Famous writers can survive cancellation, especially when the book is already published, well-reviewed, and has received huge outpourings of publicity. A major Philip Roth biography, Woody Allen, JK Rowling are going to survive. Jonathan Franzen, who is despised on Twitter as a not-quite-dead white male elitist sexist, has a new novel coming out which will get lots of attention around the world and sell many many copies--he'll be fine. (I've read all his books since the Corrections, which is my favorite, and will probably read the new one too.)
I'm more worried about new writers and mid-list writers, whose manuscripts are rejected or whose books are withdrawn pre-publication as "problematic." There have been several cases of the latter in YA fiction. And that's not even getting into the ways in which writers may shape their work to avoid cancellation. The cancellers would say that's a good thing! Besides, there's no such thing as cancel culture, don't you know.
My takeaway is that cancel culture adds market value to a product that might otherwise have had okay sales. My plot of a dystopian novel about the publishing industry would involve a venerable publishing company (Gorton, shall we call it?) that secretly owns a "fly-by-night" cheap-o publishing company (Pegasus Books?); Gorton *deliberately* subjects their authors (mostly unfairly) to cancel culture outrage only to repurchase their own rights via Pegasu to go on to sell millions of copies based on the "bad" publicity. What do you think?
It sort of feels to me like you are brushing past some of the critical reviews of the biography? But the thing is that if it's a good biography, it nevertheless reveals some pretty nasty stuff about Roth, including that he went hunting for a person to write a biography that he thought would celebrate him (and ended up with a biography that seems pretty damning even because someone sympathetic to him can't help but make him out to be kind of a shitty human being). I suppose that's the problem here before you even get to the author of the biography--the subject of the biography is sufficiently revolting, as Laura Marsh's review of the book made pretty clear.
This is also part of the problem of this landscape we're on--we've got folks (men and women) who are clinging tight to a kind of proposition about "talent" that says that people like Roth or Norman Mailer etc. need to be held up as geniuses, etc. regardless of what they were like as human beings, when the putative genius of their writing is substantially a product of how they incessantly worked the instruments of a public sphere that they had privileged access to in order to receive that anointment. The clinging going on is not just about "but if you are a bad person who writes well we should still value you" but also "damn these kids and their social media; I preferred it when the editor of the New Yorker and the NYT could squash a bad story and upsell my fiction; I preferred it when celebrity in my littler world had value without me having to pound the pavement on Instagram".
I dunno. I'm glad to have the biography available for the curious; I am not sad to have Roth and his fiction mostly fade into literary obscurity.
I think my former student, Eli Bromberg, can convince you that Woody Allen has spent his career confessing that he did sexually abusing his daughter, through his movies. If you want, I'll send you his book: *Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture.*
Famous writers can survive cancellation, especially when the book is already published, well-reviewed, and has received huge outpourings of publicity. A major Philip Roth biography, Woody Allen, JK Rowling are going to survive. Jonathan Franzen, who is despised on Twitter as a not-quite-dead white male elitist sexist, has a new novel coming out which will get lots of attention around the world and sell many many copies--he'll be fine. (I've read all his books since the Corrections, which is my favorite, and will probably read the new one too.)
I'm more worried about new writers and mid-list writers, whose manuscripts are rejected or whose books are withdrawn pre-publication as "problematic." There have been several cases of the latter in YA fiction. And that's not even getting into the ways in which writers may shape their work to avoid cancellation. The cancellers would say that's a good thing! Besides, there's no such thing as cancel culture, don't you know.
My takeaway is that cancel culture adds market value to a product that might otherwise have had okay sales. My plot of a dystopian novel about the publishing industry would involve a venerable publishing company (Gorton, shall we call it?) that secretly owns a "fly-by-night" cheap-o publishing company (Pegasus Books?); Gorton *deliberately* subjects their authors (mostly unfairly) to cancel culture outrage only to repurchase their own rights via Pegasu to go on to sell millions of copies based on the "bad" publicity. What do you think?
It sort of feels to me like you are brushing past some of the critical reviews of the biography? But the thing is that if it's a good biography, it nevertheless reveals some pretty nasty stuff about Roth, including that he went hunting for a person to write a biography that he thought would celebrate him (and ended up with a biography that seems pretty damning even because someone sympathetic to him can't help but make him out to be kind of a shitty human being). I suppose that's the problem here before you even get to the author of the biography--the subject of the biography is sufficiently revolting, as Laura Marsh's review of the book made pretty clear.
This is also part of the problem of this landscape we're on--we've got folks (men and women) who are clinging tight to a kind of proposition about "talent" that says that people like Roth or Norman Mailer etc. need to be held up as geniuses, etc. regardless of what they were like as human beings, when the putative genius of their writing is substantially a product of how they incessantly worked the instruments of a public sphere that they had privileged access to in order to receive that anointment. The clinging going on is not just about "but if you are a bad person who writes well we should still value you" but also "damn these kids and their social media; I preferred it when the editor of the New Yorker and the NYT could squash a bad story and upsell my fiction; I preferred it when celebrity in my littler world had value without me having to pound the pavement on Instagram".
I dunno. I'm glad to have the biography available for the curious; I am not sad to have Roth and his fiction mostly fade into literary obscurity.
I think my former student, Eli Bromberg, can convince you that Woody Allen has spent his career confessing that he did sexually abusing his daughter, through his movies. If you want, I'll send you his book: *Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture.*
read this: https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2021/08/orourke-roth-bailey/