In 1836, Charles Dickens captured the imagination of English readers with a tale about a roaming club of men. Serialized across nineteen installments over two years, The Pickwick Papers ignited a nationwide craze for serialized storytelling.
The trend gained traction across the Atlantic as well. Later in the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all issued novels in installments. Moving into the twentieth, the episodic format saw another surge when serials from Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Armistead Maupin drew devoted fans.
Today, the twenty-first century is picking up the baton.
Over at New York magazine, Emily Gould’s “Dinner Party” newsletter currently hosts a six-part tale crafted by novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. “The Hater” unfolds as a keenly observed contemporary nightmare with a tilt toward autofiction. The narrator’s frenemy and fixation is “a tall, self-absorbed, Berlin-dwelling writer named Lauren…who has gotten herself in too deep with F., a frustrated academic turned book critic whom she met on Feeld.”
Gould attributed the timing of this not-quite-novel novella to nostalgia. “Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction,” she wrote in a foreword to Oyler’s opening chapter. “So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.” But it seems worth asking why “chunks” of fiction are their own reward.
What’s the appeal of a serialized story? And what makes this moment so ripe for a reboot?
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We can chalk the first serial boom up to a few factors. For one, a hungry marketplace. As Dwight MacDonald writes in his essay collection, Masscult and Midcult, Grub Street Dickens operated in a rapacious environment where “hacks…ready to turn their hands to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage, or anything else” laid the groundwork for what critics would call the middlebrow aesthetic.
The pioneers of a publishing model we still rely on believed that releasing more books at a faster pace fostered a healthier marketplace. That ethos directly influenced the artists themselves.
Dickens may have been among the earliest writers to splash around for pages and pages in what author Brandon Taylor has dubbed “character vapor.” That is, long swaths of interior backstory and description that don’t obviously serve the plot.
Stories that wander in this way are often described as “character-driven.” The appeal of Bleak House, for instance, lies in its flawed characters and quirky names, rather than in relentless action. Reading a book like this—pardon the modern verb—has traditionally resisted a single-session binge. Yet the meander can be deeply rewarding when doled out gradually.
Assuming our forebears also couldn’t hold a plot top of mind through week-long gaps, we can account for the spread of the character-driven chronicle. (Not to mention, the television episode…)
And if the first mass-market for books fostered a serial-friendly style, we must also remember that most people in that famously overworked pre-industrial world had only limited downtime. One can easily imagine how Victoria-era readers would have savored the digestible installments, the comforting social ritual, and the familiar magazine framework surrounding them.
All of this adds up to a highly efficient formula.
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Since Grub Street’s heyday, the success of serials has often mirrored a thriving magazine culture. As journals rose in popularity, so did the practice of releasing books in bursts.
The long-defunct Metropolitan magazine featured F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. And the first four books in Maupin’s Tales of the City series appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle that had not yet been kneecapped by the dot-com bubble’s collapse.
Today, magazines cling to the cliff edge like Mufasa. But their cunning sibling, Substack, continues to prosper. Over there, on the open, ungate-kept, ever-expanding newsletter frontier, plenty of serial fiction can be found.
Take, for example, John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, originally serialized on the author’s Substack before Belt Publishing picked it up. Also in view: downtown character Matthew Gasda’s Seasons Clear, and Awe.
Some Substack-born offerings have leaned into gamification, consistent with the social-media-app premise. Swedish author Jörgen Löwenfeldt has invited readers to vote on future chapters’ directions in his serial fiction, giving the work something like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure vibe.
Gamified reading is a contemporary trend. Yet many of those nineteenth-century conditions endure. Just as on Grub Street, we possess a literary marketplace that prizes “more, and faster!” across nearly every tier. And although many writers today aren’t well paid per word, a subscription model tends to reward excess and detours.
Finally, even if our downtime isn’t constrained by a 12-hour workday in many cases, our attention has been siphoned by companies that prefer to bleed us slowly. We of the scrolling generation are, in other words, already acclimated to the serial. Because we’re used to taking it lightly, glancing away, following figures, and returning for more.
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Gould’s Dinner Party isn’t the sole institutional newsletter—or Mufasa-esque signal—to note the Substack serial’s success. But The Hater does seem to be uniquely attuned to the moment.
Oyler’s story stands as a neatly paced exemplar of the form. Its themes—dating anxieties in the age of apps, hijinks centered on online matchmaking, and parasocial attachment—feel sharply contemporary. Structurally, it contains some degree of character vapor, though opinions vary on its value. (I tend to lean in favor.)
There’s also a welcome self-awareness about the project. A nod to the bugs and features of a container that’s meant to please intermittently. As Oyler’s narrator writes in chapter three, “Part of my agitation, I reflected in the stall, was that it was not hard to see where Lauren’s story was going, but she was taking quite a while to get there.”
And perhaps that’s the real joy of the “chunk,” and its contemporary utility. It can be maddening to glimpse the horizon’s end. But in this economy—where we could all benefit from slowing down—I’d rather stroll.
