Hook, line, and sinker
I doubt there’s a demographic more susceptible to falling for clickbait than Authors Online. The latest piece to cause their outrage is titled “The curse of the cool girl novelist”, by some Charlotte Stroud1. This write-up is so clearly intended to bait writers and adjacent literati that it is laughable. And yet it succeeded, doing the rounds on social media, outrage-shared non-stop, driving a lot of traffic to the New Statesman, home to other masterpieces such as “The decline of the Literary Bloke”, by a Will Lloyd, and I’m sure there are more but life is too short to find out.
I guess that Stroud’s mischievous job works because she has accurately identified certain tendencies in contemporary indie literature: the ubiquity of over-educated, depressed and alienated characters, the prevalence of existential angst, a certain lack of humour, an obsession with ideological lessons, an overwhelming focus on the personal struggles of the protagonists, and so on2. The dishonesty of the piece lies not here, but in limiting its scope to what Stroud defines as the “sad girls” of literature. In other words young (and mainly white) female writers — a dominant actor in Anglophone indie publishing in 2023. For this generalisation and simplification to work, Stroud consciously avoids directly citing any actual examples of this “sad girl lit”, sticking instead to dropping the names of contemporary female authors, whilst backing up her arguments with the ideas of established testiculate writers and critics — Henry Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Martin Amis, Clive James — and just one woman: George Elliot3. You can only get outraged by this well-written but unsubtle sophistic turd if you don’t know how to read a text without a priori surrendering to its rhetorical apparatus. Regrettably, the Author Online is more of a reactor than a reader.
Clickbait should be treated like clickbait and I shouldn’t engage with Stroud’s piece past these three-hundred or so words, which are already too many. But I still find the article useful to understand how (literary) clickbait works and why we keep falling for it.