Mark McGurl insists at the beginning of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon that “This is not a book about Amazon.” Yet the book’s gambit is that the contemporary novel can only be understood as having been indelibly shaped by that titanic corporate entity, an entity whose name McGurl thus sees fit to bestow upon the entire literary Age. “[T]he rise of Amazon,” McGurl writes in the Preface, “is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail” (XII), and this reforging is occurring, for McGurl, on two distinct but related planes. First, it is indisputably true that Amazon has revolutionized the way people both buy and publish books. McGurl reports that Amazon—a company that came into existence less than 30 years ago—is now responsible for more than half of US print book sales, as well as an even higher percentage of ebook sales—the latter being “a market [Amazon] essentially made” (2). Meanwhile, on the production side, Amazon owns sixteen “more or less traditional” publishing imprints (including Amazon Crossing, which puts out more translations into English than any other publisher [102]), as well as, most significantly for Everything and Less, the massive self-publishing operation Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which has apparently facilitated the minting of literally millions of books from independent authors since its launch in 2007, fundamentally altering the composition of contemporary literature in the process (37). Amazon, in other words, despite the minute percentage of its business that bookselling now represents, has become the most important mover of both literary consumption and production in the US, if not the world. “Increasingly,” says McGurl, from every measurable perspective, Amazon “is the new platform of contemporary literary life” (2).

Yet all of this is scene setting for McGurl’s central interest: the way the novel has registered these seismic changes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main development on this score has been fiction’s ever more precise internalization of the markets it serves, part of what McGurl calls Amazon’s reconceptualization of literature as a “service” aimed at catering to consumers with exceedingly particular interests (27). And if the hardware at the core of the service model of literature is the Kindle, whose ebook libraries are characterized by a “digital liquidity” that reinforces that model (3), the software is a far more ancient one: genre, a concept more central to Everything and Less than perhaps any other. Genre, as “a form, indigenous to the literary field, of the broader phenomena of market segmentation and product differentiation,” is the means by which the market and its whims become immanent to the literary work, and though Amazon certainly didn’t invent genre, it has been involved in proliferating it at an unprecedented level (162). This has been nowhere more visible than on KDP, where authors have access to “no fewer than ten thousand separate generic domains” by which to classify their novels and help them find an audience (162)—domains spanning everything from the relatively straightforward “epic science fiction” to the slightly more niche “cozy mystery” to the highly specific “Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica,” the last of which McGurl is tempted to call “the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature” (153). In this way, Amazon’s larger standing as the “Everything Store” is thus mirrored in its panoply of literary offerings, where seemingly every conceivable readerly desire can be immediately fulfilled at the click of a button.

It is debatable how much of a “novelty” this state of affairs actually is—genre (and the broader phenomenon of catering to audience tastes) has been with us as long as books have been sold, and Amazon’s intervention here often seems like one more of scale than of fundamental rewiring. Yet by actually reading these novels (and reading them, as it were, for genre), McGurl is able to draw out many complex facets of life in the Age of Amazon as they’re refracted through the marketized logic of generic form. In something like the framing move for the entire book, McGurl identifies as the two poles of genre the maximalist epic (e.g. Game of Thrones) and the comparatively minimalist romance (e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey)—a schema that extends that of McGurl’s previous book The Program Era (2009), which situated postwar literary fiction within a similar matrix, between maximalist Pynchons and minimalist Carvers. For Everything and Less, the epic and romance correspond to the opposing yet perpetually intertwined imperatives of “more” and “less” within capitalist social existence, where our desire for “more” (money, time, fulfilling reading experiences) is always stalked by an equal desire for “less” (toil, information overload, wait time for the next Amazon package). Novels, McGurl argues, inevitably position themselves somewhere along this spectrum, if not at multiple points: “contemporary fiction makes its way by either aligning itself with or resisting the flood of muchness by which the modern sensorium is assailed, or by executing some more complex combination of the two” (260). McGurl brilliantly identifies the latter case in postapocalyptic sci-fi: the terrible sublimity of an entire world destroyed is dialectically countered by the intimacy of the small group of survivors through whom the narrative is focalized. Or, reading Fifty Shades of Grey, which functions as a kind of ur-text for Amazonian literature (originally self-published, as it was, as Twilight fan-fiction, itself a generic niche servicing ample consumer hunger), McGurl notes how Christian Grey, the ravenously consumptive “alpha billionaire” figure, ironically allows the protagonist Ana, in submitting to his domination, to herself be “absolved of the existential inconvenience of choice” that the consumer is always assailed by (128). “In this sense,” McGurl concludes, “even as he admits to being the ultimate consumer, the alpha billionaire presents himself as a fantasy antidote to consumerism.” More, as everywhere in the contemporary novel under Amazon, leads inevitably to less, and just as frequently back again.

Yet if “more and less” is the core dynamic undergirding fiction today, McGurl employs a number of other hermeneutic frames to illuminate different aspects of that dynamic—whether it be anthropologist Alfred Gell’s use of opportunity cost as a window onto human decision making, social reproduction theory’s braiding of consumption with reproduction in the site of the home, or largely forgotten sociologist Orrin E. Klapp’s positing of variety and redundancy as the competing imperatives of human informational intake. Characteristically, this capacious critical infrastructure is generative of analyses and readings that convincingly reveal the allegorical or ideological content of their object texts, even (or especially) if that text be a work of, say, “Bisexual and Gay Threesome MMF Military and Cowboy Romance” (180). As the book progresses, however, one can’t help but feel as though McGurl’s liberal assimilation of such a broad array of interpretive tools begins to mirror the manic variegation of the Everything Store itself. Perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug, but it at times works at cross-purposes to McGurl’s stated goal for viewing contemporary literature through the lens of Amazon in the first place: to give the data at hand a “vehicle of meaningful focalization, something to lend analytical coherence to what might otherwise seem the impersonal unfolding of scattered techno-capitalist processes” (2). As the frame widens and brings more thinkers and modalities into its ambit, the intended coherence risks loosening into more or less connected pivots from one frame to another, like the nudgings of an erudite yet scattered recommendation algorithm. People Who Bought Alfred Gell Also Bought: Niklas Luhmann, Max Weber, Frederic Jameson, Georges Bataille, etc.

In a conversation with Mark Greif, McGurl describes this approach as “testing out different ways of understanding fiction as a boon that somebody might want and thus might buy.”1 And indeed, fiction in the Age of Amazon—whether understood as an “existential supplement,” a “structured fantasy,” or an “existential scaling device” (257)—is always about fulfilling a need—that is, being purchased. As such, the concept that most holds Everything and Less together is genre, and this is where McGurl’s analysis is most compelling and also most problematic. It is through genre that we can most clearly see what McGurl, following Rita Felski, calls the “uses of literature,” and chief among these for McGurl is “therapy”—a designation he offers with courageous frankness. “[A]s soon as they are detached from their uses in formal schooling,” he writes, “stories provide therapeutic comfort to those who read them”—full stop. And though this is “a pointedly unheroic answer” to the question of literature’s use, it is one that McGurl nonetheless fundamentally embraces, seeing in it a more robust and democratic way of understanding fiction as it actually exists in the current moment than the traditional hierarchies of literary value would allow. While fiction loses “a certain glamour” in this conception, that loss is “partially recompensed in the revelation of [fiction’s] basic necessity. We need novels like we need food to eat and clothing and shelter—at least some of us do, numbering in the hundreds of millions” (256). Which is to say, we need novels like we need commodities—and indeed, on McGurl’s account, novels are always first and foremost commodities, if uncommonly soothing ones.

But what about so-called “literary fiction,” that mode of novelistic writing that purports to achieve something beyond the rote execution of genre conventions and thus the provision of therapeutic benefit? Unfortunately for literary critics, literary fiction in the Age of Amazon is best understood, McGurl says, as simply one more genre among others. If, “according to Amazon, all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire… [t]his includes—on occasion, depending on where you’re coming from—a desire for complex literary artistry,” a desire our scores of literary writers are satisfying more thoroughly than perhaps ever before (14-15). Even novels with ostensibly more sophisticated aesthetic ambitions than your average cozy mystery can thus be understood as simply responding to market incentives—far from a bad thing for McGurl since that response, on his account, is the satisfaction of a social necessity and therefore a kind of social good. “[T]he pursuit of finer things is a habit like any other, and one with mostly therapeutic benefits if we’re honest,” he writes—literary critics are no different than ABDL consumers on that score. There is thus no practical difference between a work like Fifty Shades of Grey and more manifestly literary novels Tao Lin’s Taipei or Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. McGurl reads all three convincingly and compellingly, but as commodities shaped by markets rather than artworks determined by their own immanent logic, they can only finally be read symptomatically.

This, indeed, gets to the heart of the problem with Everything and Less: if a novel is nothing more than a commodity, we can still “read” it in the sense of analyzing the way it emblematizes social phenomena (the way any commodity does), but it is no longer responsive to what we call, in the business, interpretation. This is a crucial point recently made by Nicholas Brown, who argues in Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (2019) that because the art commodity (as opposed to the artwork) is structured through and through by market imperatives, it can only be analyzed in reference to those imperatives, not immanently. Brown puts it thus, in the context of slasher films (but he might as well have been talking about zombie apocalypse novels or ABDL erotica):

The question “Why do slasher films have boyish female protagonists?” is interesting, but despite appearances, it is not an interpretive question: it is not to be answered by a close reading of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whose “meaning” is entirely subordinate to an audience’s demand for a certain set of narrative conventions. Rather, it is answered by, in essence, querying the audience rather than the film, and when we have answered the question, we have learned something about audience rather than about the film.2

Far from hierarchizing slasher films “below” art house films—a move McGurl would rightly caution against—the point here is simply to say that slasher films and films that succeed as art have different ontologies, and as such are amenable to qualitatively different forms of interpretation. In not attending to this distinction and thus folding all literary production into the genre (and thus commodity) system, McGurl forecloses the possibility that a work of fiction might at times attain the kind of internal aesthetic coherence—what Brown calls “meaning”—that would call for an interpretation that does not finally collapse into “querying the audience.”

And yet querying the audience appears, at moments, to be precisely what McGurl has set out to do, as when he warns against “overstating the importance of complexly effable meaning” and suggests rather “that what the reader is looking for in fiction is a sensation of meaning” (173). That such a shift in interpretive attention from “meaning” to “sensation of meaning” requires an equivalent methodological shift from reading the text to reading the audience is also alluded to when McGurl mentions in an endnote that his book is concerned with “matters more proper to literary-economic sociology than to aesthetic theory per se” (272, n.25). To say that McGurl’s mode of literary criticism moves from aesthetics to sociology is to restate Brown’s point about replacing the object with the audience quite precisely. We might say, then, that Everything and Less teaches us an enormous amount about readers in the Age of Amazon, while the novel’s capacities as an aesthetic, rather than merely sociological, form—if it still retains an aesthetic identity not assimilable to sociology, an open question—remain obscure.3

There is, of course, a politics to all of this. And McGurl’s politics, despite his at times disconcerting enthusiasm for the commodity form, are partly redeemed at the book’s conclusion when he writes that the “underlist”—his term for the countless thousands of KDP books that not only fail to make best-seller lists but are never read by anyone at all—expresses in negative a hope for a better world. McGurl writes that his

purely speculative, possibly crazy framing of the matter…transvalues the monumental waste of internet-enabled literary history as a collective demand for transformation. It sees it as representing the possibility of a world organized fundamentally otherwise than this one is. Strange and almost traitorous as it sounds, it posits literary waste as clearing conceptual space for a world that doesn’t need so much fiction, at least not as we know it, having progressed beyond a desire for the forms of therapy it currently offers (258).

If our insatiable hunger for fiction is one concrete manifestation of our desperate need for therapeutic relief, a world in which we need less therapy is surely one we can all hope for. Yet in the Age of Amazon, when the walls that art might erect against the barrage of market forces sending us all to the therapist in the first place are understood as having disintegrated—and more, when that disintegration is, in a laudable if mistaken spirit of aesthetic populism, celebrated—such a world seems as hopelessly far away as ever.

1. Community Bookstore Live, “Mark McGurl presents ‘Everything and Less,’ with Mark Greif,” YouTube video, 1:03:36, Oct. 20, 2021, https://youtu.be/4IfFQUEpTnE?t=1606.
2. Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2019) 185 n15.
3. Brown, for his part, argues that the novel still can attain a degree of aesthetic autonomy, and can in fact use genre itself to do so by treating the genre as a constraint to work through and subvert rather than a set of imperatives to simply fulfill. Though this subversion might be more likely to occur in a work classed as “literary fiction,” there’s no reason why a work of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica couldn’t carve out a space of autonomous meaning by challenging its own generic norms. (And, conversely, much if not most “literary fiction” is, per McGurl’s analysis, really is just genre fiction). The whispers of potential generic subversion haunt some of McGurl’s readings, yet without a distinction between artwork and art commodity in hand, they can never be more than whispers. See Brown, 25–27.