Why does every bestseller sound the same? A mini manifesto against beige prose

Pick up any recent bestseller and you’ll notice it. The prose is clean. Efficient. Emotionally calibrated within an inch of its life. And, yet, somehow, utterly indistinct.

This is beige prose, smooth, flavourless, and engineered for mass readability. It’s not bad writing, exactly. In fact, that’s the problem. It’s technically correct, but soulfully inert. A style that’s been edited within an inch of meaning. Every sentence feels like it’s been test-marketed, stripped of friction, and dunked in lukewarm relatability.

Publishers love it because it sells. Writers adopt it because it’s safe. Readers tolerate it because it doesn’t demand anything. It glides along, politely. But somewhere along the way, we’ve mistaken digestibility for literary quality.

Take the prose of Colleen Hoover, for example, wildly popular, highly readable (according to some), but stylistically pared to the point of invisibility. Or the later works of Dan Brown, where exposition marches relentlessly forward with all the subtlety of a plot outline. Even Emily Henry, whose novels are bright and sharp in character, often leans on clipped, functional prose that prioritises pace over texture. Add to that list many BookTok bestsellers: competent, market-ready, but stylistically anonymous.

What we’ve lost in the race to readability

Compare that with the unruly, voicey novels of the past, Baldwin’s rage, Woolf’s interiority, Nabokov’s chaos. These writers weren’t trying to sound like anyone else. Their style was the story. In Another Country, Baldwin doesn’t just document racial and sexual politics; he writes with a heat that singes. In The Waves, Woolf turns language into liquid consciousness. Nabokov's Lolita is grotesque and dazzling, not despite its excess but because of it.

Now, many books read like they were ghostwritten by a committee trained on user engagement metrics.

There’s a risk here: not just of dull books, but of dull thinking. If fiction becomes too streamlined, too risk-averse, it stops challenging us. Language loses its bite. And so do the ideas buried inside it.

This isn’t an argument against clarity. It’s a plea for idiosyncrasy. For writers who sound like themselves. For books that surprise us with syntax. For characters who speak in rhythms that haven’t been pre-approved.

If you're looking to fight the beige, to remind yourself what friction feels like on the page, start here:

Five voice-driven books that won’t hold your hand:

1. Another Country by James Baldwin — This my favourite Baldwin novel. It’s lyrical, furious, structurally messy and all the better for it.

2. White Noise by Don DeLillo — A paranoid, razor-sharp satire with sentences that hover between absurdity and clarity.

3. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa — I've always loved this book, and don't know why it is not more widely read. It is fragmented, philosophical, and defiantly plotless.

4. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry — Another favourite. Dense, drunken, and linguistically baroque.

5. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker — What a novel. And it is about a man buying shoelaces, told through obsessive, hyper-detailed footnotes.

Readers can handle more than the industry assumes. We’re hungry for voices that don’t blend in. So if you're writing something weird, something jagged, something that could actually irritate someone, good. Keep going.

Literature doesn’t need more beige. It needs colour, grit, risk. It requires writers who don’t mind leaving a few readers behind if it means