The novel—is it dead yet? Every decade seems to yield a new crop of death knells and eulogies explaining why the form has reached the end of its useful life. The French writer Jules Verne predicted, in 1902, that the newspaper would permanently displace the novel; the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset posited, twenty-three years later, that the great literary themes had been all but exhausted. Some critics, such as the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold, didn’t fear the novel’s death so much as its oversaturation, identifying the proliferation of “the bad and the middling” in an era of mass readership and ever-escalating literary production. He thought of literature as a “criticism of life,” a necessary venue for exploring the moral seriousness of human experience. Poetry, however, was his preferred medium; most novels failed to move him. Lionel Trilling, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Arnold, was more sympathetic to the novel, interpreting its ethic as a “a perpetual quest for reality.” But, in a postwar intellectual climate of scientism and dogma, Trilling saw the novel’s cultural status decline. What role did the “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” of fiction have in a world that viewed art as a diversion from “the burning questions of politics” and “solution of science”? This question, of course, has never fully subsided. In both David Shields’s 2010 polemic against traditional literary forms, “Reality Hunger,” and Will Self’s 2014 essay “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real),” the novel is positioned as a baroque form that no longer serves as an adequate vessel to capture the contemporary complexities of human life.
Novels are, of course, alive in the sense that they are still being written and published, but the data for their long-term vitality is discouraging. In 2024, literary fiction was reported to comprise only two per cent of the total fiction market, with even the best-performing titles rarely making an annual best-selling top-ten list. This is troubling news for the many creative-writing-M.F.A. graduates hoping to sell their début and settle into a stable and profitable career as a full-time novelist. Even those who do manage to sell a manuscript typically receive relatively modest advances, and few earn enough from fiction alone to make a living. The days of Don DeLillo “paying such little rent” in nineteen-sixties New York that he could “smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and look at the world” while writing his début novel are, depressingly, over. We are in the age of high rents and even higher health-care premiums, with working artists struggling to find stability and solvency in a volatile freelance economy. Reading and writing fiction under such conditions can start to feel like a luxury. And, without the promise of readership or even minor monetary compensation, how is a writer to maintain, as the novelist Alexander Chee once put it, “the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success”?
So, too, for reading: since the days of DeLillo smoking cigarettes and surveying Manhattan’s subterranea, the percentage of students graduating with English degrees has dropped by roughly half. There are almost no market-valued jobs for the undergraduate studying “Beowulf” and Cheever, meaning that the cultural capital of literature has migrated from the professional to the personal, repurposing literary study into a hobby or passion. The Trump Administration and various state legislatures have significantly cut funding to the arts and humanities, and universities have taken to “restructuring,” or contracting, these departments to a shadow of what they once were. For those who do pursue graduate and doctoral degrees in the humanities, working in academia is no longer a guaranteed next step after graduation; the number of available tenure-track jobs continues to shrink, and the exploitation of adjunct faculty is now standard business practice. These educational crises—combined with evolutions in technology and culture—have rendered the experience of reading fiction, let alone poetry, a dispensable element of human life. Picking up a novel is increasingly seen as a way to unwind, to escape, to be entertained. Because, in this economy, who has time to lead a life of the mind?
People are very much reading prose fiction for entertainment, though. Romance, fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, thrillers—many of the novels produced today belong to one of these genre categories or to one of their hybridized variants. Genre has been a dominant publishing force since at least the nineteenth century, with pulp magazines and serialized paperbacks providing mass entertainment for readers of almost any age and demographic. E-readers, Amazon, and audiobooks have made these novels only more accessible, allowing particularly devoted readers to mainline as many texts as possible with less effort than ever before. The sheer volume of commercial genre fiction is staggering; a report from 2025 estimated that fifty-one million romance books were sold that year, with fantasy novels moving around twenty-five million units. These numbers are even higher when you consider the self-publishing boom on platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (K.D.P.), which allows writers to upload and publish their work for free. (Amazon takes a large share of any earnings, to be sure.) To succeed on K.D.P., and remain algorithmically relevant, writers are encouraged to generate a book every three months, with some self-help guides suggesting a clip of a book a week—which, right: totally reasonable, totally normal. The path to commercial success is clear on these self-publishing platforms, but a frightening corporate edict lingers below the surface: This is now the only way to be an author.
Part of what draws readers to particular genre books, whether on Amazon or at airport kiosks, is the fealty to hyper-specific tropes and reliable plot patterns, the predictable and satisfying arcs of its heroines and heroes. With so many options to choose from, readers can granularly search for titles that triangulate as many of their narrative preferences as possible, whether that be for “fake dating” and “idiots in love” tropes, or “gamelit fantasy” and “confined-space thriller” plots. If a given book fails to achieve a reader’s desired objectives or checkpoints, whatever: there are millions more to choose from. With so much choice, however, it can be daunting to know which books to pick from the infinitely regenerating pile. Anyone who’s spent an hour scrolling through a streaming service looking for a movie or show to watch knows the feeling well. Why choose something at random when the perfect, most specialized thing for you surely exists somewhere in the digital ether and is available for immediate consumption?
One of the reasons TikTok’s book-review videos, known collectively as BookTok, have become so popular—and powerful in the publishing world—is that they offer a human-based, quasi-critical recommendation portal for fans and genre devotees to connect, commiserate, and promote their favorite work. And there are plenty of readers ready to open the app and post their opinions, feelings, and perspectives on the books that have “ruined” them or made them weep. Personal testimony is paramount on BookTok; a book is deemed successful if it “breaks” or “destroys” a reader. The most common book-review content on the app understands books as pleasure-spiking torment factories, arenas for an almost masochistic level of personal involvement. This means users film themselves literally crying and holding a tear-stained page up to the camera, captioning the post with a quip like “brb gonna cry more” or “I just feel too much 😭.” The excess of emotion often scans as winkingly facetious, a dramatization to demonstrate just how deeply a person loves books. Some users skip the overt pageantry and provide more measured recommendation strategies: this stack of books will actually get under your skin and unnerve you; if you like a creepy motel setting, read this; try out these hidden gems if you loved these best-sellers.
Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok. In fact, a book being poorly written is not at all an impediment to a recommendation as long as it otherwise fulfills the requisite tropes and themes set out by its genre expectations, which are precisely what engineer those strong emotional reactions. Even when a book is considered “cringe,” “flat and formulaic,” or “written like an 11 year old,” BookTok users may “still love it with all [their] heart” because it manages to achieve the chief objectives of its genre conceit. If the point of reading fiction is to derive pleasure, then these genre books are rousing successes: despite their sloppiness, potentially plagiarized plots, and passages of suspected A.I. prose, many of the genre books that blow up on BookTok are evaluated under the pretense of fun and feeling—the twists and spicy scenes, the devastation of a betrayal, the relatability of a protagonist. It’s enough to make Matthew Arnold convulse in his grave.
The publishing conglomerates, on the other hand, are rejoicing. “As Seen on TikTok” badges are stamped on books that have ostensibly been favorably marketed by content creators on the platform, or are angling to increase their potential virality. The semiotics of the badge signal a sort of hive-mind curation, a global book group that has determined that this book, of all the millions of books, is worthy of promotion. Of course, a thing being simply seen on an app is hardly grounds for consumption, let alone endorsement, but readers familiar with what the badge potentially indicates—the robust community of readers who sob and shriek and throw the weight of their hearts behind a supposedly life-affirming text—will understand its message: this was chosen by readers like me, who like the books that I like. The “As Seen on TikTok” badge functions as any book badge does, whether that be for a prize nomination, a critic’s pick, or a celebrity book club. Each label contains its own taxonomies of taste and cultural prestige, targeting the demographics most drawn to the status markers the badge foretells. It’s revealing, though, that the TikTok book badge stops its praise at being “seen.” Whether the book is good or not is an entirely different question. Having been seen on social media is enough to engender trust, primarily because, on BookTok, the social dimension of reading is more important than the private one.
In this way, BookTok is the biggest book club to ever exist—or, more precisely, a network of book clubs that all meet at the same venue, gathered around the genre table of their choosing. When, in the late nineteen-nineties, Oprah’s Book Club began receiving criticism for its appeals to “shared interests rather than shared concerns,” per the critic Jennifer Szalai, an existential crisis coursed through the literary community. Why should Oprah get to determine what novels were championed in the market? What authority and credentials did she have to make such monumental literary decisions? In a 2001 essay for The Atlantic, Scott Stossel defended Oprah’s Book Club for lofting serious books into the commercial sphere, while also lamenting the pathology underpinning the enterprise: “There is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving, about the book club that it seems antithetical to discussion of serious literature.” Even when BookTok does rally around a quote-unquote serious writer—such as Sally Rooney or Ottessa Moshfegh—there is a veneer of genre favoritism and eerie self-identification. Rooney’s novels are the “Finnegans Wake” of romance fiction, Moshfegh’s “The Sound and the Fury” of horror; their characters are “relatable” for readers in that they are often alienated and disaffected, grappling with screens and mental illness, the two defining public afflictions of our time.
Is a novel’s primary purpose to entertain or to deepen our experience of being alive—to offer escape or epistemic enrichment? Should a novel be emotionally relatable and cater to our preferences, or should it challenge and complicate our perspectives and preconceptions, pushing us toward reading the kind of work that Franz Kafka said may “wound and stab us”? Are such dichotomous conceptions of the novel mutually exclusive? In an op-ed for the Times last year, the Princeton professor Yarimar Bonilla described the fatigue she felt in her relationship with reading, ruing the relentless critical analysis that she’d been trained to perform on texts, longing to return to a more childlike, thoughtless immersion in books. BookTok, she says, gave her permission to read genre fiction with a renewed zeal, a development she deemed radical in a culture dominated by screens and productivity obsessions. Reading books of any kind, the thinking persists, is a net good, no matter what kind of book it is. It’s hard to argue with Bonilla’s assessment; I agree that reading should be encouraged and democratized, as an activity that is meaningful and accessible to all literate people. But the growing belief that fiction or prose that prioritizes moral seriousness and philosophical inquiry is bland and boring, difficult for the sake of being difficult, performative and pretentious, misunderstands what makes this work worth reading. The wonder in reading a good novel is not to know you’re going to cry or to be merely entertained but to have an internal experience that would have seemed otherwise impossible before beginning. “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” Henry James wrote in his preface to “The Portrait of a Lady.” That these windows are being shut in favor of a market-tested, direct-to-consumer pipeline of trite themes and regurgitated concepts seems too sad to bear—so, of course, we don’t bear it. We keep building new windows. ♦