The Replacement-Level Novel: Notes Towards an Investigation
Revised June 24, 2023 for phrasing, coherence, and citation accuracy; revised June 27, 2023 to clarify a point about Great Books programs.
I’ve often wished I could write book reviews: that is, essays about a book that try to judge its quality, essays that practice what Pierre Macherey called “normative criticism.” For a while, I thought the trouble was that I didn’t know how. My academic training prepared me well to conduct close readings and engage with secondary literature—in other words, prepared me well for a graduate program in literary studies—but we didn’t talk much about aesthetics or quality. If anything, aesthetic concerns were not relevant at all to the work we were doing. Though many of our readings would have fit right in on a Great Books syllabus, the unspoken assumption was that a literary scholar who only studies canonical texts would be like a botanist who only studies pretty flowers.
Gradually, however, I started to realize that “I don’t know how” was a cop-out. It would be easy to learn how to write book reviews, at least in theory. Those of you with a background in education may be familiar with the practice of using mentor texts to teach creative writing: pick a genre, read as many examples of that genre as you can stand, take note of what patterns and conventions you notice, and try to apply those patterns and conventions to your own writing. If I seriously wanted to teach myself how to write book reviews, that’s what I’d do—I’d read ten or twenty back issues of Bookforum or the New York Review of Books with a pen in hand and with an eye towards finding patterns and common structures. This would not automatically make me a great reviewer: I’ve used the mentor-texts approach with creative nonfiction, but I’m still a thoroughly middling memoirist on a good day. It would, however, guarantee that I could no longer honestly say that I don’t know how to write reviews.
Yet the fundamental problem is not that I don’t know how. It’s not a problem of practicality: it’s one of philosophy. Though I like reading book reviews and consider certain reviewers to be appointment reading, there is something about aesthetics-focused criticism that I have never been able to get past. Every time a writer judges a book on aesthetic grounds, calling it great or mediocre or dreadful or something of that nature, the writer implies a standard. A judgment of “mediocre” or “underdeveloped” or “barely competent” implies that the work has not met the writer’s standards. What, then, are the standards? Where do they come from? Why should the reader accept these standards as correct?1
In Macherey’s telling, the critic’s standard is nothing less than a flawless book. He calls the idea of eternal, universal standards the “normative illusion” in A Theory of Literary Production and critiques it thus:
[The laws of normative criticism] are external; they intervene after the fact and apply themselves to an already-existing object whose production they did not contribute to. Aesthetic law [la légalité esthétique] has a judicial rather than a theoretical status; at the most, it exerts control by restraining the writer with its rules. Powerless to examine the work on its own terms (that is, powerless to shape it), aesthetic law can only exert its influence on the work through the corrosive action of its own resentment. In this sense, all criticism can be summed up as a value judgment in the margin of the book: “could do better.” [emphasis added]
[…]
The normative illusion wants the work to be other than what it is: it supposes that the work has no reality or consistency except through its relation to a model to which it can always be brought face to face […] The work supposes a model: thus it can be corrected.2
In other words: when I make an aesthetic judgment, I’m comparing a really-existing book to an imaginary flawless book. But there is no such thing as a flawless book. Thus, every real book written by real people will always fall short compared to the “model to which [the real book] can always be brought face to face.” In an earlier draft, I used the analogy of a ninety-minute marathon, but a more accurate analogy might be a perfect circle. It is possible to imagine a perfect circle, but no perfect circles exist in the real world. Look closely enough with the right kind of lens and even the most perfect-looking circles reveal themselves as flawed and messy. Under extreme scrutiny, all really-existing circles fall short compared to an imagined perfect circle, just as all really-existing books ultimately fall short compared to the imaginary flawless book.
Is there a way out of the normative illusion? As long as we’re measuring books against a standard of excellence, I’m not sure there is. Such an endeavor requires us to imagine a perfect book. If we picked a real book to use as our exemplar, we would have to retroactively revise all our previous judgments as soon as we we came across a book that was even better. But there may be a way out of the normative illusion if the reviewer’s judgments were relative to a merely competent book. Judgments would still be relative to an imaginary model, but this model could plausibly exist in real life. I call it the replacement-level novel.
The term “replacement-level” comes from baseball statistics. David Roth explains it better than I can: “In baseball, a ‘replacement level’ player refers to the sort of freely available talent that could be pulled up out of the minors and slotted into a big league lineup; the Wins-Above-Replacement-Player metric reflects how much better (or worse) a given player is than that floor.”3 At any point, there will exist at least a few minor league players who could fill the role of a replacement player; however, the “replacement-level player,” like the “reasonable person” in a judicial opinion, does not literally exist. So too with the replacement-level novel. You can’t walk into a store and ask, “Do you have the replacement-level novel in stock?” There are, at any time, many novels for sale that would meet the replacement-level criteria, but the Replacement-Level Novel exists only in the mind of the critic.
My basic suggestion—which has probably been implemented before; I’m not so sure I’m proposing something totally revolutionary—is that a critic would judge a book in terms of its value over a replacement-level novel of the same genre or category. The traits of the replacement-level novel will vary from genre to genre and from category to category, and defining the traits of every conceivable variety of replacement-level novel is beyond my ability. That said, here are a few bullet points about the replacement-level novel of “literary fiction” (a term I really don’t like, but it’s what I’m stuck with; “realistic fiction” isn’t any better):
The reader is likely to have nothing more or nothing less than reasonably pleasant experience. The characterization will be moderately complex, and there will be a handful of interesting and/or insightful sentences and/or paragraphs, the kind that will make you sort of laugh to yourself: Yeah, I definitely know people like that!
A replacement-level novel is not a bad book, in the same way that a replacement-level player is not bad at baseball. A minor-league baseball player is likely to be far and away the best baseball player in any room he walks into, unless the room is filled with major-league players. Similarly, if placed in a stack of ten books randomly selected from the million or so that get published in a given year, a replacement-level novel is likely to be the best book in that stack, and it won’t even be close.
People who think of themselves as literary types will describe the replacement-level novel as “good on a sentence level.” I can't remember where I first heard the phrase, but I didn't realize it was a thing that literary people said until I saw it in Elif Batuman's Either/Or: “It was from Lucas that I first heard the phrase ‘good on a sentence level.’ He said it in a self-deprecating tone, indicating that he was attributing it to other people.”4 On the other hand, Batuman’s narrator defines “good on a sentence level” as “a book where the individual sentences had delightful rhythm and word choices, but some other part of it gave you a bad feeling,”5 and I don’t know if I would necessarily go that far. A replacement-level novel is unlikely to give anyone (save a tiny fraction of aesthetes) a truly bad feeling.
The author of the replacement-level novel is trying to get an A.6 In other words, replacement-level novels have a kind of carefulness to them. There might be a little experimentation, but the book as a whole won't be so experimental that the average college-educated fiction reader would describe it as "too weird."
To put it all together: when assessing a book’s merit, a reviewer could conceive of “merit” as “value over the replacement-level novel.” A great book is one that goes beyond the expectations; it has a special something, some special trait, that puts it ahead of the replacement-level novel.
Note that I said “great book,” not “Great Book.” Describing a work as a Great Book implies that people will still be reading it in a few centuries’ time, but conjectures about the books people will be reading three hundred years from now are a fool’s errand. To give a concrete example, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This was one of the best books I read in 2022. Will people still be reading No One Is Talking About This in 2122? I have no idea. It will depend on about a hundred variables, not least the form that social media and digital communications have taken by then. Still, I would call it great, with a small G, insofar as I believe it to have significant value over the replacement-level novel.
This is about all I have to say. The framework is not fully developed, and as my subtitle implies, I don’t intend for any of this to be the final word on the concept of the replacement-level novel. I also have to confess that I still don’t plan on writing book reviews any time soon. I lack the confidence or clout to defend myself against accusations of snobbishness (or, frankly, of bad taste; I’m not very good at being a snob).
I do, however, think I’ve proposed a good alternative to the flawless-book standard. It is is easy to come up with the traits of a merely competent book because it is easy to predict its overall effect on our minds. It is far less easy—impossible, really—to predict how a great book will affect us, change us, even. Indeed, if I ever work up the courage to start writing reviews, my guiding question will not be, Could it have been made better? Rather: How did it surprise me?
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This is entirely different from seeking out certain critics because one’s tastes overlap with theirs, or because one takes pleasure in watching the critic’s mind at work on the page.
Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2014), ch. 5, my translation. In preparing this translation, I consulted Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 16–17. Note that Wall translates the French word « illusion » as “fallacy,” such that « l’illusion normative » becomes “the normative fallacy.” I’ll say a bit more about Macherey in a week or two.
David Roth, “Replacement Level Billionaires,” The Baffler 50, March 2020, https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/replacement-level-billionaires-roth
Elif Batuman, Either/Or (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 63.
Ibid. I should mention that this essay was partly influenced by Batuman’s 2010 essay “Get a Real Degree,” in which she touches on certain aesthetic qualities that I would associate with the replacement-level novel: “If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust.”
This isn’t my phrase. I once heard a critic—for some reason I’ve convinced myself that it was Emily Gould, but Google is no help—say that they didn’t want to read books by authors who were trying to get an A.