The Broom of the System: Literary Sociology, Contemporary Publishing, and Dan Sinykin’s <i>Big Fiction</i>

It seems likely that Dan Sinykin felt gratified to read R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, which appeared several months prior to Sinykin’s much-talked-about new book. Kuang’s novel mounts a wicked satire of the contemporary literary marketplace, especially the racial politics of corporate publishers, who leverage “subaltern voices” and “suppressed narratives” from attractive minority writers as a form of product differentiation but are equally happy to publish scandalous works of racially insensitive cultural appropriation, à la Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020), since conservative readers gobble up anything that infuriates the libs, and “controversy of any sort is pretty good for free marketing” (Kuang 2023: 91, 218). Yellowface reads like a narrativization of many of the dynamics of conglomerate publishing that Sinykin outlines in his book, which is full of entertaining anecdotes based on prodigious research that foreground the industry’s behind-the-scenes players, such as writers, agents, editors, marketing teams, and bookstore buyers.Further, Kuang’s novel braids together the three proliferating generic trends that Sinykin contends are prominent “consequences” of “the conglomerate era” (BF, 103, 5). The first is self-reflection on the conditions of publishing. Novels in this period, Sinykin writes, “incorporate conglomeration”; they address the predicament of writers in a corporatized marketplace, often via allegory (BF, 103). The second is the boom in “literary genre fiction,” emblematized by Cormac McCarthy’s production of the “middlebrow” western All the Pretty Horses (1992) to “help his new minders” (BF, 121), Vintage’s editors and publicity team. Such strategic collaborations have caused “the distance between literary and genre fiction” to “narrow” (BF, 103) as literary writers ransack techniques from popular genre fiction to make their work more marketable. Kuang’s novel functions in the main as a realist satire of publishing. But it also flirts uncannily with horror, as its protagonist, June, is haunted by visions of her dead friend, Athena, the Asian American wunderkind whose magnum opus June has stolen and published as her own. Yellowface has been marketed as a clever, psychological thriller. But its gothic flourishes, added to the fact that Kuang’s first four books are fantasy novels that have drawn comparisons to N. K. Jemisin and Ken Liu, would appear to bear out the narrowing gap between literary and genre fiction that Sinykin identifies. While it would be wrong to label Yellowface a work of autofiction, Sinykin’s third formal consequence of conglomeration, Kuang has been forthcoming that she conceived of Athena as her worst nightmare of an alter ego, to represent her fear of being made by the industry into the “token Asian author who is prized because of her ability to be a cultural broker . . . who is able to explain Chinese history, Chinese Americans, to white readers” (Alter 2023). Moreover, June’s solution to becoming a pariah in the literary world on the discovery of her theft is to convert the story of her friendship with Athena and plagiarism of her work into a novel, a slippery autofiction that looks confessional but allows June to don another disguise.But while Kuang’s novel adopts, embeds, and plays with the principal forms of the conglomerate era, it also raises questions germane to Sinykin’s analysis of conglomeration’s effects on publishing. Foremost among them: What does it mean that an emphasis on diversity, which Sinykin identifies as an imperative shaped by the nonprofit and independent publishers who endeavored to compete with and respond to what they saw as the aesthetically and racially “homogenizing force of conglomeration” (BF, 151), is now firmly entrenched as a central strategy of the conglomerates? Sinykin notes this shift in his conclusion, which brings his study up to the present; by 2021 a “broader development in the industry” is that editors from independent, nonprofit, and conglomerate houses are “united” by a “desire to publish books by underrepresented voices” (BF, 220). These shifts would seem to evince a mobility in the industry that complicates Sinykin’s repeated emphasis that conglomerates follow a logic of seeking to reproduce what has already proved to work. Are the corporations spurring a boom in novels that critique their racial politics—or just the conditions that need critiquing? The story Alexandra Alter (2023) tells is that after a “brief, awkward debate about whether some might see ‘Yellowface’ as a not-so-subtle takedown of the company,” HarperCollins quickly got over its shyness, “bought the book for a mid-six-figure sum,” and launched a massive marketing campaign. 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