Introduction Excerpt for New Sincerity

INTRODUCTION

Sincerely Yours

Early in the hybrid 2006 work What Is the What, the Sudanese narrator Achak Deng, bound and gagged by an African American couple while they rob his Atlanta apartment, imagines telling his captors about the event that brought him to the United States. “The broad strokes of the story of the civil war in Sudan,” he silently informs them, “a story perpetuated by us Lost Boys, in the interest of drama and expediency, tells that one day we were sitting in our villages bathing in the river and grinding grain and the next the Arabs were raiding us, killing and looting and enslaving.”¹ Deng takes as his task to expand on and complicate this “broad strokes” story, detailing the tensions that existed before the war, its onset in “increments” (57), its various underreported horrors, and his own experiences as a refugee in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and finally the US. Much of the power of What Is the What derives from the palpable authenticity of Deng’s first-person testimony as a child of war, and particularly the painful way his innocent and instinctive trust in other people is consistently betrayed by their insincere and often brutal actions. At the same time, his testimony short-circuits assumptions about its unmediated authenticity through regular reflections on how it has been shaped by the requirements of a potential readership, by Deng’s anticipation of how his story will be received and put to work. This we can already see in his allusion to the fact that the “broad strokes” version of his story has been “perpetuated by us Lost Boys, in the interest of drama and expediency.” “Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want,” he observes elsewhere, “and that means making them as shocking as possible. My own story includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others” (21). In acknowledging that he is instrumentalizing the authenticity of his testimonial account, using it as a strategic means to achieve certain ends, Deng knows that he does not thereby render it inauthentic. Rather, What Is the What is here reminding its reader that the struggle to tell the truth in public cannot be separated from the ends that truth will be put to, and a foreknowledge of those ends necessarily imbues the telling with a level of calculation from the beginning. This specter of calculation, in turn, serves to raise questions less about the authentic truth of the tale than about the sincerity of the teller.

Choosing to embrace rather than shy away from this structuring dilemma, What Is the What presses the issue of sincerity in two further ways. The first is by implicitly contrasting the figure of a readership—that collective addressee, recipient of the “broad strokes” story, whose generic expectations must be met and manipulated in order to gain their attention and support—with the figure of a reader, imagined as an individual person more open and responsive to morally complicating elements in the stories they encounter. This reader, prefigured throughout the book in Deng’s silent monologues to individuals he encounters in the narrative present, comes fully into view in the concluding chapter. As Deng talks about moving on from the robbery and begins to envisage a future, his closing lines take the form of direct address:

I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. . . . All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (535)

The “you” here is ambiguously singular and plural, so that the book concludes by bringing together the previously distinguished figures of readership and reader. In so doing, Deng’s address mobilizes all the pathos associated with an ideal of sincerity defined, in the words of its most famous theorist Lionel Trilling, as “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.”² For Trilling, sincerity names a state or activity wherein being true to oneself does not serve as its own end but as a means of being true to others, an activity in which “the moral end in view implies a public end in view.”³ Developing this conception of sincerity, the book you are reading argues that, as a fundamentally social practice, sincerity is not only other-directed but depends for its very possibility on acknowledgment by another, acknowledgment that is in significant part an act of trust. As Deng recognizes in his closing words, it is trust in sincerity that enables sincerity to come into being, for the speaker as much as for their listener(s).

And yet, in a pattern we will likewise see repeated throughout New Sincerity, a second specter haunts Achak Deng’s culminating vision of sincere and trusting communion between speaker and listener, writer and reader. This is the specter of the ghostwriter, in this case the author Dave Eggers. For readers familiar with any of Eggers’s first three books—his best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), first novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), and story collection How We Are Hungry (2004)—the invocatory conclusion of What Is the What should ring familiar bells. The second-person address, collapsing space between writer and reader, stress on collective strength and existential plenitude, urgent present-tense interrogatives: these are the defining elements of Eggers’s early writing, the characteristic features of its most heightened moments. The recapitulation of this authorial style at the finale of What Is the What offers a closing reminder that we are here encountering not the actual words of the real-life Achak Deng, but a version of his autobiography fictionalized by Eggers. The latter is therefore writing not in his own voice (as in A Heartbreaking Work), nor in the voice of a character whose experience closely resembles his own (as in Velocity and most of his stories), but in the voice of a real-life African refugee reimagined as a literary character. Moreover, while Eggers was careful when promoting the book to outline its collective origins in his detailed interviews with Deng (a process confirmed in Deng’s preface to the text), when the paperback edition appeared, it featured only the title What Is the What and Eggers’s name on the cover and spine, with The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, the book’s original subtitle, relegated to the inside flyleaf.⁴

When the issue is put this way, it is tempting to summon some contemporary epithets: on the face of it, shouldn’t we be suspicious of Eggers’s approach to Deng’s story? Doesn’t it constitute an act, however well intentioned, of cultural appropriation? Yet at the time of the book’s publication, this was not the response of its reviewers.⁵ Comparing the overwhelmingly positive reception of What Is the What to the outrage that so often greeted earlier attempts by white American authors to write in a black African voice, Elizabeth Twitchell marveled in a 2011 article that “Eggers’s project of ventriloquizing the suffering of another—and African suffering at that—was not only tolerated but praised as a profoundly moral undertaking.”⁶ This led Twitchell to frame a historical question: “What confluence of events has made it ethically possible for an American writer to fictionalize African trauma?”⁷ Her answer—that Eggers’s text successfully navigated the stalemate in 1990s theory between “the moral obligation to empathize with distant and dissimilar persons, and a skepticism about the morality of empathic identification itself”—has since been joined by a host of other critical responses, many of which offer nuanced considerations of how What Is the What draws on and departs from the twentieth-century tradition of human rights literature.⁸

In the present book I set out both to amplify Twitchell’s historical question—by attending to the material as well as discursive conditions that underpin contemporary literary authorship—and to answer that question in a different way, drawing on the intersection between the two key phrases in my title: “New Sincerity” and “the Neoliberal Age.” What Is the What, I argue, could receive such a glowing reception because it was published at the very moment when both of these dynamics in American culture were at their zenith—which is also to say, at the moment they began their decline. I will later explain what I mean by this claim in the case of neoliberalism, the decline of which has been the subject of some debate. But for now it makes sense to begin with New Sincerity, since this is the central label under which I bring together the writers examined in this book.

These writers are all born within a fifteen-year window between 1957 (Helen DeWitt) and 1972 (Benjamin Kunkel). I refer to them collectively as post-boomers, born at the tail end of, and in the period directly after, the postwar US baby boom that began in the early to mid-1940s and peaked in the late 1950s.9 Having been no more than children during the 1960s, the historical experience of this post-boomer generation is defined by belatedness vis-à-vis the radical emancipatory politics, egalitarian social movements, and experimental artistic impulses that marked the earlier period. Coming to intellectual maturity in the last two decades of the century—a period retrospectively dubbed the “age of fracture” and “the unwinding”—this cohort began writing and publishing in a very different economic and political climate, one steeped in Reaganomics, the Washington Consensus, and the rise (and rise) of global multinational capitalism.10 The US literary academy, where virtually all budding authors now spend several years and many their entire careers, witnessed a number of significant developments: new paradigms for literary study were generated through the influence of European, particularly French, thinkers; the mainstream American canon fragmented and diversified under pressure from social change, feeding into the so-called culture wars; and the creative writing program continued its ascent from one authorship route among others to a near-obligatory professional rite of passage.¹¹ In the media sphere, “the late age of print” was heralded by the coming of the World Wide Web, a radically new technological form that supplemented the challenges to the printed word mounted by cinema and television earlier in the century.¹² And in the cultural sphere, something called “postmodern irony” was taken to define the spirit of the age, tying together everything from consumerism and identity to politics and art.13

In addressing the early to midcareer fiction of this post-boomer generation—running from David Foster Wallace’s first story collection published on the cusp of the 1990s in my opening chapter, to a set of novels from the mid-2000s by Susan Choi, Dana Spiotta, and Benjamin Kunkel in my final chapter—New Sincerity aims not only to offer a generational portrait, but also to delineate a central development in American literary fiction in the nearly two decades from 1989 to 2008. This was a period defined in political-economic terms by “normative neoliberalism” and “capitalist realism,” by an atmosphere in which “the horizons of political hope had been delimited to a single political-economic system,” and “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable.”¹⁴ In Chapter One I date the beginning of this period to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s now notorious argument that the end of the Cold War marked the “End of History.” I argue that the concluding text in Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair, the novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, addresses this moment of historical transition by conceiving it as necessitating a moment of aesthetic transition, from exhausted paradigms of postmodernist metafiction and minimalism to something else. Over subsequent chapters, I explore how this something else—literary New Sincerity—coalesces through the work of Wallace and his peers into a dominant generational aesthetic, one that to this day continues to retain a serious influence on the themes and forms of contemporary writing. This stylistic and thematic longevity can be seen in the work of younger novelists such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Charles Yu, as well as across an array of fictions published since the 2000s by the authors featured in this book—for instance, Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia (2011), George Saunders’s Tenth of December (2013), Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (2019), and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (2022).

Despite its sustained presence in American fiction, however, my argument is that the highpoint of New Sincerity as a literary paradigm had been reached by the mid-2000s, and therefore the story I tell ends at this juncture. Rather than the suddenness of the global financial crisis that closed the period of normative neoliberalism in economic terms, the material and ideological changes that on my conception heralded the close of this literary period arrived more gradually around the mid-2000s, with the coming of social media, the crystallization of identity categories as the vehicle for both political organization and market segmentation, the waning of American unipolar hegemony, and the shift in the publishing world to the “Age of Amazon.” According to Mark McGurl, this latter age is defined from an author’s point of view by “the reader as customer, a quasi-deity around whose needs—assuming you want to earn money from your writing—your creative labor must revolve.”¹⁵ Not coincidentally, it is around this time that we witness the widely noted “genre turn” in contemporary literary fiction, the prominence of which has much to do with technological and economic shifts, but the aesthetic ground for which was laid by the prior moment of literary New Sincerity.¹⁶ Building on the work of McGurl and others, I propose that the New Sincerity moment occupies the period between the dominance of literary postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s and the genre turn of the mid-2000s. Literary New Sincerity therefore displays elements of both postmodernist metafiction and genre aesthetics; but unlike postmodernism and the genre turn, both of which are usually identified primarily in formal terms, literary New Sincerity has at its core a question of sensibility or ethos. Indeed, it is driven in part by a questioning of the formalist project itself, not only in aesthetic but in ethical terms.

In the next section I nevertheless begin by exploring New Sincerity writing on formal grounds, establishing a set of general characteristics that lay the foundation for the case studies pursued in my chapters. The section that follows addresses the nature and history of sincerity itself, tracking a fascination with the relationship between literature and sincerity back to midcentury American liberalism’s vision of literary history, which culminated in Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity. I then consider why it makes sense to speak, as my title does, of a new sincerity. By retracing the origins of my project, I connect the literary aesthetics at the heart of this book to broader cultural engagements with sincerity in and around 2000. In the final sections I move to address the other key term in my subtitle, “neoliberalism,” offering a genealogy of neoliberal sincerity and asking whether the fictions explored in this book stake out a complicit or resistant position to it. The Introduction concludes with a summary of the chapters, which progress through a series of nine central authors—most of them named above—as well as a set of key themes: art, economy, gender, race, class, and politics, each made central in one chapter but at play in them all. Through this approach, New Sincerity aims not only to analyze a key strand of literature in the period of normative neoliberalism: by looking back from the perspective of the present, it also assesses what lessons that literature holds for where we stand today.

Sincerely Novel

What are the formal coordinates of literary New Sincerity? The answer is complicated by the fact that a distinguishing feature of this writing is its revival of what Andrew Hoberek has dubbed “intentional bad form,” where “bad form in the aesthetic sense merges with bad form in the social sense to connote sincerity: in the process of speaking from one’s deepest self, one cannot bother with, or is indeed actively hindered by the artificiality of, the canons of good form.”¹⁷ As I explain in Chapter One, rather than an aesthetics of self-expression, this turn to bad form among post-boomer writers is better understood along Hegelian lines as an attempt to reconstitute the artwork in dialogical terms, as (in Robert Pippin’s paraphrase of Hegel) a “subject-subject relation, not some sort of subject-object relation.”¹⁸ As Pippin outlines, the achievement of a sincere “subject-subject relation” in art is perennially threatened, on the one hand, by the danger of the artist’s “submission to a collective subjectivity,” and, on the other, by “an attempt by the artist to dominate or overwhelm the artwork’s audience.”¹⁹ This either/or opposition neatly indexes the twin polarities of genre fiction on the one side—where the artist internalizes the preferences of the market in their formal choices—and postmodernist metafiction on the other, where “mastery” over the reader is often taken to constitute a key aesthetic principle.²⁰ For the writers examined in this study, both these polarities are depicted as aesthetically and ethically threatening, with a healthier relationship to the reader and the market imagined to lie somewhere between them.

But if postmodernism and genre fiction crowd literary New Sincerity from either end of its moment of prominence, then retreading the boards of modernist autonomy does not offer a satisfactory way out of this formal-historical bind. In a 1996 essay favorably comparing the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky to “our own lit’s thematic poverty,” Wallace typifies the New Sincerity reaction to the legacy of modernism:

The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.²¹

“Real lived life” is understood to be what the reader wants from fiction, and it is incumbent on authors to cast aside elitist pretensions and meet their reader halfway.²² In Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling had cited formulations by Joyce, Eliot, and Gide to support his claim that the modernists’ aesthetics of impersonality—the artist as aloof genius, as persona rather than person—meant that “the criterion of sincerity, the calculation of the degree of congruence between feeling and avowal, is not pertinent to the judgement of their work.”²³ For Trilling, modernism represented the culmination of “two centuries of aesthetic theory and artistic practice which have been less and less willing to take account of the habitual preferences of the audience.”²⁴ Wallace implicitly agrees and argues instead for a mode of literature that takes those preferences into account, so that, as he put it, “The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.”²⁵

As Wallace’s paeans to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy suggest, the novel of the nineteenth century would seem to offer a more promising light to guide the way through the formal and ethical thicket of the millennial moment. Indeed, Hoberek identifies “intentional bad form” in millennial-era fiction with a return to the nineteenth century and earlier, “to the form of the novel in place before even the rules of realism were fully formulated.”²⁶ Yet as I explain in my reading of Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001) in Chapter Three, returning to the pre-modernist novel is not the balm it might initially promise to be. This is the case because the modernist critique of realism still has purchase—one cannot wish away the innovations of the twentieth century, and the twinned discoveries about human subjectivity and literary form that it witnessed—and also because in the millennial moment, as Egan’s novel shows, a return to that earlier brand of realism can be made to serve the same purpose as genre fiction, flattering the reader’s sentiments to commercial ends.²⁷ Whatever route one takes, in other words, the problem of aesthetic insincerity inevitably rears its ugly head. As Wallace’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way articulated in its knotty and convoluted way at the outset of the period of normative neoliberalism, the literary search for sincerity among his generation is not only a response to the contemporary economic, political, and cultural landscape, but also a symptom of the norms and pressures of that landscape. Fundamentally, it is in this unstable gap between symptom and response that literary New Sincerity finds its home. As I will identify more fully when I deal with neoliberalism later in this Introduction, it is the struggle with material complicity that gives this writing its aesthetic, ethical, and political energy.

In formal terms, much of that energy resides in narrative voice. A colloquial mode of address characterizes not only obvious cases like Wallace’s third-person Infinite Jest (1996) or Eggers’s first-person A Heartbreaking Work, but also less attention-grabbing examples such as the elusive narrator of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) or the unstable third/first person in the opening chapter of Egan’s The Keep (2006). As each of these instances makes clear, the question of voice brings with it the question of narrative perspective, and New Sincerity writers employ sudden alterations in perspective to create many of their most distinctive aesthetic effects. In particular, a shift from first-person or third-person narration into second-person address frequently characterizes climactic moments in this body of literature, making evident in a heightened and punctual way the basic orientation toward dialogue that underpins New Sincerity writing more generally. At the same time, the voice that speaks in these climactic moments, while evoking the pathos of direct address, is often more difficult to situate than it might initially seem. Deng’s direct address to the reader at the conclusion of What Is the What is typical here, in that it is haunted by Eggers as ghostwriter, by the book’s production of what Twitchell calls “a third voice” out of the author’s real-life dialogue with Deng.²⁸ While the cross-racial element in this example is somewhat unusual, we will see that forms of ghostwriting are otherwise common across New Sincerity texts, from the filmmaker James Incandenza’s inhabitation of Don Gately’s mind and language in Infinite Jest, to the journalist Irene Maitlock’s penning of the fashion model Charlotte Swenson’s blog in Look at Me, to the way brand names haunt the mind of the “nomenclature consultant” in Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), to the multiple ghosts that inhabit the fiction of George Saunders.

As we can already glean from the example of What Is the What, these ghosts in the machine of writing make palpable the contradictions that exist around authorial sincerity. While, at least in the modern age, those contradictions can never be fully absent from the scene of writing, they nonetheless have a specific material force in the neoliberal moment. As Deborah Brandt records in her book The Rise of Writing, with the coming of the knowledge economy from the 1970s and the digital age from the 1990s, “For perhaps the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing seems to be eclipsing reading as the literate experience of consequence.”²⁹ And writing possesses a contrasting cultural heritage to reading, being “connected not to citizenship but to work,” belonging to “the transactional sphere,” with its value “captured largely for private enterprise, trade and artisanship.”³⁰ As Brandt notes, this utilitarian, capitalist conception of writing—so different to the historically dominant understanding of reading as a pathway to citizenship, worship, and personal autonomy—is underscored by the law of the land:

According to the Supreme Court, people do not really write at work as citizens or free beings but rather as willingly enlisted corporate voices. . . . They are not individually responsible for what they are paid to say. Consequently, they don’t really mean what they say. In fact, according to the Court, people who write for pay can’t really mean what they say. Their speech rights are corrupted and, hence, inoperable. From this perspective, writing starts to look a lot less romantic, and a lot more feudal.³¹

It is against this legal and economic background that we can begin to understand all writing (for pay) as a kind of ghostwriting, where individuals find themselves voicing and being voiced by larger entities. But Brandt also observes that ghostwriting in its more restricted sense—“writing something for which someone else will take authorship credit”—is also on the rise in the digital age in a way that “simultaneously relies upon and erodes conceptions of authorship that have shaped literacy practices over time.”³² I would add that it is not only literacy practices but literary practices that are affected by such deep-rooted material changes. In neoliberal culture, meaning what you say as an artist would seem to require distinguishing yourself from those who write only for pay, who must perforce inhabit the role of ghosts in the commercial machine. Yet as we will explore below, neoliberalism’s insistence on an economic view of everyday life heightens the contradictions faced by literary writers who want to distinguish aesthetic concerns from market requirements.

Throughout this book, I read New Sincerity texts as attempts to mediate these contradictions in writerly sincerity under neoliberalism—if not to resolve those contradictions then at least to draw them close to the center of the work, to make them a concern for the reader as well as the writer. The direct invocation of a reader becomes a crucial element in this process, and explains why, as Zadie Smith puts it in her introduction to a collection of post-boomer fiction, these texts “seem to be attempting to make something happen off the page, outside words, a curious thing for a piece of writing to want to do.”³³ What happens off the page, outside words, depends upon the invocation and response of another; this other to whom I respond, and whose response I await, is for New Sincerity writers the actual reader of their text. It is striking how many novels of this period conclude with the kind of direct address we see at the end of What Is the What, such as when Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007)—to cite an example not treated elsewhere in this book—breaks with its first-person-plural narrative voice only in its closing line: “We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.”³⁴ In their punctual effect, these concluding words recall the classic example of direct address in nineteenth-century fiction: Jane Eyre’s “Reader, I married him.” The realist novel’s rhetoric of sincerity is thus being summoned by Ferris, but with a twist. In place of what Garrett Stewart identifies as the Brontë sentence’s “collaborative motivation . . . of second, first, and third person in an independent transitive—and transactional—grammar,” the ending of Then We Came to the End gives us second, first, and first-person plural combining to displace the transactional quality of the “we” (which heretofore in the novel has referred to a group of advertising colleagues connected by their precarious work situation) with an invocation of community that seems to put the narrator-writer and the reader into direct relationship with one another.³⁵

The cultural contexts of the two phrases are also worth comparing. Of “Reader, I married him,” Stewart remarks that “there is a reader in attendance, rhetorically hailed or otherwise.”³⁶ Yet while Stewart considers this “the only existential ground possible for a fictional text,” the assumption that there will inevitably be a reader in attendance for a fictional utterance should also be regarded historically, as redolent of the novel in its most confident time and place: the middle of the British nineteenth century, when an eager and rapidly growing reading public had few other forms of entertainment competing for their attention. By contrast, Ferris’s implicit acknowledgment that there is neither a “me” nor a “we” without a reading “you,” while superficially similar, has—like the “fractious” first-person plural of his novel more generally—a more precarious edge.³⁷ In an early twenty-first-century America swamped by competing draws on a potential reader’s time—not to mention a general crisis of literacy, with rates “stagnant” since the 1980s³⁸—the presumption that “readers would be many and writers would be few,” and thus that there will always be an empirical reader to ground every literary text, can be made with far less certainty.³⁹

Against this background, rhetorical gestures toward sincerity, which are also gestures toward community and “a public end in view,” take on a double temporal character in New Sincerity texts.⁴⁰ On the one hand, such gestures reach back to the heyday of the novel, transmitting palpable nostalgia for the kind of cultural centrality that literature could once claim. On the other hand, such gestures possess an open-ended, futural quality, hoping to bring into being the reader (and readership) that can no longer be taken for granted. In each text featured in New Sincerity, this doubleness plays out with a different tonality—sometimes anxious and passive-aggressive, sometimes smooth and inviting, sometimes puzzled and questioning—but the general effect is to diminish the gap between narrator and writer, a gap that literary modernism had done so much to widen at the beginning of the last century. This is why I referred above to the “me” of Ferris’s closing line as a “narrator-writer,” since the culminating moments in New Sincerity texts like Then We Came to the End often read as efforts to break through the fictional mask. And yet they are not that, not quite; it is not so much that these authors are interested in having sincerity break with fiction in these moments, as that they are interested in performing a kind of sincerity that inheres only in fiction. Which is not to say a purer kind of sincerity, just a distinctive one. The cultivation of this contemporary form of aesthetic sincerity is one of the things, indeed, that might be said to be new about literary New Sincerity, as this book aims to show.

I hope the account thus far has begun to make persuasive my choice of literary New Sincerity as a term to describe the work of this generation of American writers. But what was sincerity before it was new? And how did it become new? A journey back in literary and intellectual history will help us to address these questions over the next two sections.

Sincerely Liberal

In a scene midway through William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, the struggling and immature playwright Otto, trying in vain to seduce his ethereal poet friend Esmé, catches up with her on a New York City street and proclaims his undying love. “You know I’m sincere,” he pleads, “I’ve always been sincere with you.” Esmé hears him out, turns to him wearily, and responds flatly. “Sincerity,” she tells him, “becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves.”⁴¹

Although Lionel Trilling may or may not have read The Recognitions—which was not exactly a smash hit upon its release—it is precisely the opposition Esmé draws here between sincerity with others and honesty with oneself that lies at the heart of Trilling’s 1972 study in the history of ideas, Sincerity and Authenticity. At the outset of the book, based on his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, Trilling defines sincerity as “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” and traces its emergence in “the moral life of Europe” to the advent of Renaissance humanism.⁴² He cites Hamlet as a central text, placing particular emphasis on Polonius’s famous advice to Laertes as the latter prepares to depart for Paris:

This above all: to thine own self be true

And it doth follow, as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

For Trilling, the otherwise corrupt Polonius here experiences “a moment of self-transcendence, of grace, of truth” (3). His words are to be taken seriously, and crucial to their import is that truth to one’s own self should be understood not as an end but as a means of ensuring truth to others.

Trilling goes on to claim—via readings of Molière, Rousseau, Goethe, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Austen, among others—that this public-oriented ideal of sincerity would become “a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years” (6). But by the twentieth century it had gone into sharp decline, superseded by the ideal of authenticity, which conceives truth to the self as an end and not simply as a means. Of Polonius’s three lines of counsel, only the first now remains: “To thine own self be true.” The goal of authenticity is self-integrity rather than other-directed communication; authenticity rejects the playing of roles, and it is precisely the public orientation underlying sincerity—which emerged in an early modern period dominated by the theater—that makes the notion suspect to the new anti-social temperament. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of sincerity as bad faith, Trilling outlines the modern dialectic between sincerity and authenticity as follows:

Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic. (10–11)

This, in essence, is Esmé’s judgment on Otto’s declaration of love in The Recognitions: he may indeed be as sincere as he says he is, but his sincerity is not authentic, and is no replacement for the honesty with oneself that authenticity names. Authenticity denotes, in Trilling’s summary, “a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life” (11). And Gaddis’s novel—an emblematic late modernist artwork—could not be less genial in its portrayal of midcentury American society and those who inhabit it, making constant analogies between forgery in the art world and the forgery of the self that is everywhere prevalent in social life.

Of course, Gaddis and Trilling were far from alone among intellectuals and writers of their time in drawing attention to the cultural importance of sincerity and authenticity in the postwar United States. The questions that Gaddis was probing in The Recognitions received more accessible treatment in novels including The Catcher in the Rye (1951), On the Road (1957), Revolutionary Road (1961), and The Moviegoer (1961). Social scientists such as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, and William Whyte explored notions of sincerity, authenticity, and performance in theorizing the lives of the increasingly bureaucratized middle class of the midcentury era.⁴³ In Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling was thus employing concepts with a certain zeitgeist quality, and the author of The Liberal Imagination (1950) was doing so at least in part to defend the liberalism—now aligned with a commitment to sincerity—that he viewed as under threat from the authenticity-obsessed radical movements of the 1960s.⁴⁴

In employing literature as the primary ground for his historical exploration of sincerity, Trilling’s study was part of a stream of similar work in this period on both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning in the early 1960s, a range of philosophers and critics wrote on the connection between sincerity and literary aesthetics; following the publication of Sincerity and Authenticity, the last work in this wave of sincerity studies was Leon Guilhamet’s 1974 treatise on eighteenth-century poetry, The Sincere Ideal.⁴⁵ By the mid-1970s, however, the literary and cultural landscape had changed. “Theory” had arrived in the US academy, and scholars were now busy deconstructing the humanist conceptions of the self and literary expression that underlay the work of virtually all the midcentury writers, critics, and sociologists I have just named.⁴⁶

Across the decades that followed, concomitant with the neoliberal turn in politics and economy, both sincerity and authenticity suffered setbacks as normative cultural ideals. There are many ways to tell this story, but one of the most generative is offered by Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now (2005), which maps Trilling’s opposition onto a newer distinction between “proceduralism”—which she associates with the political and social theory of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas in the 1970s and 1980s—and “poststructuralism,” which became familiar over the same period through the influence of French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. “Proceduralism constitutes an extension of the sincerity paradigm,” Anderson contends, “while poststructuralism remains the inheritor of the authenticity paradigm.”⁴⁷ Nevertheless, both terms in this new polarity can be understood to subordinate the focus on the deep self and the relation between self and other that characterized both sides of Trilling’s sincerity/authenticity dichotomy. Proceduralism achieves this subordination through its focus on universalist norms and systems, whether legal or discursive; poststructuralism by its emphasis on difference, and its philosophical commitment to the priority of language, or what Derrida would term “general writing.” Anderson, who wants to argue the case for a proceduralist approach in literary and cultural studies, sees proceduralism as “a dialectical overcoming of the sincerity/authenticity problematic.”⁴⁸ She downplays, however, the extent to which poststructuralism marks the same dialectical overcoming from a different direction. It may well be true that poststructuralism inherits the authenticity mantle, in that it “looks beneath or beyond the surface of convention to access meaningful funds of human experience,” but poststructuralism can also be understood to undermine all claims to authenticity, any positing of an origin point from which truth flows.⁴⁹

The classic deconstruction of the notion of an origin was offered by Derrida in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” delivered at a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University that is often cited (ironically enough) as the origin point of Theory’s rise to hegemony in the US academy.⁵⁰ But the poststructuralist dismantling of the sincerity/authenticity paradigm is perhaps best exemplified by the debate between Derrida and Paul de Man concerning Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the central figure in many influential accounts of the transition from the sincerity ideal to the modern age of authenticity.⁵¹ In his breakthrough work Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida had proposed that Rousseau’s repeated attempts, most notably in the Confessions, to ground the authenticity of self-presence in the experience of hearing oneself speak, would always end up depending on the disavowed and inauthentic “supplement” of writing.⁵² In a review of the book, de Man praised Derrida’s reading while nonetheless taking him to task for failing to go beyond the traditional privileging in Rousseau criticism of “the relations the subject sustains with himself in the interiority of consciousness.”⁵³ In distinguishing between what Rousseau wants to say and what he does say, “Derrida goes very far in attributing to Rousseau a systematic and verified knowledge of the duplicity of his own discourse,” but he does not go far enough.⁵⁴ In a later essay, de Man casts Derrida’s inability to appreciate fully the self-reflexivity of Rousseau’s writing as an unwillingness to acknowledge its literary quality—and by “literary” he designates “any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the correlative of its rhetorical nature.”⁵⁵ This conception of literary writing as fully self-conscious rhetoric—which one could argue Derrida in fact shares (the question being whether he considers Rousseau to qualify as literature in this sense)—enables de Man to position self-consciousness in an unusual place. “It follows from the rhetorical nature of literary language that the cognitive function resides in the language and not in the subject,” he concludes: “The question as to whether the author himself is or is not blinded is to some extent irrelevant; it can only be asked heuristically, as a means to accede to the true question: whether his language is or is not blind to its own statement.”⁵⁶

From the vantage point of deconstruction, it therefore makes little sense to talk about sincerity as a relevant literary category: to (mis)appropriate Trilling’s terms, even in a work like the Confessions it is language doing the “avowing” and “feeling,” rather than Rousseau himself. But de Man’s position also implies, as he notes above, that all reading is inevitably misreading. In an important sense, then, the reader’s intervention is just as “irrelevant” for de Man as the author’s conception of what they are doing. The only agent that really matters is language, and even history itself becomes a construct of language’s grammatology. The ethical problems with this position have been picked over many times, with the scandal concerning de Man’s posthumously published wartime writings casting an unavoidably dark shadow on the more radical conclusions of his deconstructive practice.⁵⁷ But from our vantage point, we can glimpse in the Derrida–de Man picture of literature another spur for those direct invocations of the reader that litter New Sincerity texts. These rhetorical gestures mark an aesthetic response not only to the historical and material factors explored above and below, but also to the conclusions set out in some of the most radical Theory of the preceding age, which placed writer and reader in a thoroughly subordinate position to the language of the text.

Those radical conclusions were resisted by liberal attempts in the 2000s to revive Trilling’s categories, including Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now and Bernard Williams’s influential Truth and Truthfulness (2002), wherein “Sincerity” (capitalized in his text) is conceived as one of “the two basic virtues of truth.”⁵⁸ Indeed, Anderson and Williams’s contributions formed part of a twenty-first-century revival in “sincerity studies,” after almost three decades of scholarly neglect.⁵⁹ In a 2010 essay surveying this expanding field of scholarship, Angela Esterhammer highlighted some differences between the earlier wave of interest in the relationship between sincerity and literature during the 1960s and 1970s, and the more recent revival. Noting that the majority of scholarship in both waves had been anchored in the context of literary Romanticism, Esterhammer positions Wordsworth, “the first poet to cultivate sincerity as a poetic value,” as the presiding figure for the earlier wave, while identifying Byron, who “interprets sincerity as a code or convention,” as the model for sincerity’s more recent revival.⁶⁰ It is part of the argument of this book that literary New Sincerity bridges these two positions, combining the cultivation of sincerity as a poetic value with an awareness of sincerity as a convention. This literary combination is better described, however, as a dialectic, which it is the task of the next section to explore.

Sincerely New

The New Sincerity dialectic can be glimpsed in theoretical formation throughout the early essays of David Foster Wallace, which provide a running commentary on the commitments of his emerging literary practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Having produced a debut novel in The Broom of the System (1987) that he would later describe as “a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,”⁶¹ Wallace’s first significant critical essay, published the following year, advocated for the relevance of continental philosophy and literary theory—“such aliens as Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes, Poulet, Gadamer, de Man”—to the concerns of the contemporary writer.⁶² Wallace opined that writers could not ignore the insight that “the idea that literary language is any kind of neutral medium” had been shown by Theory to be an ideological delusion.⁶³ Three years later, in a pithy overview of debates around the “death of the author,” Wallace reaffirmed that the writer must take seriously the idea that literary language is “not a tool but an environment,” albeit he now downplayed his alignment with the poststructuralist view, presenting himself as one of those “civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another.”⁶⁴

This treatment of his generation’s response to Theory would reach its most potent expression in 1993’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which has become the ur-text for tracing the turn to sincerity among post-boomer writers. An attack on the commodification of ironic modes of audience address in contemporary television and advertising, and on American fiction’s lack of critical response to this development, “E Unibus Pluram” culminates with a clarion call for a new generation of literary “anti-rebels” who would eschew postmodern irony in favor of “single-entendre principles,” and thus risk appearing “too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic.”⁶⁵ Initially published alongside an equally striking interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace’s essay has had a major impact on both the writing of his contemporaries and how that writing has been received by critics. As Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden would later note—making the initial claim in 2011 and repeating it in 2016—“E Unibus Pluram” has wielded “predictive, or, perhaps, programmatic power” for contemporary American culture.⁶⁶ Wallace’s appeal for “a shift away from ‘ironic watching’ and toward the embrace of ‘single entendre principles’” had now become observable “almost everywhere.”⁶⁷

The renown that has attached itself to Wallace’s statements about irony and sincerity can make the problem of creating new literary art after postmodernism appear to involve little more than a shift in an author’s ethos or attitude: say what you mean and mean what you say, Wallace seems to imply, and everything else will follow. As I am not the first to point out, however, this relatively straightforward nonfiction message contrasts with the highly wrought technical complexity of Wallace’s fiction. Taking their cue from the stress in “E Unibus Pluram” on the problem of irony—as well as its felt prevalence in the cultural air of the American 1990s—critics have addressed this complexity primarily through the lens of that term, and a cottage industry of Wallace criticism has emerged on the subject of how, as one early critic put it, the author’s fiction turns “irony back on itself.”⁶⁸ The most sophisticated reading of this kind is offered by Lee Konstantinou, who devotes more than half his book on irony in postwar American fiction to the “postirony” he takes to characterize the writing of Wallace, Eggers, Egan, Alex Shakar, and other authors of their cohort and era. As Konstantinou acknowledges, “postirony” and “New Sincerity” share obvious kinship as cultural monikers, but he distinguishes them with a claim of priority, arguing that “postironic belief must precede the ethics of New Sincerity.”⁶⁹ Addressing a version of my ideas published in earlier articles that contributed to the writing of the present book, Konstantinou contends that “Kelly’s account does not address the specific threat these writers see in irony.”⁷⁰ “Why, after all, would sincerity be the aspired state one might want to attain if one was concerned about irony?” he wonders. “Why not commitment, or passion, or emotion, or decision?”⁷¹

My claim, however, is that irony is just one name—and perhaps not the best one—for the set of material, ideological, and aesthetic conditions that the post-boomer generation of writers are concerned with in their millennial-era fiction. These conditions—which I have outlined in brief above and will return to throughout the book—drive the central questions raised in and by this writing, all of which could be described as having to do not only with sincerity but precisely with “commitment, or passion, or emotion, or decision.” These questions include: in a neoliberal culture that validates self-interest above all other ends, how does one prioritize what Trilling calls the “public end in view”? If one takes into account the preferences of the reader, as Wallace suggests one should, how does one know one is not doing so in the way advertising does, anticipating the response of the receiver for commercial ends? How, in other words, does one establish one’s own sincerity in an era of neoliberal branding? Can sincerity itself become a brand? Is sincerity always valuable (morally, politically, economically)? Moreover, how does one address this set of questions in literature without the risk of outward performance trumping inner conviction? How does one establish “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling”—Trilling’s definition of sincerity again—if one cannot be sure about the status of one’s “actual feeling” because one is always anticipating the response of others, and performing for them? When one’s writing might simply be a kind of ghostwriting, determined by the economic character of language in the present, or even by the conglomerate character of literary publishing, can one ever know what one truly believes or means to say?⁷²

These are moral and epistemological questions, but they are primarily addressed by the writers featured in New Sincerity as questions of literary form. For this reason, throughout the book I mainly refer to literary New Sincerity as an aesthetic, although I also want to acknowledge that aspects of this aesthetic can helpfully be grasped through related notions such as sensibility and structure of feeling. These two terms, in their canonical definitions by Susan Sontag and Raymond Williams, share an emphasis on a collectively experienced affectivity that has not yet hardened into a system or idea. “The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect,” writes Sontag; it is “almost, but not quite, ineffable.”⁷³ For Williams, meanwhile, a structure of feeling names emerging cultural meanings and values that “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures.”⁷⁴ Both notions capture something of the ephemeral quality of the affects that New Sincerity writers aim to evoke, particularly through their defining use of ambiguously situated second-person address. Yet both Sontag and Williams were writing long before the coming of the internet, and it is a rare sensibility or structure of feeling that these days is not immediately turned into a discourse via that medium.

So it was that by the mid-2000s there existed online manifestos explicitly naming New Sincerity (however mock-sincerely) as a cultural movement, such as poet Anthony Robinson’s “A Few Notes from a New Sincerist” or radio host Jesse Thorn’s “Manifesto for the New Sincerity.”⁷⁵ In her 2017 study Sincerity After Communism, Ellen Rutten offers a remarkably thorough overview of this New Sincerity discourse. Despite her central focus on Russia, Rutten covers a wide range of uses of “New Sincerity” in the American context, piecing together a narrative that begins with conversations about Austin rock bands in the mid-1980s, continues through Wallace’s essays and fiction in the 1990s, and then explodes across popular culture and the internet after 9/11. The granular details of this narrative are certainly of interest, but for our purposes Rutten’s general summary will serve:

Visions of a new sincerity have circulated increasingly in discussions of novel trends in music, literature, film, new media, and the visual arts. By the early 2000s, genres that rely on discourses of personal confession and sincerity began to hold sway—whether the talk show, the weblog, the memoir, or autobiography; and toward the late 2000s, sincerity gained the renewed attention of leading philosophers and cultural and political theorists.⁷⁶

When I first found myself writing about literary New Sincerity in the summer of 2009, it was partly in response to this broadly circulating cultural discourse, and partly in response to the specific reception of Wallace’s work, a notable aspect of which, as we have seen, had been the persistent foregrounding of questions of irony and sincerity. That initial essay, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” was driven by two questions, framed in its opening paragraph. The first—“in terms of literary and intellectual history, what does this attribution of sincerity to Wallace mean?”—is one I have begun to answer in this section and the last.⁷⁷ The second question inspired much of my subsequent thinking and writing on the topic: “is there something fundamentally new about Wallace’s sincerity, a re-working of the concept as a complex and radical response to contemporary conditions?”⁷⁸ Were we talking about the revival of an old kind of sincerity, or was there something about Wallace’s brand of sincerity that was genuinely novel? Can there even be a new kind of sincerity? Although the weight of my initial argument was towards the claim that yes, there could be a qualitatively new kind of sincerity, I still prevaricated somewhat on the question. This is evident in the essay’s closing sentence, which describes Wallace’s fiction as grappling with “the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity.”⁷⁹ Reconceived, and renewed. Which was it? Was New Sincerity simply the renewal of sincerity—in response to postmodern irony, perhaps, or to the commodification of authenticity, or the manipulations of advertising, or political apathy, or social hypocrisy—or was it a substantial reconceiving of what had gone before?⁸⁰

We find something of this same ambiguity when we look to the work of other scholars who have explored contemporary modes of sincerity in and out of American fiction. Those whose stress falls on the revival of older forms of sincerity as a response to the ironies and inauthenticities of postmodern culture include Liesbeth Korthals Altes, A. D. Jameson, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Ruth Barton Palmer, and Allard den Dulk.⁸¹ Others, particularly those interested in the legacy of Theory and the affordances of new media, are more emphatic that the kind of sincerity that does—or should—characterize contemporary culture needs to involve “a new theorization of the concept.”⁸² Summarizing this second strand, and referring to two essays published in 1993—film scholar Jim Collins’s “Genericity in the 90s” and Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram”—Rutten notes that “Collins and Wallace were early advocates of a conceptual link that several cultural commentators would defend in the 2000s: the nexus between changing mediascapes and a radically transformed, new notion of sincerity.”⁸³

My approach in this book is not to resolve this debate between new and old sincerity in the terms set out above, but to transfer the opposition onto the terrain of a more pragmatic distinction between fictional and nonfictional contexts, understood as constituted by different writerly norms and conditions. In the case of Wallace, for instance, although the sentiments expressed in “E Unibus Pluram” make the author sound like a wannabe Wordsworth, his fiction—as we shall see in Chapter One—is closer in spirit to Byron in its ironic awareness of its own artificiality and inability to attain a pure sincerity, while adding a further layer of self-consciousness concerning the material conditions underpinning contemporary literary expression. As Wallace scholars have understood for a long time, the very form of his writing is part of the problem the author is trying to solve. New Sincerity argues that the same is true for all the post-boomer writers addressed in this study. In this sense, literary New Sincerity does not mark a rejection of poststructuralist ideas about language so much as an attempt to work through their implications in the service of something ethically traditional but aesthetically novel.⁸⁴ But this working through is occurring in a distinctive political and economic context, which the remainder of this Introduction will explore.

Sincerely Neoliberal

Mr. Pivner, estranged father of Otto in The Recognitions, is a figure of bathos and pathos. He spends his days reading newspaper advertisements and listening to radio commercials, which haunt his thoughts with the promise that following the latest self-help trends will enable him to overcome the smallness and dissatisfactions of his life. He is particularly under the sway of one book, which he peruses as he prepares “to meet his son, to win him as a friend, and influence him as a person.”⁸⁵ The almost ten pages of The Recognitions devoted to satirizing Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller How To Win Friends and Influence People provide a microcosm of Gaddis’s book-long lament for the high philosophical and existential values that he sees being corrupted by the venal commercial culture of postwar America. Quoting Carnegie directly, Gaddis especially targets the way his book, for all that its title suggests a stance of open manipulation, nevertheless foregrounds tropes of sincerity in order to win the confidence of gullible readers like Mr. Pivner:

He had taken this most worn of his books from the shelf because it inspired in him what he believed to be confidence. As he read there (underscored), “Let me repeat: the principles taught in this book will work only when they come from the heart. I am not advocating a bag of tricks. I am talking about a new way of life.”⁸⁶

Gaddis locates the origins of Carnegie’s “new way of life” in the American transcendentalists—especially Henry David Thoreau—whose values of sincerity, self-reliance, and self-making had morphed in the twentieth century into a cult of self-improvement in the service of self-selling. But this self-selling was not exactly selling out—the role played by sincerity in Carnegie’s worldview could not be so easily dismissed or diminished. “I am talking about a real smile,” Mr. Pivner reads in How to Win Friends, “a heart-warming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place.”⁸⁷

On the face of it, “a smile that comes from within” would seem to signify a contradictory set of social and moral values to “the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place.” And yet it is precisely the intertwining of these values in postwar America that Gaddis was exploring—and in this, again, he was far from alone. In The Power Elite, published the year after The Recognitions, the sociologist C. Wright Mills likewise pinpointed the importance of sincerity to the self-perception of midcentury American business culture, as evidenced by books like Carnegie’s:

The American literature of practical inspiration—which carries the great fetish of success—has undergone a significant shift in its advice about “what it takes to succeed.” The sober, personal virtues of will power and honesty, of high-mindedness and the constitutional inability to say “yes” to The Easy Road of women, tobacco, and wine—this later nineteenth-century image has given way to “the most important single factor, the effective personality,” which “commands attention by charm,” and “radiates self-confidence.” In this “new way of life,” one must smile often and be a good listener, talk in terms of the other man’s interests and make the other feel important—and one must do all this sincerely. Personal relations, in short, have become part of “public relations,” a sacrifice of selfhood on a personality market, to the sole end of individual success in the corporate way of life.⁸⁸

In Trilling’s terms, we have here a model of sincerity without any pretensions to authenticity. Rather than join the anti-social cult of the authentic self that Trilling finds so threatening among 1960s radicals, Mills’s “elite careerist” sacrifices his self to the terms of the market.⁸⁹ He acts sincerely toward others while instrumentalizing that sincerity in the service of a success that is always and only to be measured financially. As Gaddis writes of How to Win Friends, “It left no doubt but that money may be expected to accrue as testimonial to the only friendships worth the having, and, eventually, the only ones possible.”⁹⁰

While Mr. Pivner might aspire to be an “elite careerist,” however, he more closely resembles a character type made famous by another midcentury sociologist. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), David Riesman argues that the “inner-directed personality”—characteristic of an industrial era that emphasizes “technical competence,” familial authority, and the “sober, personal virtues” referred to by Mills—is giving way in American culture to the “other-directed personality.” Emerging out of a post-industrial society that stresses “social competence”—the manipulation of people rather than things—other-directedness is characterized by responsiveness not to traditional authority but to peer behavior and media messaging.⁹¹ “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed,” writes Riesman, and this dependence on the opinion of others results in “no clear core of self”—or, in Trilling’s gloss, “scarcely a self at all, but rather, a reiterated impersonation.”⁹²

And yet, as Erving Goffman would argue in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), impersonation and sincerity were not necessarily mutually exclusive. For Goffman, the term sincere could be used “for individuals who believed in the impression fostered by their own performance.”⁹³ Still, if there is nothing but performance—if the most that can be achieved is “Belief in the Part One Is Playing,” as the subtitle of Goffman’s opening chapter has it—then some more fundamental model of sincerity as truth to oneself and others seems to have gone missing. Riesman acknowledges this in his discussion of the increasing importance of sincerity in what midcentury audiences look for in artistic performance. “The source of criteria for judgment has shifted from the content of the performance and its goodness or badness, aesthetically speaking, to the personality of the performer,” he observes, warning that

it is obviously most difficult to judge sincerity. While the audience which uses the term sincerity thinks that it is escaping, in its tolerant mood, from the difficulty of judging skills, it is actually moving into a domain of considerably greater complexity. Just because such a premium is put on sincerity, a premium is put on faking it.⁹⁴

In these influential works written at the height of midcentury American liberalism, when FDR’s New Deal underpinned an economy in which state intervention and market regulation were seen not only as legitimate but necessary, Riesman, Mills, Goffman, and Gaddis could nonetheless see the writing on the capitalist wall. They worried about the effects of market values on the American individual as society and economy shifted from production to consumption. Those anxieties were filtered through a concern that the meaning of sincerity was changing: not, as Trilling worried, in the direction of an exacting or Dionysian authenticity; rather, in the direction of accommodation with market values bearing no relation to the authentic truth of being. Most fundamentally, these liberals worried that in the “personality market” and beyond it, no one would any longer know whether they were really being sincere in the traditional sense, whether there were “actual feelings” underlying the things they avowed.

Could sincerity be saved, and if so, how? One answer comes from a perhaps unexpected source. At the same time as the self-identified liberals named above were writing their anxious and authoritative masterworks of social science, another set of thinkers, marginalized in the midcentury but to become regnant by the century’s end, were claiming the mantle of “liberalism” for a different, far more market-friendly set of beliefs. We now refer to these thinkers—among them Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, and Friedrich von Hayek—as neoliberals, and they have recently become among the most revered and reviled thinkers of the twentieth century.⁹⁵ Amid all the scholarship on these individuals, their ideas, their institutions, and their influence on the post-1960s world, what has often gone underappreciated is the moral philosophy that underpinned their cheerleading for the “free market.” Trilling’s definition of sincerity—“a congruence between avowal and actual feeling”—makes it a question of the relationship between thought and speech. But one might view sincerity in a different way, as having to do not with a congruence between avowal and feeling but with a congruence between avowal and action. The key test of sincerity then becomes the willingness to act on what one professes to believe.

If neoliberals hold a view of sincerity, it is something like this, but operating in reverse: it is through action that the subject discovers what they sincerely believe. And the key sphere of action for neoliberals is the market. This is an arena in which what economists rather mildly call “revealed preference” can apparently tell us more about the moral beliefs of citizens than something as limited and unsatisfactory as casting one’s vote at the ballot box. As the Austrian godfather of neoliberalism Friedrich von Hayek put it in his 1944 treatise The Road to Serfdom:

The periodical election of representatives, to which the moral choice of the individual tends to be more and more reduced, is not an occasion on which his moral values are tested or where he has constantly to reassert and prove the order of his values and to testify to the sincerity of his profession by the sacrifice of those of his values he rates lower to those he puts higher.⁹⁶

The logical outcome of this view is that sincerity as the congruence of avowal and action is discovered through market choice; sincerity does not preexist the sphere of the market. Or if it does, it does so in an unproven state, as a congruence between avowal and feeling that is to all intents and purposes meaningless (and valueless) without being tested. “Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and the responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience,” Hayek writes, “is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created in the free decision of the individual.”⁹⁷ One commentator glosses Hayek’s position thus: “By imposing this drama of choice, the economy becomes a theater of self-disclosure, the stage upon which we discover and reveal our ultimate ends.”⁹⁸

So if sincerity as the congruence of avowal and feeling—a principle that powers the liberal imagination, in Trilling’s terms—is vulnerable on one side to the “purer” ideal of authenticity as the truth of feeling, then on the other side it is vulnerable to another kind of purity: the test of action through the making of choices under circumstances of constraint. While we might associate the first kind of challenge, as Trilling does, with the (New) Left, the second challenge stems—as its articulation by Hayek would suggest—from the (New) Right.⁹⁹ In each case the danger is that the center cannot hold, that the fragile balances involved in the moral ideal of sincerity will be destroyed. To the extent that those fragile balances underpinned the structure of feeling of postwar liberalism, this is exactly what happened in the post-1960s period: the liberal subject was attacked from both Left and Right, from a position emphasizing authenticity as personal autonomy on the one hand, and from a position that saw the market as the true test of moral action on the other. It was the way these two apparently opposed attacks overlapped with one another that set the scene for the neoliberal turn in politics, economy, society, and subjectivity.

This is another story that has by now been told in many ways, and I will return to it most fully in Chapter Six, when I consider revisionist accounts of the politics of the 1960s in recent fiction and scholarship. But for now we can zero in on one influential account of the historical shift from liberalism to neoliberalism: Michel Feher’s 2009 article “Self-Appreciation; or the Aspirations of Human Capital.” Building on the foundational work undertaken by Foucault in his 1979 lectures on neoliberalism—later published as The Birth of Biopolitics—Feher argues that the notion of human capital has come to replace the conception of the free laborer on which liberal capitalism was premised. In liberal theory, the free laborer enters the realm of the market to exchange their labor power for a wage, but much of their life exists outside this realm in the sphere of reproduction, where market values do not hold sway. “The sphere of reproduction,” Feher explains, “is one that values selfless giving (whether in one’s relation to God or to one’s neighbor), exalts people’s unconditional ties (with their family, with their nation, and with humanity), and justifies the social services required for the physical and psychological upkeep of individuals, to prepare them for their entry into the market.”¹⁰⁰ Moving between the market and this non-market realm, the free laborer of liberal capitalism is “a split being,” divided between “a subjectivity that is inalienable and a labor power that is to be rented out,” between “spiritual aspirations and the pursuit of material interests” (29). So long as this division persists, the free laborer cannot be equated with their labor power; rather, they exist in a relation of “possessive individualism” to that labor power (34). This is crucial to the dignity of the subject under liberalism, which “can legitimately claim to be a humanism, for it never confuses what we are with what we own and therefore never treats us as commodities that can be appropriated” (23).

The key claim that underpins neoliberalism is that the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction, and thus the “split being” of the free laborer, can be overcome through the concept of human capital. Developed in the 1960s by University of Chicago economists Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, the concept was initially restricted to the educational context, referring to skills an individual could acquire by investing in pedagogy and training.¹⁰¹ Soon, however, human capital would expand its scope considerably, coming to refer not to one aspect of a person’s life, but to every aspect. “The things that I inherit, the things that happen to me, and the things I do all contribute to the maintenance or the deterioration of my human capital,” writes Feher. “More radically put, my human capital is me, as a set of skills and capabilities that is modified by all that affects me and all that I effect” (26). This view places the subject beyond the liberal terrain of possessive individualism, because while the free laborer owns their labor power, “neoliberal subjects do not exactly own their human capital; they invest in it” (34).

This view also entails the “de-proletarianization” of the wage-earning subject, who becomes an entrepreneur of himself (in Foucault’s formulation) or an investor in himself (in Feher’s), a producer as much as a worker or consumer.¹⁰² All behavior now comes under the remit of production, meaning that there is no longer a separate sphere of reproduction, and so “domains such as health, education, culture, and the like” shift from a realm external to the market to “instead become sectors of the valorizing of the self (understood as capital)” (33). While many critics have lamented this colonization of the lifeworld by economic self-interest, Feher (like Foucault before him) uncovers a kind of utopianism in the neoliberal worldview.¹⁰³ “What was at stake for Schultz, Becker, and their associates,” he argues, “was to challenge the alleged heterogeneity between the aspirations of the authentic self and the kind of optimizing calculations required by the business world” (33). The point was not only to make people more like firms but also to imagine firms as more like people.¹⁰⁴

Here is where the overlap between the Left and Right critiques of liberalism starts to emerge. Toward the end of his essay, Feher spends time laying out a summary of the New Left’s three-fold critique of the subject of liberal capitalism. This critique combined an attack on the Freudian notion of desire as a symptom of lack; a reinterpretation of disinterested love and selfless giving as ideologies that enable the subject to be governed; and a rejection of economic self-interest as a handmaiden to capitalist exploitation and state socialist subjection.¹⁰⁵ While this threefold critique clearly aimed at the radical emancipation of contemporary subjects, one of its main effects—most notoriously in the case of Foucault’s much-debated dalliance with neoliberalism—was to muddy the distinctions between Left and Right.¹⁰⁶ As Feher summarizes:

Neoliberal and “radical” critiques of the liberal condition clearly came from opposite political corners and harbored antagonistic aspirations. At the same time, however, they not only developed during the same period, and out of an equally acute allergy to the hegemony of the Keynesian welfare state, but also centered their critical perspective on the subjective formation that liberal governmentality presupposes, targets, and seeks to reproduce. Indeed, for both neoliberal and radical critics of the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship that individuals establish with themselves—how they care about and take care of themselves—emerged as the privileged framework for political reflection. (37)

Far from rejecting social concerns, neoliberals and radicals came to see those concerns playing out at the level of personal autonomy. Care for others would now be conjoined with and premised upon care of the self. By dissolving—from different directions—the distinction between the realms of production and reproduction, both neoliberals and radicals espoused the idea that “the personal is (the) political,” that self-appreciation is the basis for all action. “The contest for the definition of the conditions under which we may appreciate ourselves is politically decisive,” Feher therefore concludes, lamenting that over recent decades it is only neoliberalism that “has imposed its definition of what self-appreciation entails” (37, 38).¹⁰⁷

For Feher—and this is where he is distinctive—the radical project of the New Left should be reawakened not by repudiating the notion of human capital, but by co-opting it. The idea of the free laborer was indeed an ideological ruse, as Marx had argued. Granted formal equality with their employer and imagined as free to exchange their labor power at its proper value in the market, the free laborer—unlike the peasant they replaced in the transition from feudalism to capitalism—was in reality coerced into entering the market by their loss of ownership of the means of production and subsistence. Yet rather than repudiate the notion of the free laborer, the mainstream Left in the industrial era embraced that category with a view to establishing a labor movement that could build resistance from within the system, gaining rights and retaining a greater share of surplus value for laborers as a class. Comparing Marx’s analysis to Foucault’s reflections on early feminism, Feher finds in both thinkers “a call to accept and inhabit a certain mode of subjection in order to redirect it or turn it against its instigators” (22). This is the same route he now counsels with respect to neoliberalism, which can only be overcome by embracing the notion of human capital at its heart. For Feher, the point is not to go back but to go through. He counsels today’s activists “to explore the possibility of defying neoliberalism from within—that is, by embracing the very condition that its discourses and practices delineate” (21).

As a political prescription, I cannot say that I am fully persuaded by the merits of this indubitably creative response to the neoliberal condition.¹⁰⁸ But as a description of the practice of literary New Sincerity, Feher’s idea of working to defy neoliberalism from within functions surprisingly well. Returning now to our home ground of post-boomer fiction, I want to connect the discussion of human capital above with the formal observations I made about literary New Sincerity in earlier sections. In particular, I want to revisit once more this body of literature’s reflections on writing and reading in the neoliberal age.

Sincerely Ours

In his recent Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era, Ryan Brooks—addressing many of the same authors I do, and in dialogue, like Konstantinou, with my work on New Sincerity—agrees on the importance of the human capital paradigm for reading post-boomer writing in the age of normative neoliberalism. Acknowledging that “these writers embrace the logic of ‘human capital,’ the neoliberal discourse that transforms the free market from a structure made possible by the antagonism between workers and capitalists to a structure in which everyone is a capitalist, an ‘entrepreneur of the self,’” Brooks’s structuralist Marxist approach leads him to be critical of this move, calling it “the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn—a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus.”¹⁰⁹ My countering contention is that while post-boomer writers do indeed embrace (or at least engage) the logic of human capital, they do so in order to expose its workings and to articulate anxiety about how it operates in its current neoliberal form, with a view (often inchoate) to overcoming that form. While Brooks implies that we should resist the human capital paradigm by going back, in other words, I argue that New Sincerity writers are seeking, in the dialectical manner suggested by Feher, a way through. And while Brooks suggests that these writers’ fictional texts “celebrate socially conscious values like empathy, sincerity, and respect for ‘internal experience,’” I maintain that these texts are not celebratory but ambivalent, and that it is precisely their literary qualities—including their distance from argumentation and celebration, and their self-consciousness about language and literary expression in a neoliberal economy—that enables them to turn this ambivalence into aesthetic form.¹¹⁰

A good way to explore this aesthetics of ambivalence is via consideration of the figure of the gift. Many post-boomer writers have praised Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift as a model for artistic practice, no doubt attracted to the way Hyde’s text describes the act of imaginative creativity as a thoroughly sincere one, wherein “the future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts.”¹¹¹ Significantly, Hyde distinguishes the term “labor” from the term “work”: while work is something “we do by the hour” and “if possible, we do it for money,” labor contributes to the act of creation for its own sake.¹¹² This distinction preserves a space for artistic purity to exist in an otherwise commodified culture; as Konstantinou has noted, Hyde “seeks to articulate the conditions of compatibility of capitalism and the gift economy for the individual artist. He defends the claim that the gift might endure—even thrive—despite the ubiquity of the calculating disposition that dominates contemporary life.”¹¹³ Even as he protects a space for art as gift, however, Hyde does not ignore the necessary claims of the market where the artist sells their “work.” The real lesson of The Gift, according to Konstantinou, can thus be summarized as follows: “Make your art in the gift-sphere, but when entering the marketplace, you had better find a good agent.”¹¹⁴

Yet if these divisions between labor and work, the gift-sphere and the market, and the sincere artist and the wily agent all seem designed to preserve the gift as a purely positive force, then the insights of recent scholarship on the creative economy cast doubt on the viability of this model. As Sarah Brouillette among others has argued, the artist figure can in fact be understood as the ideal neoliberal subject, the “profitable, pervasive, regulated symbol of autonomy from routine,” an example of how you should do what you love and love what you do, sincerely working to produce your wares for a capitalist market that is indifferent to use value except as an indirect route to keeping labor costs down.¹¹⁵ “Hyde’s account of the gift participates in the idealizing discourses of the ‘artist-author,’” Konstantinou observes, and as such The Gift’s imagined division between sincere gift-giving creator and wily market-traversing agent—a division internalized in the consciousness of the laboring artist—turns out to be unsatisfactory, because the creator side of the dichotomy cannot escape the taint of neoliberal interpellation, throwing into doubt the meaning of their sincerity in the contemporary socioeconomic context.¹¹⁶

With this critique in mind, the praise for The Gift among post-boomer writers would seem to constitute a kind of wish fulfillment, a way of retaining some undialectically pure image of the artist in a world of neoliberal commodification.¹¹⁷ Yet while throughout Hyde’s text the gift is understood to be something inherently positive and even transformative, and while their public commentary on the book would seem to align many post-boomer writers with this view, their fiction suggests a more complicated, more double-edged conception of the gift. For a start, it is a conception much less sanguine about the separation of work (and pay) from the labor of creation. In an essay on Wallace’s 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Zadie Smith remarks that “in these stories, the act of giving is in crisis; the logic of the market seeps into every aspect of life.”¹¹⁸ Notably, the “giver” in Wallace’s stories is often an artist who is presented as more interested in self-appreciation, both psychic and economic, than in the aesthetic integrity of their work.

This kind of compromised artist figure is not unique to Wallace, but appears regularly across New Sincerity texts, from Eggers’s narrator-entrepreneur in A Heartbreaking Work to Egan’s creative-writer-cum-social-media-guru in Look at Me, from Whitehead’s intuitive branding consultant in Apex Hides the Hurt to DeWitt’s genius salesman in Lightning Rods (2011). Through their fictions, New Sincerity writers tell a more anxious story than Hyde’s artistic alibi would imply, a story in which the cross-contamination of love and money becomes the inescapable condition of writing in a neoliberal age. If literary New Sincerity is sincere about anything, we might say, it is this cross-contamination, this basic threat to a pure sincerity, in life and art.¹¹⁹ But the dialectical move on which literary New Sincerity is premised involves a deconstruction of these two poles—the pure and the contaminated—so that the former is no longer the positively valued term. And it is here that the final piece of the puzzle, the reader, becomes crucial. The reader is the figure via whom purity and autonomy can be questioned, and contamination can be rethought as something not to be resisted but embraced.

It is the insights of poststructuralism that allow us to see contamination not as an inherently negative trope, but as a necessary condition for existence. “Contamination is not a privation or a lack of purity,” writes Martin Hägglund in his account of Derrida’s work,

It is the originary possibility for anything to be. Thus, a pure gift is not impossible because it is contaminated by our selfish intentions or by the constraints of economic exchange; it is impossible because a gift must be contaminated in order to be a gift.¹²⁰

In literary New Sincerity, the writer articulates a desire for contamination—“the very desire for a gift is a desire for contamination”—by invoking a reader who can acknowledge and even co-produce the gift of writing.¹²¹ The key split in the authorial consciousness dramatized in these texts is therefore not between artist and agent—as Hyde and Konstantinou suggest—but between writer and reader. The reader becomes the internalized figure that contaminates the pure autonomy of the writer, an autonomy that has come to serve an ideological function under neoliberal capitalism.¹²² Though I am describing it somewhat abstractly, on the page this plays out in highly affective ways, with the undecidability of the gift—its haunting by debt and indebtedness—contributing to the fraught psychodynamics of the writer-reader relationship staged in New Sincerity fiction. The reader is consistently imagined in these texts to represent a future beyond what the writer can anticipate, and thus to offer the only possible relief from solipsistic self-consciousness and pure autonomy. But this relief is also a risk. In becoming the internalized figure of historical change beyond the enclosing neoliberal horizon, the reader figures the chance but also the threat of a future that can negate the self-appreciation of the writer.

Chapter Two will offer a concrete account of the undecidability of the gift in the context of neoliberal political economy. For now, we can say that literary New Sincerity represents not an unwitting symptom but an ambivalent struggle to register and respond to a set of dilemmas historically specific to neoliberalism: the shift from the free laborer to the human capital paradigm; the worry that supposedly disinterested liberal values and feelings can be reduced to calculations of interest; the recasting of purity as ideology; and the interpellation of the gift-giving, labor-loving artist as ideal neoliberal subject. In other words, this literature is self-conscious not only about its own complicity with neoliberal logic, but also about the difficulty of diluting that complicity by reverting to a division within the authorial self whereby the autonomous creator could be walled off from the canny literary agent. This is a literature, we might go as far as to say, that endeavors to read its own political and sociological unconscious, to uncover the historical entanglements that underpin and enable the act of apparently free creation.¹²³ Directly invoking the figure of the reader—including the prominence in heightened moments of second-person address—then becomes a way to suggest the foundational priority of the other’s perspective, a way to reverse engineer the formulation of sincerity that Trilling finds in Polonius (“To thine own self be true / And it doth follow . . . Thou canst not then be false to any man”) by aiming instead to be true to others as a means to discover the truth about oneself. But where Trilling emphasizes the realm of psychology, I argue that something more than psychological ambivalence is at work in this writing. What literary New Sincerity most tellingly exposes, on my reading, is a structuring tension between the liberal emphasis on individual intention and conscience on the one hand, and the Marxist and Bourdieusian accounts of determining class interest on the other.¹²⁴

While a picture of late-twentieth-century American fiction writers as a class—more specifically, a fraction of the professional-managerial class—will only come fully into view in the second half of this book, it is worth briefly drawing out here the differences between my account of the response by New Sincerity writers to complicity with neoliberalism, and Linda Hutcheon’s influential account of postmodernist fiction as “complicitous critique.” For Hutcheon, acknowledging complicity is a radical stance, working out from a hegemonic cultural discourse to find its aporias and edges: “postmodernism does not pretend to operate outside the system, for it knows it cannot; it therefore overtly acknowledges its complicity, only to work covertly to subvert the system’s values from within.”¹²⁵ Yet despite her acknowledgment of literature’s embeddedness within the capitalist system, Hutcheon’s conception of complicity remains primarily linguistic rather than materialist, and on her account fiction writers remain free to invoke questions of complicity from an implicitly autonomous aesthetic space. For New Sincerity writers, by contrast, complicity is not only linguistic but a feature of the writer’s economic embeddedness in neoliberal culture, often filtered through particular developments in the publishing industry even before the arrival of the “Age of Amazon.”¹²⁶ This embeddedness registers in the fiction, often on an allegorical level, as a greater sincerity about positionality vis-à-vis the intensification of market ideology over the neoliberal period. Facing this intensification, New Sincerity writers are much less confident than Hutcheon’s postmodernists that they can get beyond complicity to critique. Acknowledging complicity is no longer such a radical move: it is only the first step in the articulation of a positive politics, an articulation that—as I explore in Chapter Six—is itself a notably difficult task under neoliberal hegemony.

In this climate, too, any move from irony to “postirony” cannot simply be a question of changing one’s conscious ethos. It must also involve acknowledging—and increasingly so as our historical distance from Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram” becomes ever greater—that such a move can function as its own kind of branding exercise. The term “New Sincerity” (capitals and all), though not my own, is intended in this book to capture succinctly these writers’ self-awareness about branding, and to indicate that, especially in a media-saturated age, sincerity can always resemble insincerity, with the difference not a question of knowledge but of trust and even faith. If, as Brian McHale has claimed, modernism is characterized by an epistemological dominant and postmodernism by an ontological dominant, then the equivalent dominant in New Sincerity writing is the ethical.¹²⁷ Contemporary sincerity privileges ethical questions by performing the confusions that divide the writer’s self and that complicate old notions of inner truth and wholeness that underpin sincerity and authenticity as Trilling defines them. Yet this also is an ethics deeply informed by politics and economics, and by a self-conscious acknowledgment of complicity that goes beyond that found in earlier literary movements and moments.¹²⁸ If such self-consciousness is no longer a route to freedom, as the postmodernists hoped or assumed, then the ambivalent turn to the reader in literary New Sincerity should be read dialectically, as expressive of a historical impasse.

It would thus be a mistake to assume that the role of the reader imagined by the texts studied in the following pages is coextensive with the role of actual readers of those texts. The reader’s role as imagined in literary New Sincerity is not necessarily a liberatory one; it is simply the necessary corollary of the vertiginous but impotent self-consciousness that attends the writing of neoliberal-era fiction, a fiction that structurally requires an other to relieve it of its burdens. How the actual reader responds to a New Sincerity text is a different matter to how that text imagines its reader. In this book I do propose a critical role for the reader of New Sincerity texts, one that works to establish the historical and theoretical distance from neoliberal norms that the texts themselves find so hard to imagine. This imaginative difficulty is figured not only in direct appeals to the reader for dialogue and decision—“So decide,” the famous closing imperative of Wallace’s story “Octet,” being perhaps the signature such appeal—but also in the common motif of evacuating conscious intention from the subject who acts.¹²⁹

I explore this negation of conscious intention most thoroughly in Chapter Five, in a consideration of the dramatized escape from consciousness that concludes many of George Saunders’s stories. But this escape—like the escapes from consciousness that structure, in varying ways, the imaginaries of novels like Egan’s Look at Me, Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity, Kunkel’s Indecision, and Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt—should not be taken as a positive recommendation or prescription for action in a neoliberal world. Gestures such as these in literary New Sincerity must instead be read both critically—as informed by skepticism of earlier (modernist and postmodernist) solutions offered through an emphasis on individual (self-) consciousness—and dialectically, as an admission of uncertainty about “actual feeling” and actual solutions, as a symptom of the imaginative limits imposed by the dominance of normative neoliberalism and the “End of History.” In this way, literary New Sincerity frames the outlines of a political project, albeit one not fully articulated but waiting to be taken up, as Zadie Smith has it, “off the page, outside words.” In the Conclusion to this book, I offer some brief thoughts on how this project has developed in American fiction after 2008. But it seems fair to say that it remains a political project that is, as the title of this section has it, sincerely ours.

Notes

1. Dave Eggers, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel (London: Penguin, 2006), 56. Further references in parentheses.

2. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 2.

3. Ibid., 9.

4. Along with Deng’s name being excluded from the book’s main title and authorship, one critic notes that the copyright of What Is the What lies with Eggers, commenting that “it’s further odd that for a story that is about dispossession in numerous forms, Deng doesn’t legally own the story of his own life and has become a fictional character in someone else’s novel.” Yogita Goyal, “African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives,” Research in African Literatures 45.3 (2014): 57.

5. Among other accolades, the book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The sole exception to the flow of praise was Lee Siegel, whose review of What Is the What accused Eggers of “post-colonial arrogance” and “socially acceptable Orientalism.” Even Siegel, however, did not place doubt on the sincerity of Eggers’s approach to his material, instead condemning the author precisely for his “confusion of good intentions with good art.” Lee Siegel, “The Niceness Racket,” New Republic (23 April 2007), https://newrepublic.com/article/62544/the-niceness-racket

6. Elizabeth Twitchell, “Dave Eggers’s What Is the What: Fictionalizing Trauma in the Era of Misery Lit,” American Literature 83.3 (2011): 624.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid. See Jane Elliott, The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 141–152; Goyal, “African”; Mitchum Huehls, “Referring to the Human in Contemporary Human Rights Literature,” Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (2012): 1–21; Michelle Peek, “Humanitarian Narrative and Posthumanist Critique: Dave Eggers’s What Is the What,” Biography 35.1 (2012), 115–136.

9. Having reached a first peak in 1947, the postwar birthrate reached a second peak in 1957 and then began a long, steep decline until the mid-1970s. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 77. The literary critic most committed to analyzing contemporary American fiction in terms of generations has been Jeffrey Williams; his overview of “Generation Jones” (born 1954–1965) holds similarities to my treatment of the post-boomer generation but differs in important respects. Jeffrey J. Williams, “Generation Jones and Contemporary US Fiction,” American Literary History 28.1 (2016): 94–122. Nicholas Dames has also written influentially about a “theory generation,” albeit he is not specific in defining the beginning and end of that generation, and his review essay addresses a set of novels published more recently than those at the center of my study. Nicholas Dames, “The Theory Generation,” n+1 14 (2012): 157–169.

10. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Faber & Faber, 2013).

11. On these three developments, see, respectively: François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

12. Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

13. Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties (London: Penguin, 2022).

14. “Normative neoliberalism” and “the horizons of political hope . . .” are from William Davies, “The New Neoliberalism,” New Left Review 101 (2016): 127. Davies contrasts the normative neoliberalism of the 1989–2008 period with the “combative neoliberalism” of 1979–1989 and the turn to “punitive neoliberalism” after the crisis of 2008. “Capitalist realism” and “capitalism seamlessly occupies . . .” are from Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: O Books, 2009), 8.

15. Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (London: Verso, 2021), 48.

16. On the genre turn, see Paul Crosthwaite, The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 58–62; Andrew Hoberek, “Literary Genre Fiction,” in American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 61–75; Jeremy Rosen, “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction,” Post45 (7 August 2018), https://post45.org/2018/08/literary-fiction-and-the-genres-of-genre-fic…

17. Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel After David Foster Wallace,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 217.

18. Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 86.

19. Ibid., 87.

20. See Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

21. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (London: Abacus, 2005), 272.

22. It is worth noting here the contrast between Wallace’s anti-modernism and the trend in recent literature and art that has been dubbed “metamodernism.” James and Seshagiri see twenty-first-century metamodernist novelists—among whom they number J. M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Cynthia Ozick, and Zadie Smith—as aiming “to move the novel forward by looking back to the aspirational energies of modernism,” notably by privileging “rupture, irony and fragmentation.” David James and Urmila Seshagiri, “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution,” PMLA 129.1 (2014): 93. For Wallace (at least in his nonfiction), rupture, irony, and fragmentation are not revolutionary strategies but alienating ones, ill-suited to addressing the ills of neoliberal American culture. See also van den Akker and Vermeulen’s (to my mind unpersuasive) Jamesonian theorization of metamodernism as a “structure of feeling” that emerges in the 2000s as “the dominant cultural logic of Western capitalist societies,” a cultural logic that incorporates “the New Sincerity in literature” among other contemporary art forms. Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen, “Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism, ed. Robin van den Akker, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Alison Gibbons (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 3–4. For a robust critique of this vision of metamodernism, see Martin Paul Eve, “Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of ‘Metamodernism,’” C21 Literature 1.1 (2012): 7–25.

23. Trilling, Sincerity, 7.

24. Ibid., 97.

25. Wallace, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 61. Wallace’s artistic model here was not only Dostoevsky but Tolstoy, whose treatise What Is Art? was a significant influence. See Matt Prout, “Art or Shit: Value, Sincerity, and the Avant-garde in David Foster Wallace,” Journal of Modern Literature 45.3 (2022): 81–83.

26. Hoberek, “The Novel,” 220. Whitman and Twain are, on Hoberek’s account, among the American progenitors of intentional bad form.

27. Without dwelling on the point, I would note that a wish to do away with twentieth-century innovations and return to the heyday of the nineteenth-century novel finds its most prominent contemporary instantiation in the novels of Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is often included on lists of writers associated with literary New Sincerity, but unlike the writers featured in this book, there is very little formally or conceptually “new” about the sincerity explored in his fiction, and many of the formal tensions that make their work interesting have been preemptively resolved in his. For related critiques of the writer-reader “contract” endorsed by Franzen, see Crosthwaite, Market, 182–183, and Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 33–37.

28. Twitchell, “Dave,” 638.

29. Deborah Brandt, The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3.

30. Ibid., 2. “Reading was for learning how to be good—in worship, citizenship, work, and school,” Brandt observes. “But writing has always been less for good than it is a good. While reading has productive value for the reader, writing has surplus value that fuels other enterprises.” Ibid., 4–5. Unless otherwise indicated, throughout this book all italics in quoted material are in the original.

31. Ibid., 20.

32. Ibid., 13.

33. Zadie Smith, “Introduction,” in The Burned Children of America, ed. Marco Cassini and Martina Testa (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), xx.

34. Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (London: Penguin, 2008), 385.

35. Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 12.

36. Ibid.

37. “We were fractious and overpaid” is the novel’s opening sentence. Ferris, Then, 3.

38. Amy Rea, “How Serious Is America’s Literacy Problem?” Library Journal (29 April 2020), https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/How-Serious-Is-Americas-Literacy-P…

39. Brandt, Rise, 3.

40. Trilling, Sincerity, 9.

41. William Gaddis, The Recognitions (New York: Penguin, 1993), 452.

42. Trilling, Sincerity, 2. Further references in parentheses. In support of Trilling’s claim about the emergence of a moral discourse of sincerity in the early modern period, see John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1304–1342; and Jane Taylor, “‘Why Do You Tear Me from Myself?’: Torture, Truth, and the Arts of the Counter-Reformation,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 19–43.

43. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956); William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). For an overview of literary and sociological developments around sincerity and authenticity in this period, see Abigail Cheever, Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post–World War II America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

44. In an influential essay about the period, Jameson calls Trilling’s text “an Arnoldian call to reverse the tide of 60s countercultural ‘barbarism.’” Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (1984): 205.

45. Leon Guilhamet, The Sincere Ideal: Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974); see also Patricia M. Ball, “Sincerity: The Rise and Fall of a Critical Term,” Modern Language Review 59 (1964): 1–11; Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner’s, 1969); Donald Davie, “On Sincerity: From Wordsworth to Ginsburg,” Encounter (October 1968): 61–65; David Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Herbert Read, The Cult of Sincerity (London: Faber & Faber, 1968); Patricia Meyer Spacks, “In Search of Sincerity,” College English 29 (1968): 591–602.

46. The opening paragraphs of this section draw on a previously published article: Adam Kelly, “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace,” Post45 (17 October 2014), https://post45.org/2014/10/dialectic-of-sincerity-lionel-trilling-and-d…; later in this Introduction I also develop material first published in Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics: A Reply to Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 5.2 (2017): 1–32.

47. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 161.

48. Ibid., 187. In later work Anderson will move to calling this proceduralism simply “liberalism,” with Trilling remaining her touchstone in literary criticism. See Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

49. Anderson, The Way, 167.

50. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 247–264.

51. Along with Trilling, who calls Rousseau’s writings “one of the decisive cultural events of the modern epoch” (58), see Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 27–28; and Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 172–191.

52. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–164.

53. Paul de Man, “Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,” trans. Richard Howard, in de Man, Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 215.

54. Ibid.

55. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), 136.

56. Ibid., 137.

57. For a sympathetic engagement with de Man’s reputation after the discovery of his wartime writings, see Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For a polemical condemnation, see David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991).

58. Williams, Truth, 11. The other basic virtue is “Accuracy,” with “Accuracy” and “Sincerity” respectively summarized in the formulation “you do the best you can to acquire true beliefs, and what you say reveals what you believe.” Ibid.

59. See, for instance: Deborah Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Markovitz, The Politics of Sincerity: Plato, Frank Speech, and Democratic Judgment (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan, eds., Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Palgrave, 2010); Pam Morris, Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Susan Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). This publishing trend would even reach the trade presses with R. Jay Magill, Jr., Sincerity (New York: Norton, 2012).

60. Angela Esterhammer, “The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon,” in Milnes and Sinanan, Romanticism, 104–105.

61. Wallace, in David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 35.

62. David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 63. Originally published in 1988 in Review of Contemporary Fiction.

63. Ibid.

64. David Foster Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 140, 144. Originally published in 1991 in Harvard Book Review.

65. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in ibid., 81. Originally published in 1993 in Review of Contemporary Fiction.

66. Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden, “Introduction: Postmodernism, Then,” Twentieth Century Literature 57.3–4 (2011): 291. Repeated in “Introduction,” Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature, ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 1.

67. Ibid.

68. A. O. Scott, “The Panic of Influence,” New York Review of Books 47 (10 February 2000),https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/02/10/the-panic-of-influence/. Other notable treatments of irony in Wallace’s fiction include: Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Allard den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony: A Comparison of the Irony Critique of Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel 44.3 (2012): 325–345; Mary K. Holland, “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Critique 47.3 (2006): 218–242; Nicoline Timmer, Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 146–149.

69. Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 175.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 38.

72. See Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

73. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta, 1966), 276.

74. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

75. Anthony Robinson, “A Few Notes from a New Sincerist,” Geneva Convention Archives (22 July 2005), http://luckyerror.blogspot.com/2005/07/few-notes-from-new-sincerist.html; Jesse Thorn, “A Manifesto for the New Sincerity,” Maximum Fun (26 March 2006), https://maximumfun.org/news/manifesto-for-new-sincerity/. This latter “manifesto,” in which the “awesome” Evel Knievel becomes the movement’s avatar, presents cultural New Sincerity as something akin to Sontag’s “camp,” with its “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” and its tendency to “convert the serious into the frivolous.” Sontag, Against, 275, 276.

76. Ellen Rutten, Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 72.

77. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Austin: Sideshow Media, 2010), 131.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., 146.

80. As this list of possibilities suggests, sincerity can have many opposing terms, including but not limited to irony, authenticity, manipulation, apathy, hypocrisy, and insincerity. As Bernard Williams notes of Sincerity, “it has to be related, psychologically, socially, and ethically, to some wider range of values. What those values are, however, varies from time to time and culture to culture, and the various versions cannot be discovered by general reflection.” Williams, Truth, 93.

81. Liesbeth Korthals Altes, “Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies—Notes on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” in Narrative Unreliability in the Twenty-First-Century First-Person Novel, ed. Elke d’Hoker and Gunther Martens (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2008), 107–128; A. D. Jameson, “What We Talk About When We Talk About the New Sincerity, Part 1,” HtmlGiant (4 June 2012), https://htmlgiant.com/haut-or-not/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about…; Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity Is Changing Pop Culture for the Better (Colorado: Bondfire Books, 2012); Ruth Barton Palmer, “The New Sincerity of Neo-Noir,” in International Noir, ed. Homer B. Pettey and Ruth Barton Palmer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 193–219; Allard den Dulk, Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 162–195.

82. Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal, “Introduction,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, 16.

83. Rutten, Sincerity, 163.

84. We can equally say that (as will be seen most clearly in my reading of Kunkel’s Indecision in Chapter Six), literary New Sincerity invites a hermeneutics of suspicion in part by applying that hermeneutics to itself. Although I recognize that it would take much space to demonstrate the claim, I would argue that this approach enables literary New Sincerity to transcend the opposition between critique and postcritique that has underpinned so much contemporary debate in literary studies. See, e.g., Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Postcritique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), and Bruce Robbins, Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).

85. Gaddis, Recognitions, 497.

86. Ibid., 498.

87. Ibid.

88. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1956]), 348, emphasis added.

89. Ibid.

90. Gaddis, Recognitions, 498.

91. Riesman, Lonely, 129.

92. Ibid., xxxii, 157; Trilling, Sincerity, 66.

93. Goffman, Presentation, 10.

94. Riesman, Lonely, 194, 196.

95. The literature on neoliberalism is vast. I cite a small number of significant works in what follows, but for a broader discussion relevant to the argument here, see Alexander Beaumont and Adam Kelly, “Freedom After Neoliberalism,” Open Library of Humanities 4.2 (2018), https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4519/

96. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 218.

97. Ibid., 216–217.

98. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 151.

99. Perhaps the most powerful analysis of the New Right’s ethics and politics of constraint is found in Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017).

100. Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,” trans. Ivan Ascher, Public Culture 21.1 (2009): 32. Further references in parentheses.

101. Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” American Economic Review 51.1 (1961): 1–17; Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1964).

102. The idea of “de-proletarianization” was first introduced in Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), a founding text of German Ordoliberalism. In its original context it entailed the deliberate dilution of working-class consciousness through the state’s cultivation of market-friendly norms of thinking and behavior.

103. Among the most influential critiques of neoliberalism as the extension of economic logic into previously non-economic spheres of existence is Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

104. Lest the shift from the free laborer to the human capital paradigm be viewed as no more than an idealist projection—as some Marxist critics have claimed—a compelling account of the pervasive material role of human capital in the lives of the millennial generation (the children of the post-boomers) can be found in Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).

105. Feher most closely associates these three critiques with, respectively, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and the Italian autonomists.

106. On the question of whether Foucault was or was not a neoliberal sympathizer, see Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

107. It is worth mentioning one other influential account of the rise of neoliberalism that complements Feher’s. In The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the 1960s saw the coalescing of two traditions in the critique of capitalism, which they dub the artistic critique and the social critique. The neoliberal transformation of capitalism successfully internalized the artistic critique—which emphasizes “disenchantment and inauthenticity” and “shares its individualism with modernity”—while sidelining the social critique, with its focus on exploitation, inequality, and collective life. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2018), 38–39. This successful co-optation of the artistic critique provides one explanation for why neoliberalism rather than radicalism won the battle to define the conditions of self-appreciation, in Feher’s terms. I will return to the role played by the artist figure in neoliberal ideology in the next section.

108. Feher would eventually articulate his project at book length in Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Zone Books, 2018). Whatever its merits as political strategy, his argument stands out theoretically in contrast to the recent prevalence of more traditional materialist attempts to remobilize the category of economic self-interest for the Left. See, for instance: Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Annie McClanahan, “Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject,” boundary 2 46.1 (2019): 103–122.

109. Ryan M. Brooks, Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 3.

110. Ibid., 4.

111. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983), 47. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2007 was retitled The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, and Geoff Dyer were among the writers who wrote blurbs for it. See https://lewishyde.com/the-gift/

112. Ibid., 50.

113. Lee Konstantinou, “Lewis Hyde’s Double Economy” ASAP/Journal 1.1 (2016): 126–127.

114. Ibid., 134.

115. Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 54.

116. Konstantinou, “Lewis,” 128.

117. This is in fact Konstantinou’s view: he calls The Gift “a palliative for the contemporary author or creative worker,” and reads Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002) as a logical development of Hyde’s account, in that “the artist in Smith’s novel becomes not only a model for the liberated creative class worker but is herself changed in return.” Ibid., 128, 129. By contrast, I read New Sincerity fiction against the grain of Hyde’s account, as a more ambivalent response to the wholly positive picture he paints of the gift.

118. Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 258.

119. For an overview of how the aesthetic and commercial realms have intersected for artists at prior moments in modern literary history, see Günter Leypoldt, “Professional Countercultures: Network Effects in the Long Nineteenth Century (Weimer, Paris, Grasmere, Boston),” Symbiosis 25.1 (2021): 21–49.

120. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 37.

121. Ibid.

122. Alongside the neoliberal promotion of the figure of the autonomous artist as ideal worker, there is a broader argument here—taken up more fully in Chapter Two—about the function of the figures of purity and autonomy for neoliberal ideology. On the one hand, the neoliberal subject as human capital is imagined (originally by Becker and Schultz, later in all kinds of self-help discourse) as autonomous in the sense of owning their personal feelings and having responsibility for their personal wellness, and acting in an entrepreneurial fashion so that all the gains of their actions return purely to themselves. On the other hand, the market is imagined (in Hayek’s vision) as a spontaneous social aggregator that allows for the pure articulation of “revealed preferences” and the frictionless movement of capital to feed those preferences, with financialization instituting a temporal logic in which the future is imagined as a pure product of the present. Underlying both of these dimensions is a faith in economics as a pure and disinterested science. In Bourdieu’s summary, neoliberal ideology imagines that “the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences.” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le Monde diplomatique (1998), http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu

123. In this sense, literary New Sincerity works very much in contradiction to the ideological function of sincerity that Ana Schwartz diagnoses in colonial America, where “sincerity is often invoked to circumvent or transcend the discovery of historical entanglement.” Schwartz, Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 2.

124. I am thinking here of Bourdieu’s classic work on the sociology of “cultural capital,” for instance in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). For an account of how post-boomer writers and thinkers might confront the demobilizing effects of Bourdieusian analysis, see The Editors, “Too Much Sociology,” n+1 16 (2013): 1–6. I take up n+1’s significance as an intellectual response to normative neoliberalism in this book’s Conclusion.

125. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 224.

126. On shifts in US publishing from the midcentury to the present, and their meaning for questions of aesthetic autonomy in contemporary writing, see Crosthwaite, Market, 17–29, and Sinykin, Big Fiction.

127. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987).

128. For a more thorough treatment of complicity with relevance to the argument outlined here, see Adam Kelly and Will Norman, “Literature and Complicity: Then and Now,” Comparative Literature Studies 56.4 (2019): 673–692.

129. David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 160.