Substack And Its Discontents
In Which Mary Jane Eyre Pisses Off a Large Number of People
Dear Republic,
Now that we’ve had a week or two of uplift — telling stories of workplace tribulations and of coming closer to God — let’s get back to complaining about other writers and/or the literary establishment as we launch Craft Week, aka Complaints Week.
If we’re being completely honest, I’m not sure I totally follow the thread of this piece, but Mary Jane Eyre is always brilliant, and somehow or other we move from a review of reviews of The Sleepers to an hysterical working definition of ‘The Romanticon’ while passing through a giant love puddle of intra-Substack referentiality.
-The Editor
SUBSTACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS
America’s Next Top Novelist (Or: What Is Substack Good For? )
As a naturalised Brit from the dark edges of the former Empire, it is with wry amusement that I've been observing the efforts of my fellow Substackers to make the American novel great again. I hate to break it to y’all, but we do not live in great times. We live in a time of shitcoins and microplastics. According to both Compact Magazine and The New Yorker, Substacker
didn't quite succeed in manifesting with Major Arcana (2025) the first great American novel of the 21st century. On the other hand, he did succeed in manifesting articles in both Compact Magazine and The New Yorker contemplating whether he had succeeded in manifesting the first great American novel of the 21st century. Not bad for someone whose research into the occult was, by his own admission, rather perfunctory. I am yet to read the similarly ambitious Glass Century (2025) by Ross Barkan (populariser of the so-called new so-called Romanticism), because my appetite for American nostalgia is limited. Instead I opted for ’s The Sleepers (2025), because my taste for interpersonal cruelty is well developed.Outside the world of Substack, which Matthew Gasda has called “OnlyFans for male novelists” (Matthew Gasda being one of the fortunate few with the ability to succeed on either platform), Matthew Gasda is probably best known for his play Dimes Square, memorialising the (Thiel-funded???) post-left art scene centred around the eponymous Manhattan micro-neighbourhood (or so I’ve heard). It is often said, not without merit, that for an art scene it produced very little art. But could the same not be said for the hot girl mud wrestling contests that passed for mainstream literary culture around the same time?
At least you Yanks had the pretence of an analogue alternative literary scene in New York. There has not even been the simulacrum of something resembling a scene anywhere in Great Britain — only
and and the ghost of William Blake in Soho at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Is it because American millennials are all on stimulants? The millennial cohort of London’s creative underclass — stuck inside a structurally unsound flat with two to four semi-strangers (unless Mom and Dad gave them a leg up on the property ladder), paying £7.50 for a smashed avocado on rye and £4.20 for an espresso macchiato [yes, that is a Eurovision reference] — are certainly no strangers to chemical aids, but these are generally used to fuel 36-hour deep techno raves in Victorian cemeteries, rather than AI-powered biofintech start-ups or high-end rationalist sex work or fake literary scenes.
Americans are so good at being fake that despite all the woke and anti-woke malarkey, you’re making twice us much fake money as us miserably materialist Europeans. That’s why arguments that Substack will only ever produce an ersatz literary culture leave me cold: I am well aware that having a semi-famous writer leave the occasional encouraging comment on my glorified blog is not the same as being edited by Ezra Pound. As Queen of the New Culture,
, has astutely observed: The Internet is for poor people. If traditional media has left deep wells of loneliness and nostalgia untapped, I say: drill, baby, drill!There is more at stake in the battle between the Substack barbarians and the literary establishment than the number of white men on the shortlist for a Pulitzer. When I witnessed
red-pencil the opening paragraph of Major Arcana, I thought of the perennial struggle between the letter and the spirit. If art is a finger pointing at the moon, Valerie Stivers is preoccupied with how well the finger is manicured.Therapy and its Discontents
In addition to reading The Sleepers, I have also read a number of thoughtful reviews of the novel (none by Valerie Stivers). Considering the reduced marginal utility of each additional review (beyond an insectile contribution to the general “buzz” surrounding the book and its author), I decided not to write another. (Matthew is welcome to count it as one anyway.) Instead, I will do what we here on Substack love to do: riff off each other’s (half-)baked thoughts.
called it a “Wake-Up Call for Millennials.” (If any Millennials are still sleeping after ’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018!) and um, recent events, I’m beginning to suspect that maybe they don’t want to wake up). Anthony also provides a useful round-up of other reviews, so I don’t have to. (If you want to grow your Substack, work smarter not harder):calls the novel “the new high water mark of Millennial fiction.” compares it to The Sun Also Rises, declaring the work “one of the great novels of this period.” thinks “it’ll stand the test of time as one of the more important and lasting literary novels of this millennial era.” There were a few others that I came across as well, all positive if a little less enthusiastic.starts off with a reasonable question: “Do we really need to hear about the empty lives and unsatisfying relationships of the Brooklyn cold-brew class ever again?” but ends up admiring the “formal, neutral qualities” of this “good novel.” Several reviewers seem to have confused a deadpan narrative with a neutral one.
It’s a grim tale, but one leavened with eros (rarely have I been this turned on by twisted straight sex) and humour so dark I want to date it: a gory vivisection of the soul of man under porn-drenched therapy culture. The sleepers may wistfully wish for the ability to believe in God, but it is in therapy that they put their faith, even though it doesn’t seem to be doing them much good.
Dan, the terminally online “Marxist” English professor (“Politics and Porn. That was the content of this thoughts.”) considers therapy “empowering” because it provides him “with the space to map his inner-landscape” and “the courage to explore the shame which had compacted and crystallized within himself.” He is able to locate his stored shame just above his pubic bone (somebody has been reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014). But despite talking “for hours and hours, for years and years,” he has never been able to talk to his therapist (or to his long-term girlfriend Mariko) about his most shameful experience: being penetrated by a tutor in graduate school: “He had hated it, it wasn’t what he wanted: the odors, the sensation, the general roughness.” He gets into trans porn, but he is unable to articulate the source of his desires (which might lie in the porn itself). He represses the fear that he might be gay by telling himself that he was “just curious—just letting off some erotic steam.”
[Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I have had the opportunity to get intimately acquainted with quite a few male members of the digital first generation, and let me tell you, honey, the results are not salutary. And yes, I do recognise that such an observation immediately implicates me in the very system that I wish to criticise and serves as evidence that I have not yet evolved past the need to plug myself into this network of bodies and increasingly artificial minds, like Nietzsche’s Last (Gay!) Man or something by the Wachowski siblings.]
Mariko enjoys talk therapy the way she enjoyed acting school: as a safe space where she can try things out, without committing to anything. She needs direction, in more ways than one. She is unhappy in all the roles that she has been cast: “I want to point in one direction, not ten. I feel like I haven’t started yet; that I’ve been looking for my start, like I’m looking for a lost penny.” Despite her efforts of to be grateful for what she has, she realises “there’s something seriously fucked up about me” that risks being passed on to her kid. She resolves to be “more diligent about therapy.”
There’s a pervasive sense of arrested development, with the characters unable to break old patterns and move forward. It is tempting to read this as an allegory for broader societal trends. I was reminded of what G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy (1908):
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.
The Rise of the Romanticon
Sam Buntz ends his perceptive review of The Sleepers asserting that the author’s “depiction of this doomed sleepwalkers’ world springs from a much livelier creative intellect than that possessed by his characters” and that this “should give anyone depressed by the world Gasda portrays a certain amount of—dare one say it?—hope.”
I expressed a similar sentiment reviewing James Macdonald’s 2024 stage production of Waiting for Godot (starring the dreamy Ben Whishaw as Vladimir):
In contrast to the creeping miserabilism that
diagnoses in the so-called liberalism of both Judith Butler and Marilynne Robinson, the cheerful nihilism inherent in Beckett dares the audience to own up to our Schadenfreude. Of course we can identify with the absurdity of Vladimir’s and Estragon’s existence, with their victim mentality and their bickering, with their procrastination and their wishful thinking, with their jumping at any distraction to pass the time (isn’t that what we in the audience are doing?). But laughing at these poor sods creates a distance not just between us and them, but between the parts of ourselves looking forwards and upwards and those parts of ourselves that are content to remain prostrate in the mud. Il faut imaginer Didi et Gogo heureux.
More cynically, one could say that the hope that Buntz feels springs from the similar sense of self-satisfaction which
has observed in admirers of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), itself inspired by the original critique of therapy culture, Philip Rieff’s The Triump of the Therapeutic (1966). Naomi wrote:Yes, some people in contemporary society do seem a bit empty, and I very much enjoy feeling superior to these people—It is this enjoyment that really is what powers the appeal of a book like this. You read this book and think, “Yes, this book describes certain tendencies that I recognize as being true. But...I have overcome them. Obviously other people haven’t, and I am better than those people.”
Naomi (who, despite having published several books through traditional means, has emerged as one of the writers most likely to convince sceptics that Substack can do more than provide a platform for those excluded from conventional media for being too white, too male and/or too reactionary), wrote one of her classic bait-and-switch posts earlier this year, asking: Is literature a false God?” Simone Weil might have replied that such a question answers itself. But Naomi wasn’t talking about God, she was talking about politics, suggesting that not all have the luxury to ignore it in favour of aestheticism.
“The Sleepers also participates in the aging Millennials’ conservative turn,” John Pistelli has written about the work of his confrère, “the dawning awareness that we have not so much removed Chesterton’s proverbial fence as blasted it into the sun, and this perhaps rather prematurely” (Chesterton also gets a mention in John Pistelli’s review of
’s AI-themed Stop All the Clocks (2025) — yes, it does get a bit incestuous). , one of the most insightful and generous writers whom I have had the pleasure of interacting with on this platform, has written about the “Lasch-Paglia intellectual dyad” inspiring this “conservative turn” (or “rightward lurch” if you prefer). Neither neoconservative nor neoreactionary (“Politics has nothing to do with a luminous heart,” Mariko reproaches Dan), a new archetype seems to be emerging. Here is a rough outline:The Romanticon avoids explicit political identification. He (most Romanticons are assigned male at birth) prefers to discuss higher things. He is probably straight, maaaybe heteroflexible, but cool with the gays. Not into drugs, but doesn’t make a big deal about it. He likely had some sort of religious upbringing, for which he is mostly grateful, even if he is no longer observant, preferring to follow what Oscar Wilde called “the Spirit of the Christ who is not in churches.” He is not afraid that Jungian archetypes imply some sort of the metaphysical fascism — he considers them to be mere “philosophical toys,” like Freud’s images of the mind and Plato’s Forms to be used in the kinds of glass bead games which he finds increasingly tiresome. He is probably named Mark or Luke or something similarly apostolic. He doesn’t go to therapy. He likes his bourgeoisie the way he likes his women: petite. In general, he prefers the small and the local: the seminar room, the family restaurant, the independent bookstore. (He might even make an eco-socialist case for Palestine.)
At its worst, romantic conservatism risks a similar kind of naïveté (or blissful ignorance) about the real world as the la la liberalism to which it is partly a reaction. At its best, it can draw upon neglected sources of wisdom and creativity to help chart a course between the miserabilism of the intellectual left and the callousness of the opportunistic right.
Major Arcana and The Sleepers both in their own ways suggest that the creation and appreciation of art might offer a superior alternative to politics and therapy and porn. Substack seems like a good place to test that theory.
Mary Jane Eyre writes about Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil and gay stuff at The Extremely Difficult Realisation. He lives in London.
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Great post. And this made me literally LOL for a second: "Matthew Gasda being one of the fortunate few with the ability to succeed on either platform."
The taxonomy of the Romanticon needs much wider circulation!
Can you explain the reference to Koudelka as Blake? I don’t see the similarity.