Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon - Mark McGurl
Published in 2021 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
336 pages
ISBN: 978-1-83976-385-4
Whether we like it or not, we are now living in the Age of Amazon. In a world of immediate gratification, almost any product we desire is simply one click away, sure to be delivered straight to our front doors within a few days. Few can argue against the fact that Amazon has radically reshaped our lives, and techno-optimists celebrate this as a victory of modern progress. Indeed, when roughly 60% of U.S. adults own an Amazon Prime Subscription, the proclaimed “Everything Store” has come a long way since its inception as an online book distributor in the late 1990s.
Of course, many Leftists have rightly criticized the company for its unfair labor practices, as well as its exploitation of workers at its distribution warehouses and the company’s monopolistic ambitions. Furthermore, Amazon’s former CEO Jeff Bezos has received much criticism over the past decade or so, mostly regarding his extraordinary wealth. As a result of such vast amounts of capital, Amazon has expanded from a simple online book distributor to a vast multinational empire encompassing advertising, streaming services (Twitch, Amazon Music, etc.), cloud computing (AWS), audiobooks (Audible), fifteen publishing imprints, tablets and e-readers (Kindle), home security (Ring, Blink), social media (Goodreads), robotics and AI (iRobot), and even grocery stores (Whole Foods), to name only a small handful of its 115 acquisitions.
Despite its vast size, Amazon’s outsized influence in the so-called “free-market” is not particularly novel. Despite the claims of capitalist defenders that the free market system allows for the greatest amount of choice to the consumer, this perception of free choice is, in reality, an illusion. When only ten parent companies own almost every food and beverage brand and 90% of media outlets are owned by only six companies, we can see that, due to their outsized influence on our everyday lives, these corporations place our actions and behaviors under far greater constraint under our current capitalist system than we might have previously thought.
Yet, we are still coming to terms with just how much the influence of this mega-corporation has impacted our culture at large. One market on which Amazon has had a remarkably profound influence, even from its earliest days, is the bookselling industry. Once upon a time, big retail bookstores such as Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million threatened to put small, independent bookstores out of business for good. Now, these same companies are the ones struggling to survive in the face of an even bigger behemoth: Amazon. Entering into the world of e-publishing in the mid-2000s, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (K.D.P.) service promised to revolutionize how books are published. No longer would one have to submit their manuscripts to large publishing houses to be accepted or rejected; now, anyone could publish directly to Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform.
Promising to democratize the publishing process, Amazon’s K.D.P. platform has published over 2 million books, an untold number of which are never read. In the wake of such a widely-utilized platform, one must ask: what impact does Amazon have on literature? In his 2020 book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, literary critic and Professor of Literature at Stanford University Mark McGurl explores the various ways in which Amazon has not only changed the way we acquire works of fiction but also how we write and read these novels as well.
Overview:
More than simply changing the way we order and receive books, McGurl argues that Amazon has dramatically shifted our ways of reading and writing works of fiction as well. He argues that it has reshaped our social relations and our desires, as he writes, “the rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail” (xii). According to McGurl, the Age of Amazon has transformed fiction into the endless consumption of more varied and colorful life experiences than can be had by the reader in a late capitalist society. Amazon can commoditize these experiences through the proliferation of endless fiction subgenres, which are shaped by our therapeutic needs and cyclically work to reshape our desires (19).
This is accomplished through Amazon’s K.D.P. (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform, where anyone can publish and sell their writing. Spanning a wide array of genre fiction (including niche genres such as LitRPG, alpha billionaire romance, cozy mysteries, and A.B.D.L. (Adult Baby Diaper Lover) novels), McGurl unearths how both the content and the form that these novels take are indicative of the proliferation of Amazon’s reach in every aspect of our literary lives. In an age where algorithms use our data and shopping habits to serve us never-ending lists of suggested materials from expansively growing fields of niche subgenres, the reader has, in effect, been turned primarily into a consumer. On the other hand, with the pressure to publish amid an endless sea of self-published titles on the platform, writers have been turned into producers, as quantity tends to outperform quality in reaching potential readers.
In Chapter One, McGurl provides a quick history of the rise of Amazon alongside “Amazon’s commitment to service transforms literary experience into customer experience” (46). He traces how Amazon came to dominate not only the book market but also how it grew into the titan of distribution that we see today. In his estimation, genre fiction has become the defining mode of fiction in the Age of Amazon, with each iteration somewhere on the spectrum between “epic and romance and their characteristic modes of wish fulfillment” (51.) As such, McGurl establishes three main genres as the templates for how all other texts perform various functions in the Age of Amazon: the novel, the epic, and the romance.
In Chapter Two, McGurl focuses on the genre of the epic and its permutations. The epic is massive in scale, as it carefully constructs vast worlds in which characters embark on grand adventures. It is populated by a wide variety of characters, and the genre lends itself to grand narratives that justify the wholeness of existence. The epic, McGurl argues, is the defining genre of Amazon, as Bezos has planted himself as the grand hero within his own world-building machine (Amazon) that serves to mass produce and distribute other stories. According to McGurl, the book in the Age of Amazon “is also conceived as the bearer of a service provided to readers looking to be told a story. Product becomes process in what is essentially the liquefaction of the literary object” (88). This is best represented in McGurl’s exploration of the genre of LitRPG, which combines elements of role-playing games with fantasy and science fiction genres. According to McGurl, LitRPG -- with its focus on leveling up and maxing stats -- reinforces the fantasy of meritocracy, or “the successful investment of oneself as human capital” (81.)
On the opposite pole, the romance condenses the narrative world to the psychodrama between (typically) just two individuals. In Chapter Three, McGrul argues that the microcosm of the couple is representative of the relationship between capitalism and the individual. This relationship is epitomized in the Fifty Shades of Grey series, which McGurl repeatedly references. McGurl traces the development of the romance genre through the two centuries, arguing that the shift that occurred in the mid-19th century from an ideologically productive to an ideologically consumerist society in the West accounts for the changing tastes in literature. As such, McGurl connects the development of literature and its market to the dominant economic and social conditions of its society, as he writes:
As Amazon is related, genealogically, to the department store and mail-order catalog, so too, or so I will argue, are its contemporary practices the realization of a way of thinking about economic activity that emerged in Austria and England in the second half of the nineteenth century, when economic theory and practice found themselves centered on the psychology of consumer desire, or demand. (132)
The proliferation of romance novels in our contemporary markets, argues McGurl, is a therapeutic salve to the anxiety we experience in post-modernity. In this schema, the romance novel presents us with a reduction of choice, as the protagonist narrows down their choice to “The One,” which McGurl contrasts with the anxiety of contingency and internal multiplicity that define the modernist novel.
In Chapter Four, McGurl continues to examine the uses of literature for social reproduction, particularly through the romance genre. Whether through a spicy sex scene or a marriage plot, the romance novel targets the demographics in our society that are deeply vested in reproductive functions, both socially and biologically. He argues that romance -- more than any other genre -- “records our life as gendered, as generative, and as generic, and as lived in conditions of radical disparities of power” (165). He ties this social reproduction to the expansive reach of consumerism. Taking a note from psychoanalytic theory, he argues that we do not structure our lives around a lack, accepting the reality principle of dissatisfaction and incompleteness as a crucial part of life. Rather, we constantly browse through an endless array of enjoyments that promise to fulfill our immediate desires, whether through images, objects, services, or tastes (166).
This repetitive drive to consume connects with McGurl's topic of Chapter Five, where he turns his focus to what he describes as the “attention economy.” Returning to Amazon’s K.D.P. platform, McGurl posits that posting selfies and publishing novels exist on the same plane of self-exposure and attention-seeking behavior in a world of mass production and consumption (198). Here, the genre of the contemporary novel helps us to make sense of the world around us, acting as a way to therapeutically process information and integrate it into our own experiences and webs of meaning. Thus, the novel acts as a mediating structure between the epic and the romance, allowing the individual to locate themselves between these two poles of meaning and stabilizing the psychic state of the individual in an overwhelming world.
To illustrate this, McGurl offers two structures of the fiction novel that correlate to the genres of epic and romance: maximalist and minimalist fiction. In maximalist fiction (epitomized by the work of Faulkner), the author’s words overflow the text, as they create entire worlds in order to explore the contours of history. By contrast, in minimalist fiction (epitomized by Hemingway), the prose is sparse as the world consolidates and shrinks to the level of the individual (207).
In Chapter Six, McGurl examines the role of waste within the digital literary landscape. He notes the overabundance of literature available on Amazon’s platform and comments upon the wasted time that is spent reading and writing novels that no one else will ever read or discuss. Drawing on the work of Bataille, McGurl argues that surplus, rather than scarcity, is the central problem of economic theory. Amazon has generated an age of surplus fiction, in which the overabundance of literature has made it difficult for writers to break through, causing them to write more -- rather than better --fiction. As McGurl writes in the Afterword, “Contemporary fiction makes its way by either aligning itself with or resisting the flood of muchness by which the modern sensorium is assailed, or by executing some more complex combination of the two” (260).
Commendations:
There are a few primary strengths to McGurl’s account in Everything and Less. First of all, he is correct in focusing on the primacy of Amazon in our contemporary marketplace, especially in the world of publishing. Amazon has rapidly expanded its way into our lives over the past few decades, and McGurl rightly points out that it has inedibly changed the relationship between author and reader. A litany of books has been published to help authors produce more content for their readers in order to keep up with the promotional algorithms of Amazon’s K.D.P. platform. Such books also remind authors to keep up a minimal level of quality in their writing not to uphold artistic literary value, but to keep readers from “disappointing content.”
In this way, McGurl is wholly correct that Amazon’s focus on customer service has turned the reader into primarily a consumer who needs to have their desires fulfilled by the author, who now acts as a service provider. While literary genres have always been targeted toward specific demographics, Amazon’s algorithms have kicked this marketing into overdrive. After tracking what you buy on its platform, Amazon delivers hyper-specific recommendations from a seemingly never-ending list of niche genres. In turn, this perpetuates the cycle of authors writing for these specific demographics, endlessly repeating basic plot structures instead of pushing the boundaries of literature in order to satisfy their audiences.
Additionally, McGurl’s willingness to dive high and low for these hyper-specific pieces of genre literature is also one of the most valuable parts of this work. He includes obscure and highly niche works and micro-genres that have been understudied and often wholly neglected from academic analysis, writing, “Part of the point of this book’s strategic re-periodization of the present as the Age of Amazon is to put popular genre fiction—the bread and butter of the KDP world and of Kindle-enabled consumption in general— at the center of scholarly concern rather than at the margins where it usually finds itself” (205).
Some of the most delightful passages from Everything and Less are when McGurl is analyzing these weird and surreal works, such as Chuck Tingle’s gay-erotica fiction such as Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls, Space Raptor Butt Invasion, and Slammed In The Butt By My Hugo Award Nomination. He also critically examines “alpha billionaire romance” novels, such as Beautiful Bastard and Loving the White Billionaire, Penelope Ward and Vi Keeland’s romance novel Cocky Bastard, the wildly popular postapocalyptic Silo Series by Hugh Howey, and a litany of Adult Baby Diaper Lover (A.B.D.L.) books. This academic venture into the strange, surreal, and kinky worlds that have emerged from the K.D.P. platform makes for a delightful weird read and a valuable point of departure for his analysis of mass culture.
Finally, McGurl astutely notes the therapeutic nature of writing and reading. In assessing the proliferation and multiplication of microgenres within the literary field, McGurl does not pass judgment on readers but rather seeks to understand what function the work has on the reader in addressing their needs and desires. He utilizes the psychoanalytic theme of repetition to understand why readers come back to the same story structures within the romance genre, which is often derided by consumers of more “refined” literary tastes. As we grow older, McGurl notes, we are faced with narrower possibilities for the future. Fiction serves as a way to reintroduce contingency and “attenuate the depressing limitations of embodied life” (129). McGurl goes beyond examining fiction as a means of escape from the real world and instead digs deeper into how literature plays with time, both in its own world and in ours.
Critique:
On the other hand, McGurl’s account has several weaknesses as well. First and foremost, Everything and Less is a remarkably dense read. McGurl’s writing is often unfocused and filled with constant tangents, making his argument difficult to follow. His writing is overly-academic throughout the text and his lengthy, wandering sentences prevent a cogent narrative flow to his argument. While I am used to academic writing, McGurl’s dense exposition, unnecessarily complicated prose, and often pretentious tone will likely turn off all but the most dedicated readers. This frustratingly difficult nature of the book is compounded by the bafflingly unhelpful and incomprehensible charts that are scattered through the text (174-175), only serving to confound the reader further rather than to clarify his argument.
Speaking of his central argument, while McGurl’s thesis that Amazon has changed the way we write and consume literature is undoubtedly true, his evidence more often than not seems like a stretch. Constantly throughout the book, McGurl notes that every different genre is an allegory for Amazon. Whether it is the zombie novel representing the attitude of Amazon toward its customers (creatures driven by their desire and insatiable appetites), the alpha male billionaire romance novel reflecting Bezos’s self-perception, or the Adult Baby Diaper Lover books reflecting the customer’s infantile dependence on their mother (Amazon) who seeks to immediately gratify their demand, McGurl argues that all of these genres are the “quintessential” genre in the age of Amazon.
Not only is this frustrating due to the contradictions found throughout his analysis, but also because he exclusively utilizes novels published through K.D.P., even though he extends his argument to the larger publishing industry. He largely ignores the history of the book as a commodity, insisting that Amazon has turned the reader into a consumer although this process began long before Bezos was born. Above all, McGurl’s writing is detached from the readers he’s writing about, as he makes assumptions about their motivations for reading without conducting any interviews, reading reviews of these novels, or gathering any qualitative data about the publishing industry. There is also no mention of how the authors who write on the K.D.P. platform feel about their connection to Amazon and the massive profits that Amazon takes from their (most often mild) successes. For McGurl, the data he presents serve largely to decorate his more theoretical arguments, which come across as unconvincing, albeit entertaining.
Finally, McGurl makes large and sweeping generalizations throughout the book, often using scant or cherry-picked data as evidence. While he is self-aware and often qualifies his statements with caveats such as “a stretch-surely,” and “speculative to be sure,” only to then offer sweeping conclusions on the same page. McGurl does not attempt to persuade the reader but rather provokes them with hypotheticals and insinuations. He introduces thought experiments for the reader to consider but then states them matter-of-factly later in the text. For example, he argues that the orgies within The House of Enchanted Feminization suggest “a lunge toward erotic collectivity and community if not communism” (180). Yet, to classify every act of group sex as a collective with emancipatory potential is simply dubious.
Additionally, this simplification of complex phenomena can be found in his two primary organizational schemas: the division of literature between the poles of romance (minimalism) and epic (maximalism). While this framework provides a useful point of reference to analyze literature, it is more often than not limiting, especially since most fiction is neither or includes elements of both. While there are indeed small nuggets of insight in this volume, it must often be mined from under mountains of jargonist writing and obscurantist framing. It is at this point that the reader begins to realize that there are also inaccuracies littered throughout the text, such as stating that the Twilight series is a trilogy or repeating the debunked story of Bezos’s inspiration to start Amazon after reading Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. These small inconsistencies build up throughout the text, often working to undermine McGurl’s credibility and weaken the work as a whole.
Conclusion:
Overall, Everything and Less is an occasionally insightful -- though unnecessarily obtuse and frustrating -- examination of the novel in the Age of Amazon. While McGurl delights in the strange and obscure literary forms to be found on Amazon’s K.D.P platform, his overly academic writing steals the spotlight from what could have been an illuminating and clear analysis of how Amazon has changed the literary landscape. Despite these shortcomings, McGurl's provocations serve as a useful intercession into the publishing industry and how it has been shaped by the forces of neoliberal capitalism. If you’re willing to wade through pages of abstruse prose, the motivated reader just might find some glimmers of genuine insight that are well-worth engaging.