Would Illuminatus! be a publishing success today?

RAW fans, talking about how many times they have read Ulysses or about their Finnegans Wake discussion groups, seem out of step with the culture today. Literary fiction seems to be going out of style.

A Substack piece called "The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction" seems to document that literary fiction once sold well and now does not sell at all. It states, "No work of literary fiction has been on Publisher’s Weekly’s yearly top ten best-selling list since 2001."

I don't know that I agree with every claim made by the author, Oy, but most of his assertions seem to be correct.

A couple of other articles: In a blog post in April, I mentioned another Substack article, "The average college student today," which asserts, "Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By 'functionally illiterate' I mean 'unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.' I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of 'serious adult novel.' Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either."

Earlier this month, I read Lake of Darkness, the latest novel by British SF writer Adam Roberts. Its setting in the future depicts a society in which even scholars such as historians seldom have the ability to read and write. Why should you learn to read when an AI can read to you? It seemed like a convincing depiction of what we are moving toward. (Mostly, the book is a horror novel about black holes. I am fascinated by Roberts, who doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the U.S.)

Illuminatus! was a riveting read for me when I stumbled across it in college, but at the time, I was also reading Nabokov and other literary fiction and a pretty wide variety of science fiction, including the more challenging stuff. Some people have found Illuminatus! a difficult read. Would it have done well if it (or something like it) were published today? I also feel uneasy about the reception Richard Powers, another of my favorites,  would receive if he were just starting out today. Would he sell enough books to be able to make a living and keep doing it?