The Institutionalist

In a chapter so expertly woven together that you cannot help but envy the mind capable of doing the weaving, Alexander Manshel shares an anecdote about teaching the novels of Colson Whitehead. Having shown convincingly how Whitehead's novels are shaped by the “structures, institutions, and forms of labor” surrounding their writing, Manshel tells us that “the most common typo in my students’ essays on Whitehead, the misspelling of the title of his first novel, is also a brilliantly apt description of him as an author: The Institutionalist” (142). A cursory read of Manshel's influential monograph, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, might lead readers down the same false path. Manshel's attention to book clubs, literary prizes, university English departments and their syllabi, MFA programs, and grant-giving agencies makes it easy to label him an institutionalist, a scholar who makes sense of how we read by training a sociological eye on the organizations that determine what we read. But this would be, like the typo made by Manshel's students, an apt mistake. Because while it is true that Writing Backwards considers the work of Julia Alvarez, Michael Chabon, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tommy Orange, Julie Otsuka, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Whitehead against the backdrop of the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them, the book is at its most powerful when Manshel uses the fine instrument of close reading rather than the broader brush of institutional analysis.This is not to say that the two modes are opposed; in fact, Writing Backwards is a rare work that brings sociological methods into harmony with formalist and historicist approaches, not just by alternating between them but by drawing real conceptual and interpretive energy from the exchange of text and context. Still, Manshel's scholarship sings most at the moments when his abiding interest in the institution of education gives way to his voice as an educator—the professor who explains to his students how the list form in Nguyen's The Sympathizer or the miniaturization of objects in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach excavates history in ways only literature can. History, Manshel points out, is shaped not only by Great Wars or Big Events, but also by the “literary institutions” that have “privilegeed historical fiction above all other literary genres” in the decades since the 1980s (4). Describing his method, Manshel notes that he investigates contemporary novels “both at the level of the sentence and within a complex system of social relations” (6).Ambitious work that lives up to its promise, even if this reader is more compelled by the book's granular readings than its occasional statistics (94) and graphs (198). For me, Manshel's points about literary institutions are useful but unsurprising; it is his intuition for literary form and literary history that dazzles. Take, for instance, his treatment of the aerial photograph on the cover of Ben Lerner's 10:04, which Manshel reads alongside Lerner's description of New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (228), or his attention to Ruth Ozeki's use of metaphor in A Tale for the Time Being to address the historical catastrophes that have made us all “by-products of the mid-twentieth century” (224). Manshel considers both these novels in a chapter on “the recent historical novel,” which argues that “the prestige of, and demand for, historical fiction has grown so pronounced that the twenty-four-hour news cycle has been conscripted as a literary institution in its own right” (206). It's a sound argument, reminiscent of one Mark Seltzer makes in his 2016 book The Official World, and it yields the nuanced points Manshel makes about individual texts. That nuance is animated by an evident writerly affection that Manshel brings to well-crafted novels. He is as thoughtful about his own prose as he is about the novels he studies. Writing Backwards is refreshingly clear, always generous to its readers. And while never flowery, the book is not without its colorful moments: a novel “moonwalks through a variety of literary genres” (65), while another moves “briskly—at the pace of Billy Joel's ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’—across historical time” (180). The sentences that conclude sections are often poetic: “When the multigenerational genre is stretched far enough, one cannot see the branches for the family tree” (185). Given that Manshel frequently discusses fiction that contorts time, zigzagging between past and present, it is especially helpful that he is a clear and linear guide.What does it mean then, to “write backwards”? Although the opening chapter deals with recent novels with plots that literally move backwards through time, Manshel's title speaks more broadly to his catchy slogan that “contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary.” Manshel diagnoses the popularity of historical fiction over the last several decades as a “sea change in the American literary field,” one that has been especially dramatic for writers of color (240). In short, if you want to go big as a novelist, you better go backwards. As a good institutionalist, Manshel draws on ample evidence to support this claim: data about what sells, which novels appear on syllabi, and—perhaps his favorite category—what wins. Literary prizes, he explains, are bestowed most frequently upon historical fiction, and “ethnicized history” alerts prize committee readers to the likely identity of the authors behind anonymous submissions (73). This narrative of prizes and fellowships is compelling, but it is harder to accept that writers from Martin Amis to Julia Alvarez write historical fiction because they know it to be prize-winning and marketable. Perhaps I am naive, or painfully aware of how difficult it is to write any book, but I find it more likely that contemporary novelists are influenced by the historical fiction they themselves have read and studied, and by the histories they feel need telling. After all, even if Manshel claims that today's novels are examples of “new historical sincerity,” he himself notes that the authors he discusses were influenced by the less sincere but no less historical novels of Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and E. L. Doctorow. And of course, as Manshel chronicles in his introduction, all the novelists discussed in his book write under the north star of Toni Morrison, whose 1987 Beloved is “a model for a diverse group of writers interested in narrating the past” (1).For Manshel, this diversity is in some ways measurable. He claims that “over the past five decades, minoritized novelists have been canonized almost exclusively for the writing of historical fiction” (5). To support this point, he cites Richard Jean So's work on racial disparities in publishing, as well as data about the novels by writers of color that have been taught and shortlisted for prizes most often. The notion of “new historical sincerity,” for the minoritized novelists Manshel studies, names the shift from the highly ludic fiction of Ishmael Reed to the lyrical, sometimes magical realism of Morrison's novels. It also points toward a more general, recent shift from ethnic and Black realisms, where fiction focuses on present-day, quotidian, domestic dramas, toward ethnic and Black historical writing, where content is both post-ironic and past-driven. This interest in the orientation of today's writers toward history puts Manshel in productive dialogue with Adam Kelly, whose 2024 New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age considers many of the same writers as Manshel, with an eye toward what authenticity means in an age when everything, including the artist, can be bought and sold. And the emphasis in Writing Backwards on prizes, MFA programs and English departments, and the publishing market also places Manshel in the company of Jim English, Mark McGurl, and Dan Sinykin. As Jeffrey Lawrence has recently written in “Moving Beyond Institutionalism,” a response to several short essays by critics engaging with his 2024 essay “Mobilizing Literature,” a central challenge of institutional analysis for literary scholars is to establish how the governing logics of institutions enter fiction. In his response, Lawrence argues that the institutional approach falls short because it frequently offers allegorical readings that are always and inevitably partial.This is one reason I find Manshel's formalist and literary historical leanings more satisfying than his sociological ones. It is also why I find his most illuminating interlocutor to be Kate Marshall, whose 2023 book, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century, shows us that many of the things contemporary literary scholars like to call new—new genres, new topics, and new weirds—have long histories, with deep roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marshall writes about the strange genre mixing she sees in today's citational texts, a blurring of the lines that once delineated horror from fantasy, romance from realism. A penchant for genre hybridity characterizes many of the authors who interest both Marshall and Manshel: Nguyen, Ozeki, and Whitehead, to name three who appear at length in both books.If the biggest contemporary authors are writing genre fiction now, or are at least free to do so, as we are free to study it, must we admit that the so-called genre turn (much discussed from roughly 2015 to 2020 in contemporary literary studies) has lost most of its explanatory power? Taken together, Marshall and Manshel offer an instructive rethinking of genre. For them, genre isn't so much a taxonomic category as an aesthetic orientation. A historical novel, for Manshel, might be about space aliens or zombies, soldiers or spies. Similarly, for Marshall, a novel might have detectives as characters, but if they are written in a traditionally realist way, or a magical realist way, the end result isn't necessarily “a detective novel.” Marshall and Manshel instead suggest that genre is one way that writers reach back into the (literary) past to evoke and explore history. Even if this approach has been predetermined by markets and notions of prestige, as Manshel argues, writing backwards can refresh the sense of genre that critics have exhausted and fiction has outgrown. To put it in catchy terms that Manshel's book has helped cement, genre is out; history is in. Writing Backwards might not prove that all fiction is now genre fiction, but it makes a strong case that it may be more interesting to read genre fiction as historical fiction instead of thinking of historical fiction as just one genre among many.In this way, Writing Backwards is also a much-needed uptake and update of Linda Hutcheon's work. Whereas Hutcheon argued that all genres reveal how adaptation functions, Manshel shows us that all historical novels reveal how genre functions. And like Hutcheon, Manshel examines the ways cultural capital and institutional imperatives shape historical fiction. There is a self-referential quality of fiction that we once understood as the most artful, least commodified aspect of a novel, yet with Manshel's framework aboard, we can see metafiction as the vehicle writers use to address the market forces and institutional imperatives that create genre in the first place. Here, Manshel's work emerges as a useful mirror of Hayden White's Metahistory. Where White asserted the narrative and literary nature of historical discourse, Manshel shows us how our most contemporary literature leans heavily on history.Even the very recent past is now available to American writers as capital-H history. Manshel's last chapter explores these novels of recent history alongside the twenty-four-hour news cycle that has itself become an institution. How quickly can a novel digest and metabolize the present? Is it faster than ever, a sign that the line between past and present has vanished under what Anna Kornbluh calls “too late capitalism?” Manshel probes these questions in his last chapter, and although he does not state that the mediating force of time itself has begun to erode, his reading of reportage-style autofiction as historical fiction suggests as much. The content of our current news cycle, like the novels that reflect it, is cataclysm and catastrophe: invasions, wars, hurricanes, pandemics, and an array of meltdowns—financial, nuclear, and political. Manshel suggests that reading novels about these recent disasters can function as a form of “posttraumatic exposure therapy, wherein the reader can once again experience a world historical catastrophe, only this time without the surprise of its occurrence and the uncertainty of its unfolding” (231). While I'm not sure there's any work of art with enough therapeutic power to lessen the pain of recent history, especially with the knowledge of where it has led, I don't want to live in a world without art that tries to make sense of the past, whether recent or distant. And for those works to survive, to continue to be made, we need the institutions that disseminate, fund, teach, celebrate, and explain those works—the publishers, literary foundations, museums, foundations, grant agencies, book clubs, universities, and colleges. This is not a plea Manshel makes explicitly in Writing Backwards, but it is one that his new history of the contemporary novel allows us to make: no small achievement for a strong institutionalist.