The Amazoniad

Abstract

no more promos no more photos no more logos no more chokeholds we on Bezos we get payrolls Kanye West, ‘Heaven and Hell’ (2021) Don’t let my title fool you: Mark McGurl’s bold new monograph Everything and Less is in an important sense not an epic. It couldn’t have been an epic, because to tell the story of the novel in the Age of Amazon in so heroic a mode would have risked inadvertently endorsing the company’s coolly ruthless practice of platform capitalism, its commitment to seeing itself ‘in terms of an unfolding epic narrative of astounding achievement that it can’t find enough ways to narrate’. Then there’s the pointedly unheroic fact of the corporation’s systematic state sales tax avoidance, hardly the normal occasion for epic poetry. But it would be simply naive, even downright foolhardy, not to acknowledge the force of the claim that Amazon drives literary life as many readers today know it, accounting as it does for roughly half of all print and a still greater share of digital book purchases across the US. Nor should we underestimate the fact that since 2013 Amazon has owned Goodreads: undoubtedly the single largest repository of non-professional reviews ever to exist, it is now estimated to boast some 100 million members with data ripe for collection. And how could we ignore the long arm of Kindle Direct Publishing, a platform that takes aim at traditional literary gatekeepers, liquefying and radically deregulating the dissemination of stories as ebooks in exchange for 30 per cent of their sales? McGurl’s dilemma is thus that he needs to ‘Think Big’, as the seventh of Jeff Bezos’s leadership principles demands his employees should, but not on the corporate super-author’s generic terms. By refusing to spin an epic from the siren song of corporate populism, or otherwise glorify Bezos’s calculated pursuit of multinational (no doubt soon multi-planetary) servile domination in the triumphalist mode of entrepreneurial myth, McGurl thinks beyond the receding horizon of limitless growth. To insist on the presence of less in a book about the novel in the age of the Everything Store is to remember that beneath the rude health of commoditised fiction lies the starvation-wage warehouse worker, that person with so little time to read, paid to package those books we find on our doorsteps.