Lauren Oyler's 'The Hater' Revives the Serial Novel — On a Newsletter

Novelist and critic Lauren Oyler is publishing a six-part story, "The Hater," through Emily Gould's "Dinner Party" newsletter at New York magazine — and it's the clearest signal yet that serialized fiction (novels released in installments) is having a 21st-century revival.

The form has a long pedigree. In 1836, Charles Dickens hooked English readers on a story about a traveling men's group, published over two years in 19 installments. The Pickwick Papers launched a craze for serialized fiction that crossed the Atlantic. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all published novels in installments in the late 19th century, and the episodic boomed again in the 20th with serials from Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Armistead Maupin.

Oyler's entry in the tradition is what the source calls "a psychologically astute modern nightmare with an auto-fictional tinge." Its 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."

Why now?

Gould attributes the timing to nostalgia. "Today's newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction," she wrote in a forward to Oyler's first chapter. "So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack."

But why do "chunks" of fiction work as their own reward? The first serial boom, the source argues, came down to a few concrete conditions.

• A hungry marketplace. As Dwight MacDonald writes in his essay collection Masscult and Midcult, the Grub Street (London's hack-writing district) Dickens published on was rapacious, full of "hacks…ready to turn their hands to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage, or anything else."
• Payment by the word. Dickens was famously paid by the word for magazine contributions, at a rate that would shock today's freelancers once adjusted for inflation. Length paid, so he wandered — exploring, in author Brandon Taylor's phrase, "character vapor": rafts of interior backstory that don't obviously serve the plot.
• Limited downtime. An overworked pre-industrial readership relished the digestible installment, delivered in the approving frame of a known magazine.

Put together, it amounts to an efficient hit. And the serial has historically coincided with a thriving magazine culture: the long-defunct Metropolitan magazine hosted Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, while the first four books in Maupin's Tales of the City series ran in a San Francisco Chronicle that predated the dot-com collapse.

What does the Substack shift change for readers?

Magazines today are, in the source's phrasing, clutching the cliff edge. But newsletters thrive, and Substack hosts plenty of serial fiction. John Pistelli's Major Arcana was originally serialized on his Substack before Belt Publishing picked it up. Downtown writer Matthew Gasda offers Seasons Clear, and Awe. Some writers have leaned into gamification: the Swedish writer Jörgen Löwenfeldt invites readers to vote on directions for future chapters, making the work something like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

The mechanism hasn't really changed, the source argues. Like Grub Street, today's literary marketplace rewards "more, and faster!" at almost every level. Few writers get paid by the word anymore, but the subscription model demands and rewards excess and digression. And while modern downtime isn't squeezed by 12-hour workdays, attention itself has been fracked by platform companies — leaving a scrolling generation already habituated to following faces, looking away, and coming back for more.

The pleasure of the chunk

"The Hater" is, by the source's account, a nicely paced paragon of the form, with hyper-contemporary concerns: internet dating psychosis, app-based hijinks, and parasocial relationships. It also knows what container it's in. 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."

That's the paradox and the pleasure. Seeing the end on the horizon can frustrate, but the chunk asks you to slow down and amble. In an attention economy built on speed, the serial's old-fashioned pace may be exactly its modern utility — and with Substack ungate-kept and proliferating, expect more writers to pick up the installments Dickens left behind.