This continued until two weeks ago, or maybe the late ’90s/early ’00s, when Bertelsmann bought Random House, Viacom took control of Simon & Schuster, and publishing started acting slightly more like a corporate industry than a perpetual Yale reunion. Highly educated, overwhelmingly male editors and agents did handshake deals over three-martini lunches at the Century club, then went back to the office and sexually harassed their secretaries. Modern American book publishing began to take shape in the early 1900s. Though the golden age of the Jonathans is far gone, the templates created by their best sellers still sway how novelists write, marketers market, and publishers publish today. This Midwestern clan came to stand for a fin de siècle way of life that the author probably never intended to hold up as a model, except of exactly how close close third-person narration can get. And Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections, portentously published on September 1, 2001, traced Albert and Enid Lambert and their miserable adult children through over 570 action-packed pages. Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude created nostalgia for a pre-gentrification Brooklyn and made genre flourishes trendy.

Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, featuring a narrator named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to Ukraine to discover his Jewish family’s tragicomic history, presaged the recent autofiction boom. The other reasons are even more depressing.īack when the Jonathans first roamed the earth, Amazon was just getting its bearings, social media didn’t exist, review coverage thrived, and it was not remarkable to encounter an all-male masthead or awards committee. One reason must be that publishing is the most hidebound and retrogressive of all culture industries.

The demographics have also been shifting, though not as dramatically as you might imagine. The books the Jonathans published between 19 occupied that rarefied sliver of the market where literary fiction and huge cash cow overlap. Franzen is the über-Jonathan, most apparently concerned with protecting the citadel of fiction from populist encroachment. But Michael Chabon is a Jonathan, and so is Jeffrey Eugenides. Jonathan Ames, despite being named Jonathan, is not a Jonathan. Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer: white American men hewing to a midcentury model of novelist as public intellectual. Time was, if you read books, you’d be hard-pressed to escape the Jonathans.

Osierocony brooklyn jonathan lethem