A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (review)

Evan Brier's engaging study of the book trade "between 1948, when television began its commercial ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House [. . .] became a publicly owned corporation" (3) aims to redress the dearth of attention paid to that era's effect on novels. The blind spot, he argues, results from a "scholarly-critical discomfort" with treating novels as we treat movies and television shows, as if to preserve a space for the literary outside the realm of commerce. Brier suggests that this discomfort reached its peak during the epoch of mass culture, when it merged with the socio-political Cold War discourse about declining literacy and these two separate and often antagonistic (or just coldly unrelated) discourses found a convenient mutual enemy in the growing influence of television. Brier doesn't situate his study of the book trade within these conversations so much as explore how it reflected, exploited, and even generated them, thus playing a sort of double agent: it participated in mass culture to promote reading while promoting rhetoric against mass culture—also to promote reading. This, he argues, helps account for the fact that, while alarmist rhetoric about Americans not reading was perhaps stronger in the 1950s than at any other time, it was matched by an "unprecedented ubiquity of books in America" (10), and the public was buying them.

A Novel Marketplace is organized by what's "regrettably understood as the cultural spectrum" from high to low art (2), proceeding through two novels that were marketed directly to the hysteria about declining culture, then two that were marketed as mass-culture objects. Each chapter explores how a novel reflects within its pages some aspect of its own production or distribution, and thus reflects on the cultural anxieties of the period. Brier's reading of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, for instance, highlights the moment when publishers began to recognize the saleability of the "art novel" concept (21) to an audience primed by fear of popular culture's taint, and how the figure of the literary agent at this moment helped keep up an important appearance of distance between authorship and commerce, with the result of a surprising commercial success. To deepen his case, Brier reads the trope of detachment or disinterestedness both in the novel and in Bowles's correspondence with his publisher regarding his agent throughout its production. The chapter on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 tracks the rise of book-related associations and awards against the backdrop of Cold War alarmism about literacy and the explosion of the paperback format, which Brier calls "a version of mass culture used to respond to the threat of mass culture" (55). Brier reads Fahrenheit 451 as a related irony, arguing that "as a dystopia that links the destruction of Western civilization to the predicted decline of the book, [it] might be the best advertisement for the book ever devised" (47), which might help explain its crossing over from paperback pulp to "serious" genre fiction. Conversely, argues Brier, the marketing of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Grace Metalius's Peyton Place evidenced a publishing industry more consciously in control of its "developing links to mass-culture institutions" (77). This development guaranteed the novels' immediate success but relegated them critically to their own historical moment. Brier shows how Wilson's novel about a disgruntled ad-man was promoted by Simon & Schuster as "typical" of its era in order "to capitalize on public interest in corporate culture and middle-class existence" (77) — starting from the change of its title (from Wilson's proposed A Candle at Midnight) — while the scandalous (and female-authored) "blockbuster", Peyton Place, was immediately entrenched in the high/low culture debate and never made it out.

Brier caps off these two movements with the fifth leg of Norman Mailer's 1959 Advertisements for Myself, described as a...