Abstract
This beautifully written and deeply insightful book does just what its title indicates: it gets “under the cover” of a historical literary novel and follows it through its full life cycle, from inception to birth and beyond. The novel is Jarrettsville, by Cornelia Nixon, which was published in 2009 and was based on an incident from her family’s history. In following this novel’s trajectory, Childress analyzes three linked organizational fields: the creation of a cultural object, the production of that object, and the reception of that object.
In this book, the chapters are laid out to follow the trajectory of the creation, production, and reception of the book. Creation involves the actual task of writing and the circle of people who affected it (family, friends, fellow writers, and teachers), the economics of authorship (including the economic and social factors related to the physical location where writing takes place), and the “selling” of a book to a field boundary-spanner (the literary agent) who introduces it to the field of production. Production entails not just the physical production of the book but also its initial selection by a publisher (or in some cases Amazon), the contribution of the cover artist, and its passage through a publishing house into the next field: reception. A book’s reception occurs in the eyes of the publishing industry, booksellers (independents, chains, and Amazon), reviewers (both professional and amateur), and readers.
As Childress demonstrates through retrospective interviews with Nixon, bolstered by interviews with other authors and published work, her creative writing process was intensely social, dependent on family, education, archival research, and several “collaborative circles” composed of other writers. He also demonstrates, based on interviews with Nixon and secondary analysis, that the creative writing process is subject to a complex, patchwork set of income streams: advances from publishers, income shared by spouses and family members, remuneration from MFA workshops, university and college professor/lecturer salaries, and (for a tiny few) sales from self-publishing. These income streams have varied over time, being augmented by new social technologies (the rise of MFA and creative writing programs affiliated with colleges and universities), hurt by the decline of old social systems (English department professor positions), and influenced by new material technologies (Internet publishing).
He deftly highlights the brokerage role that literary agents came to play in the second half of the twentieth century, as they link the field of creation to the field of production, the artistic field to the commercial field. Laudably, he goes beyond many network analyses of brokers to investigate the multiplicity of roles a broker can play. Literary agents serve as gatekeepers (mostly rejecting authors, very rarely accepting to represent them), matchmakers (between authors and editors at publishing houses), and translators (between authors’ visions of their work and editors’ personal interests and enthusiasms). Similarly, editors in publishing houses play multiple field-spanning roles as they balance their firms’ economic interests, resource constraints, and style against the personal/emotional connection they (and agents) have with the novels they are considering publishing. And publishers’ publicity managers translate their firms’ views of books into language that review editors can relate to, while also taking care to maintain their firms’ reputations in the eyes of review editors. Finally, authors not only produce books; they also constitute the majority of book reviewers for news media.
In his relational analysis of those who span field boundaries, Childress characterizes the management of emotions positively, as social capital, rather than negatively, as a cost of labor born by workers (cf. Hochschild, 1983). He shows that an agent’s or editor’s enthusiasm for a novel can convince decision makers to go forward (for agents, the decision makers are editors; for editors, they are peers and managers). In addition, an editor’s enthusiasm for a novel can convince copy editors, cover designers, and marketing/sales staff to exert extra effort; in turn, marketing/sales staff effort can convince bookstores to stock the novel and persuade reviewers and bloggers to read it. Similarly, he highlights the role of emotions in retail interactions, explaining how publishers’ field representatives “pollinate seeds of enthusiasm for the books they represent” (p. 157) and how booksellers’ excitement can convince people to actually buy certain books. Throughout the chain of interpersonal connections from the field of creation to the field of production to the field of reception, management of emotions is a powerful tool for the individuals involved in promoting novels. The display and exchange of positive emotions (e.g., field representatives rave to bookstore decision makers about particular books, bookstore staff wax lyrical to field representatives about books in general) also reinforce trust in cross-field relations.
One thing I admire about this book is that it places the interlocked fields under analysis (creation, production, and reception) in context. Childress traces the evolution of these fields not just across Nixon’s career but across the past century or more. He also explicitly recognizes the geographic variation in these fields, specifically in New York City vs. other parts of the country. In this way, he clarifies the scope conditions for the arguments he develops, the inferences he draws, from his data. For example, the methodological appendix neatly lays out how he came to realize these three fields were distinct but linked and how they were conditioned in time and space.
I have just one quibble: Childress does not always explain the methods behind the statistical analyses sprinkled throughout the book. Notably, it’s not clear (even in endnotes) where the data on literary agents (chapter 4) or readers (chapter 9) came from, how the samples were obtained, and how representative the first sample is of the population of literary agents. (To be fair, much of the data on readers analyzed in chapter 9 is described in a published paper: Childress and Friedkin, 2012.) I recognize that the book was written so as to be intelligible to an audience not familiar or comfortable with quantitative research, but these omissions could have been included in the methodological appendix.
Scattered throughout the book are lovely tidbits of fact that will appeal to avid readers of novels, such as (1) to augment his income from fiction, Kurt Vonnegut managed a car dealership, while Octavia Butler inspected potato chips for quality control; (2) novels described by agents and editors as “gripping” have mass-market appeal, while those described as “intimate” are artistic but will have limited sales; (3) a single mildly positive e-mail (“About halfway through Jarrettsville, and really enjoying it.”) can nearly double the anticipated sales of a novel.
This book should be of interest to organizational theorists and economic sociologists who are interested in cultural products, as well as many cultural sociologists who study meaning making and sociologists of culture who study cultural products. It also offers insights into field theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Bourdieu, 1993, 1996; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) by empirically and theoretically linking multiple fields. And for lovers of novels, it’s simply a fascinating read.