"Literary Fiction Is A Genre"
Author Catherynne M. Valente blogs about a bunch of "literary fiction" books she's read in a row. An excerpt:
Every once in awhile I end up reading a bunch of "literary fiction" books in a row, whether to see what's going on outside of genre or by some fluke of omnivorous shelf-grazing. Almost always, it causes a rash of contemplation about literary fiction as a genre--because boy howdy is it a genre. And this time is no different. Due to what was staring me in the face in zoethe and theferrett's guest room, what was on offer in the Frankfurt airport bookstore, and what I happened to pick up when I got home, I read, in quick succession: A Brief History of the Dead, The Lovely Bones, Kafka on the Shore, and A Trip to the Stars. Add to that the not really literary fiction but certainly mainstream YA Feed and out of my own perversity a re-read of The Secret History and it's a feast of angst and high sales and quotes from the LA Times.
I found none of the others to be bad books per se. Obviously, they're bestsellers of varying degrees and somebody loves them, they speak to someone. But I feel like, with every one, they were doing it wrong. Clearly doing it right for someone, but doing it wrong for me, personally, as a reader. And with every one I felt like I got a clearer idea of the actual difference between "literary fiction" and "genre."
The difference, I think, is rules.
...If you center stage the weird shit, rather than using it as a fetching window treatment, then it's not Serious Literature. But what we're left with is a bunch of Literature that makes no sense because the authors are essentially operating a forklift they're not rated to handle. It's awesome! It goes up and down! It crushes things! Wheee! But if you don't read the manual, you end up with a messy factory, and everything is out of order and nothing makes sense. A novel should have its own internal system, its own logic, that coheres, that connects with itself. It should not be full of random incidents of magic that connect with nothing just because watching people grieve for three hundred pages is much harder to make interesting without ghosts or vampires. It feels lazy to me, intellectually lazy, to throw out scenes and leave them hanging, breaking all the rules of the world, with no explanation. And yet I see it again and again in these books.
I'm reminded of a speech from Six Feet Under, a show that for awhile managed to pull all off this afterlife/family drama stuff pretty well:
It may seem weird to you but there is a reason behing everything that we do here...
Every once in awhile I end up reading a bunch of "literary fiction" books in a row, whether to see what's going on outside of genre or by some fluke of omnivorous shelf-grazing. Almost always, it causes a rash of contemplation about literary fiction as a genre--because boy howdy is it a genre. And this time is no different. Due to what was staring me in the face in zoethe and theferrett's guest room, what was on offer in the Frankfurt airport bookstore, and what I happened to pick up when I got home, I read, in quick succession: A Brief History of the Dead, The Lovely Bones, Kafka on the Shore, and A Trip to the Stars. Add to that the not really literary fiction but certainly mainstream YA Feed and out of my own perversity a re-read of The Secret History and it's a feast of angst and high sales and quotes from the LA Times.
I found none of the others to be bad books per se. Obviously, they're bestsellers of varying degrees and somebody loves them, they speak to someone. But I feel like, with every one, they were doing it wrong. Clearly doing it right for someone, but doing it wrong for me, personally, as a reader. And with every one I felt like I got a clearer idea of the actual difference between "literary fiction" and "genre."
The difference, I think, is rules.
...If you center stage the weird shit, rather than using it as a fetching window treatment, then it's not Serious Literature. But what we're left with is a bunch of Literature that makes no sense because the authors are essentially operating a forklift they're not rated to handle. It's awesome! It goes up and down! It crushes things! Wheee! But if you don't read the manual, you end up with a messy factory, and everything is out of order and nothing makes sense. A novel should have its own internal system, its own logic, that coheres, that connects with itself. It should not be full of random incidents of magic that connect with nothing just because watching people grieve for three hundred pages is much harder to make interesting without ghosts or vampires. It feels lazy to me, intellectually lazy, to throw out scenes and leave them hanging, breaking all the rules of the world, with no explanation. And yet I see it again and again in these books.
I'm reminded of a speech from Six Feet Under, a show that for awhile managed to pull all off this afterlife/family drama stuff pretty well:
It may seem weird to you but there is a reason behing everything that we do here...
posted by pgenrestories at 10:16 AM
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