PILCROW: John Pistelli is the author of the novel Major Arcana, which was first self-published here on Substack in serial form, before being discovered by Anne Trubek of Belt Publishing, where it was finally manifested on the physical plane this spring. John and his novel were also mentioned in The New Yorker's May 2025 piece: “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?
He has also written four prior novels—The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and The Ecstasy of Michaela—as well as diverse short fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism that has appeared in many venues. He writes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture and hosts a podcast on the literary canon at his bestselling Substack Grand Hotel Abyss, which has become a personal favorite of mine. We highly recommend you subscribe.
PILCROW: Welcome, John.
PISTELLI: Thanks, thanks for having me, Tom.
PILCROW: Do you want to talk a bit about your life in writing before Major Arcana, your previous novels?
PISTELLI: Sure. I’ll give a compressed biography. So I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. How much biography do you want? Let’s just say I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a small child reading Superman and Batman. I always wanted to be a writer. And I pursued the study of literature, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I got a PhD from the University of Minnesota in English literature, but I always did want to also be a fiction writer and really just write in many genres, but I really liked writing novels. And so from about the late 2000s on I began — or the late 2010s on, I should say, I began trying to publish short fiction and novels and I published a short novel with a small press in 2012 called The Ecstasy of Michaela and from there I began a self-publishing journey in the 2010s because, maybe we can get into this later, but I wasn't having a lot of luck trying to find an agent or getting small press publication for some of the other novels I wrote, particularly one called Portraits and Ashes, which I really did make a concerted effort to get an agent for around 2013.
PILCROW: I do want to talk about that, yeah.
PISTELLI: Okay, we can go into more detail about that later.
PILCROW: It’ll come up.
PISTELLI: I'll just say that I decided to self-publish that in 2017, around the time — all this time, I got my PhD in 2013 and was adjunct teaching, which I still do, from 2013 on as a day job, but I was writing. Both writing a lot of literary essays on the internet and trying to build an audience and a following there, and then writing fiction, short fiction. I was successful with the short fiction. I published every short story I ever wrote in a real literary journal, for whatever that's worth [laughs]. But the novels, I was self-publishing in the late 2010s and early 2020s. And I joined Substack in 2022 because it seemed like that was where a lot of the literary discourse and other kinds of cultural discourse was taking place. And in 2023, I decided it would be an interesting experiment to serialize a novel on there because serialization has always been a part of the history of the novel, especially in finding a more popular audience for the novel. And so I serialized Major Arcana mostly throughout 2023 for paid subscribers.
PILCROW: And at that point, when you sat down and said, I'm going to serialize this, it was always a plan to serialize it and not finish it and release it, you know, as a larger file? Did it…not occur to you, but did it cross your mind that maybe I should look for an agent for this or were you sort of over that at that point?
PISTELLI: No, I was over that because the reasons I was having trouble finding an agent back in 2013…because they weren't, I wasn't getting like form rejections, I was getting actual people responding to me who said “we like this actually,” but so it was all “we like this but” and the “but” was always some version of, “actually it's too kind of literary” or “it's not…the characters aren't relatable enough” or “it's not sort of pop enough," which is funny because Major Arcana would be called sort of too poppy later but [laughs] that’s fine.
PILCROW: Well I want to talk about that when we get to the Kirkus review, right, these sort of…a lot of people have heard these things; they're almost clichés in a way.
PISTELLI: Yeah.
PILCROW: So you didn't go that route with this. And if I'm not mistaken, you were writing it as you were serializing it.
PISTELLI: Yeah, I thought it would be cheating to write it and then serialize it, because generally writers who did serial fiction didn't do that. But I was always about two months ahead of the serial. If I had been writing it week to week, I think that would have been maddening.
PILCROW: I think there's some document somewhere where Dostoevsky's creditors are looking for him because he hasn't submitted a chapter.
PISTELLI: Yeah [laughs]. Right. Right. So I was trying to, I was trying to stay, I started the serial in May of or March of 2023 and I started writing it in January. And by the time I started the serial, I pretty firmly had the end in mind. I knew where it was headed. But I don't think I could have started this serial if I was completely just going week to week, because it took me about a month to sort of really discover the novel's whole sort of shape and form.
PILCROW: I mean, I think you know this, but part of the inspiration for this project, this Substack, PILCROW, that we started is because of how you did that. I mean, you're not the only person to be serializing a novel on Substack, but I would get out of work, whatever day you published it, every Wednesday or Thursday, I would read the next chapter on the way home.
PISTELLI: Wow.
PILCROW: On the train. And it was the perfect length for that. And I thought, why is this not something that's more promoted or even more formalized in a way? Because as you said earlier, there's a long — and as we say on the Substack, there's an extremely long history of serialization and it's something almost like a social technology that we've forgotten in a way. And maybe or maybe not, there's something about the internet and maybe Substack in particular that lends itself to that, or one hopes so.
PISTELLI: Yeah, I would hope. And thank you for that. I'm a bit of a hypocrite [laughs]. I'm a bad reader of of people's serialized novels on Substack. I'm always like I'll wait for the I'll wait for the print edition So I am hypocritical there. But I agree with you that's it's just very powerful, the serial, and I did find myself deliberately leaning in to certain gestures of the serial, like the chapters are very, they're sort of self-contained, but they kind of almost end — not in the most possible vulgar way, but they end on cliffhangers Because even novels you don't think of. You know, we know about Dickens, but like Henry James. James Joyce. I mean Ulysses was serialized until the-
PILCROW: I try to imagine reading Ulysses in serialized form. It hurts a little bit.
PISTELLI: Right. No, I don't know that that one really worked. And they never finished the serial because the cops literally shut them down because it was obscene, but I just think serialization is such a deep part, and there's a thematic element, too, because it's a novel about comic books, which are also serial form. And so I was sort of experiencing what the comic book writer experiences, having to have regular copy on a set schedule.
PILCROW: Right. Well, one person who didn't wait for it to come out in some other form besides me, is Anne Trubek from Belt Publishing. She was following along? How did she get in contact with you?
PISTELLI: She actually didn't read it in serial, I don't think. So after the serial wrapped up, because I had a lot of people tell me, “I'm not reading this serial, but I will buy it when you publish it as a book.” So I briefly self-published it in, I want to say, February of 2024. In February of 2024, it fell into the hands of Ross Barkan, the journalist and novelist. And he did an interview with me on his very widely read Substack.
PILCROW: Political Currents.
PISTELLI: Political Currents, right. Because he's a political journalist and he literally, I mean, he's widely read because he like has the scoop about, you know, Zohran or whatever it happens to be. But he also writes very brilliantly about literature and culture.
PILCROW: And is a novelist in his own right.
PISTELLI: And is a novelist, I recommend his novel, Glass Century. So he published an interview with me and that's what Anne Trubek saw. And she then purchased the Kindle edition of my self-published version and read that and decided that she wanted to publish it.
PILCROW: So that leads into what I think is a really big question, not just for me personally but for anybody following this this project, PILCROW. To have this novel serialization contest and spread the word in that way. I think a lot of people who have almost completed or completed a novel feel a certain way about self-publishing. I think the assumption for generations in the world of at least literary fiction has been that editors or agents are basically allergic to anything that has been self-published, that it reeks of the vanity press or someone's weird blog. But we were talking earlier and of course the rules are maybe a bit different in genre fiction or certain fan fiction communities that launch these sort of you know adapted bestsellers. But I think as an operative consensus for a long time that's been true of literary fiction. Is that something that you and Anne discussed? Had she ever discovered a writer she went on to publish this way before?
PISTELLI: So Anne, her publisher Belt Publishing was mainly a non-fiction press until now, and so this is one of their first fictional offerings and it's a direction she wants to go. And so I don’t know if she found…what you're saying, it's funny because there's genre fiction on the one hand literary fiction on the other there's nonfiction on still a third hand, and I think even going back 20 years there’s been a certain legitimation of the nonfiction blogger. It was in the mid-2000s that people like Ezra Klein or people like this began as bloggers and then were acquired by institutional journalistic organizations like the The New York Times or The Atlantic.
PILCROW: And you had a foot in that world, no? This sort of 2000s blogosphere?
PISTELLI: Yeah, I did, but I was on the more fringe political edge of that at the time, so nobody was going to publish me as far as The Atlantic went. And I sort of have effaced that part of my career, as it were.
PILCROW: Well, you mention someone like Ezra Klein. There was a point in maybe the early 2010s when a lot of established outlets tried to co-opt that blog form, and it doesn't seem to me like that had a lot of success on their sort of official websites and all that. Maybe some, but, it almost seems like the energy has shifted back. I mean [laughs] maybe this is just the collapse of prestige journalism as such. So some of this sits in tension with okay this earlier attitude, we say maybe not so much for non-fiction or journalism, but definitely up until pretty recently for literary fiction at least, but there's a weird tension there between conversations that I've had with agents in New York and this is I think pretty widely known that one of the marketing ploys now is to find someone who already has a built-in audience.
PISTELLI: Right.
PILCROW: And I wonder about that tension, that kind of allergy to things that have been self-published versus if you’re publishing something and you have a following, is that legitimated by this process or…maybe we don't have an answer yet?
PISTELLI: Yeah, I don't think we do. I mean, I think the thing about literary fiction as against genre fiction, and I think Naomi Kanakia has written about this on her Substack, is that there was this almost an orderly, like a cursus honorum if I'm pronouncing that right. It was like the final stage of grad school or something. You went, you got your BA, you got your MFA. You wrote your short story collection. You wrote your novel. And this was all a very orderly process that wasn't sort of sullied by the populist energies of the internet.
PILCROW: You could argue that Joyce almost invents this in a way. I’ll write my autobiographical novel, my short story collection, and then my big novel.
PISTELLI: Right. And it's not a bad model, in a way As long as you stop writing that autobiographical fiction at some point for the love of God [laughs]. But it became I think kind of a stale model at a certain point. So I do think that this idea — I'm ambivalent, because I don’t think you shouldn't have to have whatever the number, I’ve heard the stories about people getting rejected by agents because they don't have 10,000 TikTok followers or whatever the answer is, whatever the right number is. I probably have the right number of Substack subscribers. I think my Substack subscribers are exactly triple the number of average literary fiction sales or something, so I should be okay there [laughs]. But you don’t want all literature to be about social media stardom. But the system had also gotten pretty brittle and out of date, so something has to change.
PILCROW: Which is the more democratic, dynamic system, rather than, you know the the 26 year-old agent or assistant who only reads contemporary literary fiction because that’s their job, ruling one way or another or letting the masses decide in their own way.
PISTELLI: Right.
PILCROW: And I have a reason that I'm asking this, because I've known writers who've gone through this who've been dealing with Big Five publishers who didn't want to be on social media, who didn't want to self-promote, and they're not just talking about an influencer’s memoir, okay, we can understand why that might have some kind of built-in audience. But writers who were told “you need to go out there and and self-promote.” And not everybody is good at that.
PISTELLI: No, yeah.
PILCROW: You are. And I say this out of admiration, you can do this self-promotion thing in a way that feels authentic and doesn't feel like bad social media. Is that something that you forced yourself to develop over time? Or is that just who you are?
PISTELLI: I started blogging as soon as — I got on LiveJournal in 2002, so I generally have a desire to speak to an audience, I think. There's just always been that. It just always seemed like a great opportunity. It can become a trap, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm a little bit in a trap. Like, we're recording this on September 15th, if you don't mind my saying, and I have this weekly newsletter and I sometimes comment on the day's events and sometimes when something happens. I think, aww Christ, they're expecting me to say something.
PILCROW: Audience capture.
PISTELLI: Yeah, and then I have to be very... because I'm very aware that there's different sorts of factions of the audience and all of this. So sometimes, you know, you wish you didn't have to do it. Or you wish you could take a week off, or, you know, “must I really?”
PILCROW: I will say that that's part of the idea behind PILCROW, behind this project, is that not everybody has — and I don't think a lot of people realize how much work that is, or just the psychological demands of self-promotion — that maybe this can be that for people who don't want to necessarily have an entire presence in devoting a big chunk of their lives to doing that. At least that's the hope.
PISTELLI: Well, right. I mean, one of the things I often think about is there's a lot of discourse about “well, we need to get offline, and we need to get offline more, and we can't be online so much.” And I'm not unsympathetic to that, but that's not going to work until there's some kind of infrastructure that the online world displaced that can be rebuilt.
PILCROW: Right.
PISTELLI: And so, personally, I can't get offline until my fame becomes self-sustaining, as it were [laughs]. Until there's some other institution that can sort of carry me along, I can't do that. And so I think it's good for there to be ideas about new institutions that can relieve the individual from some of this pressure.
PILCROW: Well, that's what I want to talk about next. I would be remiss in not mentioning that a lot of the...I joined Substack around, I think, the same time that you did. And I think appropriately for a place, for a site, that was set up the way that it was and was welcoming the kinds of people that it was, there been a lot of discourse around the collapse of these institutions, not just in literary fiction, but obviously in journalism. You've had former op-ed writers, and people moved onto Substack, and made five times the money they made as a staff writer somewhere else. But also that comes with a built-in instinct to criticize the institutions that are perceived as having failed. Look, I live in New York. I'm relatively well plugged-in. I don't know anybody who thinks that we're in a really healthy or golden age for literary publishing, for whatever reason. And you can see this on Substack, and you can see this as part of the discourse, not always from people who have the same critique. Or who are politically aligned. There's, I think thankfully, a lot of diversity in the reasons why — you mentioned Naomi Kanakia and her newsletter, Woman of Letters. She has her own developed thesis about this that is sometimes in tension with other theses about this. And I wanted to plug this into some of the reviews of Major Arcana. But do you have a theory about the sick man that is literary publishing?
PISTELLI: [laughs] I think my theory is really boring, which is that there's a very large number of factors. I think people are searching for a monocausal explanation and I don't think there is one.
PILCROW: Yeah.
PISTELLI: I think that there is inability to keep up with rival media. I think that's one thing. They're just becoming sort of out of date and out of touch with where the culture is generally going, and can't really respond or are responding in kind of crude ways. Like all the way back in 2013, another problem I ran into with agents was, “can you do The Wire but in a book? Can you do Mad Men but in a book?” And I started promoting Portraits and Ashes. I used to have this line, it's like, “José Saramago's Blindness, but written by Lena Dunham.” Or maybe I did that the other way around. “Lena Dunham's Girls written by José Saramago,” which actually kind of fits, but…but this this kind of inability to compete with rival media, envy of rival media. I think some of the problems in academia, which furnishes the pipeline into these industries, the collapse of some of the standards of literacy and academia is a problem.
PILCROW: That is something I wanted to touch on. I didn't know how much you wanted to go into your experience as an academic with a PhD, but it does seem these questions aren't exactly orthogonal. I mean, obviously, if you're working in the publishing industry, if you're writing, you've probably gone through higher education in a formalized way. So are there overlaps there that you think lead to where we are now?
PISTELLI: Yeah, I think so. I think that the decline of the English major, the decline within the English major, the sort of, you know, “nobody reads long books anymore, nobody reads complex books anymore,” there's a certain limitation on what you can assign. One of the monocausal explanations I'm wary of is “well it's ideological capture because of wokeness.” And it's like, well, sort of but it's not…I mean everybody was liberal and interested in feminism and multiculturalism in the 80s and they were still publishing much better books so it doesn't seem to me that that's really-
PILCROW: They were still serializing books in the 80s!
PISTELLI: Right. So that doesn't seem to me to be…that is a problem, and you know we could talk about that a little if you want but…there was more political diversity in the 80s or the 90s than there is now in mainstream publishing on the literary fiction side. So it's not not a problem, but I think that's probably less of one than almost — it's more a symptom than a cause, the kind of brittleness with which they hold these opinion, is a symptom of the sort of general deculturation of the metropole. I sound like I'm ten thousand years old, but-
PILCROW: No, I think brittleness is a good word, because you said everybody, and like I was saying, this discourse on Substack of the last several years, everything does seem to be searching for something monocousal. And everything is right and everything is wrong simultaneously, because it is pointing to some kind of brittleness or some kind of exhaustion in a way. And maybe that plugs into the next question, which is specifically about your novel Major Arcana and its reception, its reviews. There was one that really stood out to me. Maybe I could do this, although you might be more suited, obviously, to give a brief synopsis: what is Major Arcana?
PISTELLI: I guess you'd call it a generational saga. So it covers a couple generations from the late 20th century until the present. And it begins with an inciting incident, which is the public suicide on a university campus of a student, while his friend films this act. And then the rest of the novel is a kind of explanation of what leads up to this act, and it encompasses about 50 years of history. So it's basically, there are two main plots: the first one is the story of a comic book writer, a sort of cult comic book writer in the late 20th century. Who does very dark and occultist takes on superhero stories. An American figure in the vein of what comic book people call “the dark age of comics,” around the time of Alan Moore or Frank Miller or Grant Morrison. Where you had these superhero comic books for adults that were very grim, dark, violent, graphically, sexually transgressive. And so I have a fictional character who is a writer of this nature. Who is also a practicing occultist who wants to communicate a view in line with the esoteric or magical tradition of imposing one's will on reality with these books, and who is also very much somebody who's experimenting with gender identity. And so the first half of the novel is really about this character's production of these comic books amid the entanglements of, I'm trying to be careful with pronouns here, with this person's personal life-
PILCROW: Even you get confused.
PISTELLI: Yeah [laughs].
PILCROW: I want to interrupt here and say that I think some of the most bravura passages in the novel are actually the descriptions of the graphic novels that Simon Magnus is working on. It's almost a truism that if you write a novel about a novelist or an artist who is a genius, it's hard to describe what they're doing. But I found myself incredibly absorbed by the passages that are...and I didn't grow up reading comic books or graphic novels, and I was very, very absorbed by those passages in the book.
PISTELLI: Well, thank you.
PILCROW: They're sort of a co-protagonist as well.
PISTELLI: Right. Yes. I was hesitant about how I would do it, I even thought I would do like excerpts from his scripts or something, but I decided that would be kind of a gimmick. So what I tried to do was to describe them in a way that made them...I don't know how to say it. I wanted it to seem to you like you had read 300 pages of a comic book from me just writing three paragraphs. Just to be suggestive in that way. And so I hope that worked and I hope that wasn't confusing.
PILCROW: I think it succeeds on that basis And there's, again, the younger co-protagonist Ash Del Greco who…I don't know are spoilers still a thing? Who may or may not have a connection with the…because the public suicide, the livestreaming of it, occurs on this college campus where Simon Magnus, the first protagonist, is a teacher and it turns out that both of the young people involved in this incident were students in his class.
PISTELLI: Yes, and the second half of the novel is about this character in the present, this young Gen Z character, Ash Del Greco, who is an online occultist influencer and who may or may not have a familial relation to Simon Magnus, but who is definitely influenced by Simon Magnus's books.
PILCROW: I want to talk about a particular review that stood out to me. And I mean maybe it's unfair in some ways because it is one of those Kirkus reviews, these little two-paragraph capsule reviews, but I think there's a lot in there that that matters to me as a reader. And matters to me as someone trying to launch what PILCROW is doing and create a space for things that may not be articulable in other modes. So I'm just going to read from the Kirkus review. “The author doles out extensive digressions and critiques, often satirical in their exaggeration, about a wide range of hot-button topics. In addition to gender, there's political correctness, Tarot, suicidal ideation, and advancing technology, to name a few. This unrelenting approach will undoubtedly alienate some readers, but others will be enthralled. Pistelli pulls off a few notable narrative surprises along the way, too. A rich and enriching novel for readers who persist through its challenges.” So there's two aspects to this mini-review that stand out to me, both of which bother me and both of which lead directly to my next question. One aspect is a stylistic or aesthetic critique, “extensive digressions and critiques, this unrelenting approach.” For one thing, the novel — or at least the novel that I read — is actually quite easy to read. It's accessible. In fact, it's a bit of a page-turner, as you said, in this serialization sort of framework. It has a motor on it. It moves. It's not The Recognitions or something. But the assumptions, in the comments that the reviewer is making, “for readers who persist through its challenges,” it seems very loaded to me, a kind of warning sticker for literary complexity. And if I'm honest, I find that really disturbing on some level. Do you have thoughts on that or why these contemporary reviews are written in this way?
PISTELLI: Yeah, for me, I deliberately wanted to hark back to an older - not much older, just over the temporal horizon, a slightly older model of the American novel that existed just in the forms of Don DeLillo's books, or Toni Morrison's, or maybe on the more quote unquote middlebrow level, like a John Irving, who was very important to me in my adolescence, where the novel would have kind of a big architecture to it, and would have a kind of complexity, and it would be satisfying as you got to the end that there had been all of these things that were mysterious along the way that began to fall into place as you get closer and closer to the end. I wanted to to create that kind of satisfaction in the reader where, yes, there is going to be a bit of a mystery as you start, but as you go through the book it's going to sort of coalesce and to order around you until everything is explained. Not everything, I guess, not thematically, but plot-wise everything is explained on the final page. I was trying to to create that kind of aesthetic order that would be satisfying that seems to have been lost in the literary fiction market with its bent toward the slice-of-life type of novel. And then as far as focusing on the present, I kind of think one of the maybe, I don't know, social or historical functions of literature can be a reflection on what's happening in the present day. That is not something that novelists used to shy away from. Dostoevsky took stories directly from the newspaper.
PILCROW: I'll tell you a little story about this. I was at a party or reception one time, this was during the first Trump term, and I was speaking to someone I won't name, but is a well-known writer, and she said, “I'm writing this story and it's about now, but I'm not sure if I want to use Trump's name.” And I thought to myself…wait, what?
PISTELLI: Yeah [laughs].
PILCROW: Like, was this an argument against “platforming” someone, you know?
PISTELLI: Right.
PILCROW: But I think that something like that has been operative in a sort of — I say this as someone with an MFA, like MFA discourse. You don't want to name things because it…something, it doesn't feel, what, literary or it doesn't feel…something else?
PISTELLI: Right, yeah, that's probably, this is…I'm gonna I'm gonna flag this as a joke before I say it. That's the CIA conditioning of the MFA program [laughs]. You know, I'm not big on that kind of conspiracy, I mean there's a grain of truth to that obviously, but, I understand you don't want to write something that's — it's a tough line to walk, because you don't want to write an op-ed. And one of the things I also tried to do is try to create what I call ideological suspense, where I introduce these issues, and you almost think I have a certain predictable take on it from the way it's portrayed at the beginning. But you go through such a journey with the characters that…the thing I take issue with in the review is the word “satirical.” I don't think it is satirical. I think maybe it feels that way in the opening chapters, but by the time you've gone 400 pages with these characters, you know them so deeply and you don't condescend to their journey and their impulses.
PILCROW: Well that leads into, I said there were two aspects to this, you know, these two paragraphs that really stuck with me. The second aspect is, I guess we could call it a sort of trigger warning aspect. You know, they say “hot button topics,” right? That the novel's topical concerns are at least like a conditional mark against it, that this would be part of its review for at least the prospective reader that this review is assuming to exist. And I know you've talked about this a lot in other interviews, but do you want to address that?
PISTELLI: Well, yeah. And it bears talking about. We're talking about the gender identity portrayal in the in the book. And I did write it in 2023 largely as a reflection on the way that issue had evolved, and that I had watched it evolve over 30 years, because I did watch it evolve, because it was part of those late 20th century comic books, that in real life, that are reflected in the novel, those comic books very much were at the vanguard of those discussions in the 1990s. And obviously we're in a changed political environment now. I don't know if I'd write it any differently now. That's an interesting question.
PILCROW: You mean because discourse moves so fast?
PISTELLI: Yeah, you know, I guess now there's talk of almost, you know, transgenderism as a kind of marked political category as if it were like a type of terrorist or something-
PILCROW: Yeah.
PISTELLI: And I would not wish to give any kind of aid to that thinking. And I don't think the novel does. But the novel was written in and about a different political atmosphere where I was trying to bring some complexity to the whole question of the subjective feeling of gender identity and the way that's expressed and some of the limitations…I think they were limitations, of the way that was expressed in the 2010s around things like the category of non-binary identity or things like that.
PILCROW: And the protagonist of — well, the co-protagonist of the novel — Simon Magnus, goes even further and goes beyond pronouns, right?
PISTELLI: Yeah. And, you know, just to editorialize, I kind of agree with his view. That was kind of a view I toyed with in the 2010s when I was confronted with a lot of the pronoun stuff in my professional environment was, well, let's just take this to the end of the line, because they/them is kind of inelegant as a grammatical solution to the problem of the fact that gender is a spectrum as it's experienced. And it is. I would never say it wasn't. So let's just abolish the pronoun altogether. And that's what Simon Magnus does. And I call Simon Magnus “Simon Magnus” throughout the novel.
PILCROW: Some reviewers didn't like that, but I loved it.
PISTELLI: Thank you. Yeah, it was a risk. It was a risk.
PILCROW: There's a manneredness to it, but it belongs there. I could just say for me reading this, and comparing the actual novel, what I read, with that Kirkus review, these sort of allegedly edgy aspects become something like...I'm actually cribbing this from Richard Ford when he was discussing a Harold Brodkey story, “part of the righteous vocabulary” of the novel, what Henry James called “the conversion into the stuff of drama.” It's not inert or offering a kind of discourse for our approval, or disapproval for that matter. I think in large part because the characters that we meet in the novel would reject that framing of hyper-discourse. It's all too idiosyncratic, maybe, to fit like that. While at the same time, there are sections of the novel that deal with, specifically with Ash Del Greco, really do engage with online discourse and culture. She becomes a manifester. She's involved in things like Tumblr and YouTube, these subcultures. All of that is in there, but it doesn't feel discourse-y, for lack of a better word. It feels human.
PISTELLI: Well, thank you. That's what I was going for. That's what I was hoping for. I understand that different people are under different kinds of pressures and so different kinds of readers can't read it that way. I mean, they say you shouldn't, but I read the Goodreads reviews, and it's really funny the range of them. There's people who are like, “this just sounds like a grumpy old man complaining about these kids and their pronouns,” and then there's one that just says, “this is a woke queer novel.” And I don't know, I leave it I leave it to you, I leave it to the readers.
PILCROW: How does one square that circle?
PISTELLI: I don't know. I guess I think that there's always a margin of ambiguity in art. That's what makes it not propaganda.
PILCROW: Well, I said that this was leading to an actual question. Both the sort of implied aesthetic warning in the Kirkus Review that this might be, in fact, literary, and also the sort of discourse-y stuff. But it's a simple question. Do you think this novel could or would have been published by a major press like the Big Five in 2023? And if not, would it have to do with either or both of these aspects?
PISTELLI: Umm, 2023 probably not. 2026? I don't know. Because politics and ideology are changing…because a lot of what…so a lot of the issues at big institutions were driven by staffers rather than driven from the top. So for instance, when one of the major publishers, I forget which, was going to publish Woody Allen's book, this was 2019, I think, or early 2020. The staff threatened to walk out And it was the same in some of these journalistic scandals like around when Barry Weiss was at The New York Times, it was all about — not even journalists, like people in the IT department or in the Slack channel threatening to walk out. And I think now these organizations have gotten a little bit more proactive about telling those people to shut up.
PILCROW: So some people — some people on Substack — would suggest that this is part of a downwardly mobile sort of professional managerial class, that this is a way to kind of actuate at least some kind of presence or ownership over discourse. Do you buy into that?
PISTELLI: Sure, yeah. I think a lot of things are affected by the fact that there is a kind of diaspora of the academically unemployed or semi-employed, of which I myself am a part, totally.
PILCROW: Likewise [laughs].
PISTELLI: So a lot of things come from that. I just wish that it didn't take the form of a censorious impulse.
PILCROW: I'm gonna say something, and it might sound like damning with faint praise, but it's absolutely not. When I read Major Arcana, when I finished it, I thought to myself: this is absolutely a novel that could have been published in the late 90s or the early 2000s. I think of Jonathan Lethem, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon — although I know that comparison with Chabon because of comic book stuff may not be the most comfortable one for you — it's not a stylistic comparison, but a sense of expansiveness, a small-L liberality that I think the novel embraces and I thought: if not, if this wouldn't have been published in 2023, we've lost something.
PISTELLI: Well, thank you. I genuinely don't know. I'm really not sure about, and maybe I don't pay enough attention to what the Big Five is publishing because so much of my attention is absorbed by what's going on on Substack and related publishers that have picked up the slack like Arcade Publishing or places like that. So yeah, I'm really not sure. I guess. If we want two examples, which aren't statistics either, but we mentioned Ross Barkin with Glass Century, and he said that he was not able to find a Big Five publisher, and that has none of the ideological-
PILCROW: I find that so surprising. With that novel.
PISTELLI: Yeah, that has none of the ideological issues with Major Arcana. It's just that it's big and complex. And I do think there might be still this fear that readers can't handle that or don't want that. I think it's just the opposite. I think it's an underserved market.
PILCROW: Well, that leads me into sort of the final big question here, which is that has to do with Substack, or at least a certain corner of substack. You've been at least somewhat associated with, call it a term or a movement or designation that's been bouncing around on Substack, from Ross Barkan at Political Currents, which was his original Substack, but he's also the editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review, which is something I read almost every other day. Matthew Gasda, who wrote the play Dimes Square, but even someone like Ted Gioia who is pretty removed from a lot of these sort of subcultural literary disputes. I mean, he writes about culture in general, but mainly about the music industry. That's his background. But there was this confluence around this term, “The New Romanticism.” Does that term mean anything to you? Is it something that's identifiable or articulable at this moment?
PISTELLI: Yeah, well it's kind of gotten — I don't know, I almost said it's gotten out of hand a little [laughs] but my understanding is that Ted Gioia started talking about it in late 2023, as an idea that goes back to what I was talking about before, this preference for…reacting against what some of the online world has become, preference for analog media trends — ironically like TikTok trends — but still things like “cottagecore” or “dark academia” that almost fetishize this pre-postmodern life or whatever you want to call it.
PILCROW: There's a hunger for something.
PISTELLI: A hunger for something, yeah. And I think that's what Ted Gioia had in mind. And then Ross linked it actually very specifically to some of the occult New Age currents that I was researching to write Major Arcana.
PILCROW: Which are very American in many ways.
PISTELLI: Totally. Stemming from Emerson, Transcendentalism, New Thought. I immersed myself in this online world to write Major Arcana. If you read my Substack posts from 2023, I kind of was research-captured by them. I was like, “yeah, magic is real, manifestation is real; I don't even know how people don't think it is.” If you read those posts, I’ve cooled down a little, but-
PILCROW: Well, you had a career self-publishing or pseudo self-publishing novels. You're in your 40s now, and then you were mentioned in The New Yorker. Did you manifest that?
PISTELLI: Yeah, I mean, yeah, sort of. I mean, it does work in a way. It just works in a more mundane way than people think. You actually have to sort of go out there and make it happen. You have to be very insistent upon your own importance, as uncomfortable as it sometimes feels.
PILCROW: Which I would say is…a response to…in the institutional era of American letters, which I think was a really brief period. Historically speaking, the post-war period up until somewhat recently, the idea that one didn't have to present themselves, didn't have to have that sort of, that thymos, a term that Fukuyama has terribly abused. But you know that, that you have to put yourself out there. And it's one of the things that I admire about Substack.
PISTELLI: Yeah, I mean it’s just easier in a world where where Farrar, Straus and Giroux could do that for you, and it just doesn't appear that we're really in that world any longer. So that’s what Ross was talking about initially and then it's really developed into essays for and against…there's a new journal that Matthew Gasda is part of called Romanticon. Which was the coinage by a writer on Substack named Mary Jane Eyre, who I think initially meant it as romantic conservative, to name the tendency of Gasda and myself. Though that's not exactly what I would call myself. Does it name anything real? For me, I'm not so into the Luddite aspect of it. I'm not really that kind of a person.
PILCROW: We’re recording this interview to be posted on — however literary it is — a social media site.
PISTELLI: Right. I don't yearn for the cottage or anything. But as a literary idea, I guess one of the reasons I embraced it was to hark back to those romantic values of things that I think have been missing from literary fiction and other aspects of culture recently, which is the value, the shaping power of the imagination, the value of beauty as a factor in art, which I would define very broadly, not just to mean some kind of kitschy, pretty picture, but things I was talking about like the architecture of a narrative that is satisfying in its complexity, but also its resolution. Can we bring back some of these values of beauty and imagination into the precincts of the novel, of your sort of autobiography transcribed in bland prose?
PILCROW: I often wonder about this actually, as part of the…at least American or at least Western postmodernist movement The sort of anti-story revolution in fiction, including many people which I admire. I love Donald Barthelme, for example, or Robert Coover, or Angela Carter, but there was a bend back toward narrative fiction. In a way that maybe in the professionalized art world is still…and I think this was part of one of your earlier novels, is still somewhat stuck in this, where do we go from here in representational, like visual or experiential art? But it seems to me there is something very….I used the word “hunger” earlier, a hunger for narrative. Like maybe the novel will even withstand the slings and arrows of our extremely online culture.
PISTELLI: Yeah, I would hope so. And I think the example of visual art is well taken because I think that if you completely eschew representation…well, that can be an interesting experiment. I'm not one of these, there's always like, every month there's a discourse about, is Mark Rothko good? Yes, Mark Rothko is good. Like, shut up. Okay [laughs]. So I'm not one of those people. But if you completely eschew representation, you cut yourself off from broader conversations, a broader public, an ability to have art, to bring art to bear on what's happening in society and the world. And that's why I say I'm not really harking back that far, like, oh, you're harking back to Dickens or something.
PILCROW: Well, some people have described Major Arcana as Dickensian, and I always thought: that's not right. Dickens, to me, is quite linear. I think people are just reaching for a reflexive descriptor for that.
PISTELLI: Right. And you know, that's a compliment. I love it. I love Dickens, but it was just 20 years ago that we had, or 30 years ago. I'm old. I'm old, Tom. I don't know how long ago it was [laughs] but it just wasn't that long ago that we had Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and people like this and they're kind of-
PILCROW: The Satanic Verses.
PISTELLI: The Satanic Verses. People read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It just seemed like there was a bigger world of fiction out there than the Sebaldian maundering.
PILCROW: I do think that's what some people are responding to a lack of a lack of bigness or a lack of…I don't want to be sentimental, but a lack of heart.
PISTELLI: Yeah. And I want to be careful because I don't want to do a New Sincerity, right.
PILCROW: This is a slough of despondency one might fall into.
PISTELLI: Right, right. I love irony. I'm big on irony. But no, I agree with you that I don't think irony and sincerity in a novel are in conflict because the heart is that the characters are represented in their passions and the irony is that their worldviews are incommensurate. And you just dramatize that and that becomes almost like real life, where you feel your feelings and other people feel their feelings and you have to deal with them all at once
PILCROW: And the true cynic is the disappointed idealist.
PISTELLI: Yes.
PILCROW: Well, John, I wanted to ask you a final question. What are you working on now? What are we going to read next?
PISTELLI: Well, I finished, I think I already mentioned the date of this recording, I finished in August a short story or really a novelette of about 8,000 words that is the first fiction I've written since Major Arcana. And it's a bit strange. I was asked to write a short story and I ended up producing this and I sent it to the editor and said, “I don't know how you're going to feel about this. It's a bit long.” And because I've taken some public positions against the sort of Chekhovian realist epiphany driven short story.
PILCROW: I love Chekhov, for the record.
PISTELLI: So do I. Chekhov's wonderful. Chekhov is wonderful, but I feel like it's become a bit of a mannered gesture. So I had to write something weirder than that, so I wrote something... It's kind of a first person narrative by a poet, so there's poetry in it. And it's about political extremism. And so I said to the editor, “I understand if you don't want to publish this, because it's a little long and it's got poetry and it's a bit strange.” And I don't really know where it came from. I just sort of wrote it in August. But it begins with a political assassination of essentially a radical figure.
PILCROW: Seems like more than one of your works begin with…
PISTELLI: Yeah, I’m preoccupied with the violence of American life, I would say, or modern life. I think it's something that begs for representation, begs for some kind of an explanation. So I don't know, it might be a bit controversial. I haven't heard from the editor, and I think that's just because of the fact that editors are inundated and overwhelmed. And so my hope is that that story will appear from a venue near you and you'll be able to read it soon. And if it doesn't I'll figure out something else. That's the most immediate thing. Next I want to write another novel, but I don't know what form that's gonna take at the moment
PILCROW: Well, thank you for joining us today John. If you’d like to follow John's work. He's at Grand Hotel Abyss. I would highly recommend it. And if you like what you've heard today, if you believe in what we're doing at PILCROW, trying to restore the serialized novel to pride of place in our literary culture, please share, please like, and please subscribe. And again, thank you so much for joining us, John.
PISTELLI: Thanks for having me, Tom. It's been great.
