Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?

“I know many of my readers, particularly women, will read Jack as a sociopath,” the story’s narrator says. But “I really don’t think that’s fair.” This feels, at first, like a provocation that Kanakia is daring us to disagree with, especially when Jack, in the middle of a daytime bender, starts mulling what it would look like to maneuver Mona into sex work, with himself as her pimp. But the more time we spend with Jack, the harder it feels to write him off as a jerk, or as just a jerk. Maybe he’s different from how he first appeared. Maybe he’s changing. Eventually, he decides that he’s fallen in love. Has he really? Can love change him, or is “love” another tool he’s deploying in “the game.” Is he an asshole? A manipulator? Or a fairly normal young person, doing some fairly normal growing up, his every thought subjected to an unflattering X-ray vision?

The writing’s most salient quality is speed. There’s very little scene-setting or physical description. Jack’s house, despite being the location for most of the action and a central plot component, is left almost entirely to our imagination. We learn little about what the main characters look like, other than, occasionally, how conventionally attractive they are in Jack’s eyes. (“You’re so hot,” he tells Mona. “If you wanted to be trashy,” he says to Cynthia, “you could obviously be super hot.”) Time zips by breezily, the point of view slides around unpredictably, and more than one plot strand is introduced without ever being resolved.

But somehow these features, rather than being an obstacle to engagement, converge perfectly with the story’s interest in how it feels to be swirled around by the vortex of time, all your inherited circumstances, choices (wise and foolish), and luck (good and bad) running together so close you can’t tease them apart anymore, because they’ve become something else: your life. On the rare occasions when the narration slows down, it has the effect of making the action—often a long, fumbling conversation—feel etched in sharp relief, and loaded with some meaning just out of sight, something we can feel the characters reaching toward and, simultaneously, refusing to explicitly acknowledge.

Kanakia isn’t the only one playing with fiction on Substack. The National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie posts fiction, poetry, and essays on his Substack, and Chuck Palahniuk (of “Fight Club” fame) serialized a novel on his. The renowned Israeli author Etgar Keret (who, like Alexie, is a frequent contributor to this magazine) posts fiction on his Substack. Rick Moody, one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful literary authors of his generation, recently published a nearly twenty-thousand-word “non-fiction novella” on the Mars Review of Books Substack, and the Times columnist Ross Douthat has, since September, been using the platform to publish “The Falcon’s Children,” a fantasy novel, at the rate of a chapter per week. This is to say nothing of the many names—including George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, Catherine Lacey, and Elif Batuman—who have popular Substacks where they publish nonfiction about literature and life.

These are writers who already enjoy considerable levels of professional success and are using Substack to experiment with new styles, build direct connections with their readers, or make a few bucks selling premium-tier subscriptions to their biggest fans. On the other end of the spectrum are passionate amateurs who post stories, serialize novels-in-progress, commiserate about the joys and agonies of writing, talk smack about the literary establishment, and cheer one another on. In the middle sit writers who have, like Kanakia, acquired some of the markers of professional success without becoming names. Their outputs are a mélange of the passion and experimentalism of the amateurs with the polish and ambition of the pros, and they often possess a briskness that feels shaped by an awareness that an endless selection of other stories is mere clicks away.

In March, 2023, John Pistelli, an adjunct English professor and longtime literary blogger, began serializing a novel called “Major Arcana” on his Substack, where he also posts lectures on literature. It is a long, playfully serious novel that starts with a dramatic public suicide on a college campus and then works backward in search of an explanation, spinning a kaleidoscopic plot that spans three decades and tangles, along the way, with tarot, comic books, perception-altering drugs, academia, and the cultural politics of gender. After a year, when the serialization was complete, Pistelli self-published the book using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform.