Call it a premonition, call it a general sense of foreboding, or consider it a called shot: the authors of little-read works are often quite aware that their work will be ignored, and will even include that fact in their book. Late in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a book critic holds a copy of a book that sounds a lot like The Recognitions and proudly declares he won’t read the book, he’ll just work off the jacket copy instead. Thomas Pynchon, late in Gravity’s Rainbow, lays out some tarot cards for his main character: “His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too).” Something similar happens late in Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity, a book that was reportedly rejected by some 88 literary agents before De La Pava just decided to publish the damn thing himself in 2008. One character, remarking on a legal appeal written by the main character, Casi, tells him:
And all that work for nothing. I hate to say it but you may have poured your very soul, as you obviously did, into the creation of this work and it may never be read by anyone, it may never so much as influence a single person’s actions. I just came to that realization, how awful.
To which Casi says: “Wait a minute, maybe it is art.”
Such is the lot on the slush pile, where ambitious novels from unknowns go to wither and die. Self-publishing the book, as De La Pava did in 2008, gets the book physically out there, but without the promotional machine of a big publisher, it’s tough to get in stores, let alone into readers’ or critics’ hands. After a couple years of self-promotion, though, De La Pava got enough of the right people to take a look, and the book was republished in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press, which if not a ‘big publisher’ is at least a publisher.
The funny thing is all those agents and publishers weren’t necessarily wrong about the book; in the twelve years since its (re)publication, the book has remained little read, and De La Pava’s next book, Lost Empress, even with Penguin's fearsome machine behind it, didn’t make too many waves. A Naked Singularity is miraculously still in print, but it stands mostly as a monument to all the things contemporary book publishing has given up – door stopping systems novels on the one hand, and the expectation that publishers could create a market for such big challenging books on the other. It is the last escaping light of the heights of literary postmodernism – think of the 90s trifecta of Underworld, Mason & Dixon, and Infinite Jest – and it features in unequal parts that movement’s highs and lows. It wasn’t my favorite novel, but one can mourn the fact that They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, or, more accurately, They won’t publish ‘em anymore. (That’s a Pynchonian They.) Instead it’s out of one slush pile and into another, much bigger slush pile, that of readerly and cultural indifference. “How awful,” indeed.
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