Posted on 12/26/2025 3:39:04 AM PST by karpov
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing.
The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even deeper. Today, the publishing industry as a whole turns its nose up to narratives that promote objective meaning.
There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense. Reared on the postmodern spirit that dominates colleges and universities, publishing professionals favor ambiguous, open-ended narratives to stories with clear redemption arcs. But, at its core, literature should not only teach us to think critically but also to live our best lives.
In 1908, New Humanist literary scholar Irving Babbitt set out to redefine classic-literature education in a collection of essays called Literature and the American College. An early literary critic, Babbitt believed that the purpose of literature was to cultivate a lasting moral imagination—that is, literature had a duty to craft readers into morally upstanding members of society. Though New Humanism’s reign was short-lived in the academy, its fundamental axiom—that the purpose of literature was to foster moral education—articulated the broader cultural tradition that has sustained the human soul for thousands of years. Literature is supposed to teach us what gives our lives meaning.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
A book about drunks moping and whacking off.
Post modernism killed many great games as well, because you need a presumed bad guy for a game to work. Even a game like Monopoly operates through that.
Oddly enough, I was able to get through college without being assigned that book. I never met anyone who had to read it who did not almost gnash their teeth at the thought of it.
Some of these classics are interesting to read, if you arent forced to read them.
It’s not just that you need a villain. You need a villain worthy of scorn. Humanising a villain isn’t unnecessary if you have a plan to allow that villain to redeem themselves (vs. killing them off in a grand fashion), but modern gaming has turned to nebulous, faceless villains without any sort of identifiable morality. Moreover, in a typical man-vs-nature narrative, some games have even made nature a hero or sort of anti-hero to be respected as if to push the narrative that the protagonist, you, the player, is the villain and should be ashamed of your morality.
Thankfully the hollowed-out nature of modern prose is recognizable and often panned as useless, because the majority of readers want to identify not only with the protagonist but with the author themselves. I pray this prevents AI-generated prose from catching on, because, as a holder of degrees in English, it’s evident from any writing out there the voice of the author if you know how to find it. AI writing lacks warmth and voice, two things that I believe cannot be mimicked by computers no matter how hard they try, but then I’ve been wrong about stuff like this in the past.
It is possible to write a book about dull, unpleasant people that is still interesting. Useless was not it.
The most important thing a nation has is its national IQ. Nothing else really matters. High average IQ in a population determines wealth, security, happiness and general success. As it lowers in general, and the peak of the curve starts shifting to the left—- Botswana here we come.
People that aren’t terribly bright can be easily manipulated and taken advantage of.
Literature is going down the toilet? How about movies, science, music, the arts in general. As the general national IQ lowers and approaches around 83, there really isn’t anything that person can do to add to the society. Here is a good video by Jordan Peterson explaining that:
https://youtu.be/caR69G6wpwU?si=tEP1IPszMUeqL_IG
THANK YOU for posting. A good read!
bfl
“”””“Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life”””””
with a Forward by Candace Owens
Yup—the history of post-colonial Africa is amazing to behold.
Pick any black African country and look at its history post independence.
They all read the same.
Coup. Counter-coup. Revolution. Insurgents. On and on and on and on....
The “developing world” never seems to develop at all.
Caught in a dead-end loop. Yeah.
Then why bother reading their work? The news is bad enough.
Postmodernism has also killed off film, music and art.
All the genre’s are now oriented to DEI, including advertising and TV commercials. Western marketing focuses on the Black Lesbian Muslim Midgets of the world.
The state of things are such that if you are a white male Christian, then your contributions are not wanted. Institutions only want primitive cannibal savages running the world, in other words they only want democrats. /spit
And then the doors shut.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
The Vanishing White Male Writer
I have to ask is it the quality of the writing or is it willingness of publishers to publish white male writers?
Of course their is the fact that most males born since 1990 would rather play video games than consider matters of great importance.
Sitting down to write the Great American Novel is pretty low on their list of things to do.
Even sitting down to read the Great American Novel is below their threshold of caring.
I haven't read any current literature in a couple decades myself. My typical reading these days is things written before I was born.
I became disillusioned with current authors in the late 90s when writers became infected with political correctness.
“”””I haven’t read any current literature in a couple decades myself. My typical reading these days is things written before I was born.””””
I agree. And that is why I regularly refer to my Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia published in 1898 for their view of what happened prior to 1900.
The purpose of literature is art. If truth flows through it, it’s fine art.
The teaching of timeless truths has given way to vocationless advocacy.
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