, make people think, and inspire other writers. Every published book is not a masterpiece, but many if not most books that are published are worthwhile in some way. That’s what the Editorial Assistant Book Club is about. We’re going to read and think about what’s happening in the now with literature, picking writers that you may like or dislike but that are worthy of our time to read, critique, and talk about. Pick up a copy of The Guest wherever you buy your books, get reading, and tune back at the end of the month. We’ll explore The Guest and take a look at Emma Cline’s fascinating publishing journey and writing career.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 125, Pages 582
This week our cat got blood on my copy of Moby-Dick, which I am trying hard not to read as an auspicious sign. We enter the final week and the encounter we’ve been waiting for looms.
Back Matter: Links and other Happenings
Two awesome movie trailers came out from acclaimed directors in these last couple of weeks. As a newsletter about words, these two can be celebrated for their writing and their copyrighting.
First, Can you find the wolves in this picture? Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon trailer, looks amazing and that rhetorical line is played for maximum effect. There Will Be Blood, eat your heart out.
Maybe I’m a sucker, but the Barbie movie trailer from another beloved and acclaimed director, Greta Gerwig, knows exactly what the discourse is around a Barbie film and plays to it rather slyly with its tagline: If you love Barbie. This movie is for you. If you hate Barbie. This Movie is for you. Gerwig also got one of the best pop artists working to create an original, good song for the film. For changing my skepticism about a movie involving toy IP into intrigue—maybe even anticipation?—I’d say that’s one pretty impressive teaser.
Finally take a look at these absolutely stunning hand-bound books, which you’d have to have a massive ego to ever feel confident to write a word in.
This campaign for releasing Lolita the Whale combines two very unlikely classics together, let the poor whale be free.