"I'd Rather Be Scrolling"

Against Alt-Lit's infiltration of literary fiction.

This was first published in Neo-Passéism, the Neo-Decadents’ ongoing series of tirades against neo things we find passé.

Back when I was an underage girl, Alt-Lit was not only actually still alt, but, regularly, and in the conceptual aggregate, actually cool. “Knife Girl” was cool. Marie Calloway was cool. horse_ebooks, HTMLGIANT. Arch, tossed-off constructions like “in a shit-talking way.”¹ Entire books of single-sentence paragraphs (🤯)! Hyperlinks, chat transcripts, glorified Erowid reports. Plagiarizing real-life…in a not-shit-giving away. Fucking people you probably shouldn’t...for the story. Publishing your shit-posting (!) Twitter (!!)…as a book (!!!). And it was cool because of, you must remember, the lit to which alt-lit was then alt. In a milieu where mainstream litfic was craft-obsessed and self-important, when it was still trying to swim out of the backwash of the literary Jonathans, and you couldn’t even let loose with hysterical realism anymore because James Wood said so, alt-lit was truly subversive. It was irreverent to all this belaboring that the middlebrow seemed to require; it did not insist upon itself. In its underdog days, alt-lit embodied a sprezzatura which the corporate-cringe Zillennialism of “brat” could never hope to reverse-engineer.

Obviously, infuriatingly, things have changed. Our relationships to both the internet and literary fiction are completely alien to what they were since the publication of Richard Yates, or The Sarah Book, or even as late as literally show me a healthy person (all alt-lit books of literary value). Not only are alt-lit authors being published by the Big 5 and prestige journals (Mr. Fuccboi himself is in the Paris Review), but everyone is practicing alt-lit now, as Sam Kriss documented in The Point—erasing any discernible stylistic difference between posting and writing, or at least trying very hard to contrive a facsimile of the sprezzatura of posting. Everybody writes stuff like “in a shit-talking way” now. Like Kriss points out, the result is unexciting to readers who are on the same internet as these authors, which is, again, fucking everybody—there’s a Tweet out there I can’t find wherein the author says whenever they read fiction about the internet, they think “I’d rather be scrolling.” Contentwise, the now-mainstream brainrot autofiction is essentially longform social media–dull little feel-bad fables about MFA students in idpolitically fraught situationships and unethically polyamorous configurations wherein their characters in a neurotic deadpan judge their rivals’/frenemies’ characters, flaunt their perfectly curated tastes in theory, products, and art, signal their takes on recurring culture war discourse, and perform a kind of pre-emptively self-aware narcissism that never interferes with their IRL status as an e-boy/girl/they. And much like Twitter has a house style, so does it: and this style is so insidious that it’s not just the internet poison Kriss describes, or the interchangeable, blasé brat-minimalism anti-prose Rhian Sasseen wrote about in The Baffler, or the compulsive, hyperspecific name-dropping identified by Greta Rainbow in The Walrus which serves as a shorthand for actual description (although it is all of that); it’s also seeped into the fucking RHYTHM of the sentences. Open any legacy journal or hot new Dimes Square Clout Review or the Leftist version thereof, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Do some scansion, and it will quickly become permanently nooticeable to a point approaching psychosis. There’s this homogenized sing-song-y-ness to so many people’s prose nowadays which I find nearly physically intolerable: pseudo-Iambic (frequently with slant rhymes or even real rhymes); post-Lishianly quasi-consecutional; mono-, at most bi-clausal; sentence fetishizing, but strictly of the same five sentences. It’s like people are unintentionally writing or editing themselves into couplets; it’s that horribly abused Virginia Woolf quote about style being rhythm taken to the extreme. Worst of all, it’s tryhard as fuck. It is so visibly overwritten in its attempt to sound detached and posting-adjacently sprezzaturic that it ends up sounding precious and contrived as a nursery rhyme. And it is all so exhaustingly boring I could cry.

In the Baffler piece, Sasseen calls the aesthetic flatness of alt-lit easily imitable, arguing that the “sarcasm” of the today’s derivatives “functions as a protective armor” which exposes “no hypocrisies” or risks any stakes. I think this fear or paralysis is more stylistically driven, and less about vulnerability or nakedness than cringe: an aesthetic paranoia carried over from chronic internet abuse, which this mode requires for creative output. No matter how unflinching their story is, or how uncomfortably the characters are portrayed, they believe they must never stray too far from acceptable bounds of sentence-level self-indulgence or experimentation, lest they become an aesthetic lolcow. To intentionally attempt, say, Nabokov- or even McCarthy-level fireworks would be unthinkable; genre or political fiction or other such dorky aesthetics would spell a social death. As a result, their work is only ever in conversation with each other’s, and (maybe) a slim acceptable canon, even if they read more widely than that (and many claim they do).

Kriss concludes the Point essay by asking, in enraged despair, what it would possibly take to make literature ‘genuinely vital and necessary again.’ He has two ideas: terrorism and writing about something other than ourselves. I prescribe a third: RETVRN to formal rigor. I think it’s becoming very clear to everyone that the edgelord has no clothes and that many practitioners of whatever alt-lit has degenerated into write this way because they’re hiding a moderate-to-severe skill issue. That’s not the case? Okay, prove it. Bring back games of skill like Oulipo or extremely long grammatically correct sentences or novels in verse. Incentivize peacocking and showboating, and the deep study and pastiche of literary movements and scenes which engaged in such peacocking and showboating (it’s easy to forget how fun hysterical realism was). Gatekeep: your influences should prove your high taste level. Cringe at those in their thirties still doing this babyvoice. And the vibe shift is already here. This blog post is honestly late to the game; I suspect all these pissed-off thinkpieces may have already served as a death knell for alt-lit. You saw it in people’s vehement defense of brodernism, in the choice of authors (nary a neo-alt-lit-kid to be seen) hand-picked by Blake Butler for the inaugural issue of his new magazine, in the rise of publications like Apocalypse Confidential, whose sensibility could not be more different from alt-lit, in the interest in Neo-Decadence. Going mainstream kills coolness. It happened to the modes alt-lit replaced; it’s happening to alt-lit. There will probably be a lot of stylistic overcompensation in its stead, but that’s the circle of life. And who cares? It’s fun.

1. Tao Lin denouncing Tom Wolfe’s proto-alt-lit term “K-mart realism.”