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On e-books, genre books and cap-L literature
June 24, 2009 | 7:34 am
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By David Rothman
Genre books dominate the fiction world—both P and E.
Science fiction novels, romances, mysteries, thrillers and other genre works have their places. But wouldn’t it be nice to see more mainstream novels published as e-books?
That raises another question. What’s genre entertainment, and what’s true literature? And can genre also be authentic lit? Is Raymond Chandler inferior to a 20-something novelist just because Chandler wrote crime novels such The Big Sleep?
In Slinging Stones at the Genre Goliath, a young novelist and creative writing teacher named Sonya Chung raises the genre-mainstream issue on the Millions site. An excerpt:
“With its obligatory happy endings, strict conventions, formula elements, and, above all, comforting predictability, genre fiction will always garner a wider audience than literary fiction. Which is another way of saying that more people buy books and spend time with the words in them to evade the (messy, complicated) world as it is than to see it more truly – in all its mystery, pain, complexity, and beauty. Resistance—perhaps opposition is not too strong a word—to genre fiction for a writer and reader of literary fiction is, in my opinion, a literary ecosystem imperative.”
So what does this mean for e-book awards, where genre literature prevails even more than in the book world at large?
Here’s my take on the general controversy. Genre books can be lit. But for that to happen, they need to be credible, not just entertaining. They cannot just pander to the reader’s desire for escapism or thrills. See a relevant Wikipedia passage in the crime fiction entry.
About Sonya Chung: She was born in Washington, D.C., and has taught at the University of Washington. Her first novel, Long for This World, will appear next year from Scribners. Her own favorites are “Rilke, EL Doctorow, Denis Johnson, Jane Kenyon, Don Delillo, Theodore Roethke, Hemingway, Mary Gaitskill, Chekhov, Annie Dillard, Philip Larkin, James Salter, Virginia Woolf, Roberto Bolano.”
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Oh please.
I saw that crybaby wail yesterday. Basically it all boils down to, “Why isn’t my treacly, wordy, and boring book not selling?”
Read the Classics. Read Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, et al. Do you snore? No! And I’d bet money if those books were published today, they’d be looked down on as “genre” fiction.
Chandler was ignored and disdained in his day. All the prizes and big money and recognition went to others. Yet all those others are today OUT OF PRINT. Chandler is recognized, too late for him, as genius.
All the boring wordy treacle of today will be forgotten too. They’ll be at the end of the Long Tail, their electrons gathering mold. Good riddance.
Most genre fiction, whenever it was written, is total crap; most literary fiction, whenever it was written, is also total crap. Most things written and published are total crap for that matter.
It is hard to praise literary fiction over genre fiction because literary fiction is really a genre in itself with its own conventions and formulas. Bad literary fiction is just as bad as bad genre fiction, only in the first you’ll find a divorced middle-aged woman taking to her mother about the meaning of life and marriage, and in the second you’ll find a Kung-Fu expert/Weapons Master with a supermodel girlfriend taking on the Mob for a mystery, or space aliens for science fiction, or zombies for horror.
Good genre fiction like THE BIG SLEEP will better than bad genre fiction and good literary fiction like Faulkner or Hemingway will be better than bad genre fiction.
She comes off as someone poorly read in genre literature: she should attack the books she complains about as being bad books, rather than as “genre fiction,” which gives critics an opening to complain that she’s judging genre fiction by its worst books, rather than by its best. If she made the argument that genre is so awful that even the top books in the field are corrupted by genre-ness, she would at least have a more sound argument there. Yet, haven’t bad, formulaic books always been popular, even back in the good old days?
You know, one of the great irony’s of the modern literary set is that they love to look down on genre fiction with disdain at the same time that they praise books that properly speaking belong in the genre section of the book stores. Lonsome Dove is a an unabashed western, though you won’t find it kept with the Westerns in the book store; Slaughterhouse-Five is a science fiction novel through and through (as is much of Vonnuget’s work), for that matter so is 1984. In fact, many of the works of various authors can properly be classified in one or more genres (Hemingway certainly could have some of his novels included in the war and or adventure sections of a book store).
About the only thing that Ms. Chung said that was accurate about genre fiction is that there are genre conventions; though if she ever actually bothered to read any genre fiction, she might find that they are often not that strict. Certainly many science fiction novels have not had happy endings, or ignored the complexity of the world.
I think Ms. Chung might have had a point if she tried to make the division between escapist fiction and more serious fiction. But even there, it ignores the fact that sometimes people need escape, or even really serious literature and novels can be escapist for some (Ever hear a literature teacher wax poetically about the beauty of the language in a particular work, don’t doubt for a second that they are getting lost in the language as completely as others get lost in plot).
My particular belief is that part of the problem that “literary” fiction has had for a century now, is that some authors have forgotten that the primary reason people read novels is to be told stories. If a novel fails to tell a good story, I don’t care what other virtues it has, to me, it has failed as a novel.
More ‘LITerature’ should indeed be on etexts. Genre is on ebooks because genre is popular, because people want to read it. But genre in general (some exceptions) is quite backwards-looking as an art form. I note Mike Cane referencing books 200 years old, almost, in defense of genre.
LITerature on the other hand could very well explore interactivity, hypertext, and other aspects of ebooks that simply do not exist on p-books.
@ Bill McHale “some authors have forgotten that the primary reason people read novels is to be told stories”
Actually, I think authors who focus too much on story often write the most trivial kind of fiction. A good novel, literary or genre, requires a balance of plot, character, theme, language, ect. Some authors are deficient in some areas, e.g, Dreiser had an awful prose style, but was still wrote important novels; modern authors often make the mistake of dropping everything but the action. If the story were the only reason to read novels, then people should probably just watch movies instead, because a good book will do more.
Hear, hear!
A novel exists purely to entertain. Ultimately it stands or falls by its entertainment value. Once the literati and their tame academics stop pretending that reading fiction makes them better people, and admit that they read it for fun, then this silly and fatuous debate will be over. People who _really_ want to ‘learn something’ read non-fiction, not novels.
Greg,
I am not saying that the only thing a novel should do is tell a good story (Thought I think that is also true of movies and television as well… we just have lower expectations of them.).
I am saying however that a novel’s first job is to tell a story. Its kind of like building a house. You need a good foundation first. You don’t want to live in the foundation, but without the foundation, no matter how good the rest of the house is, it will ultimately fail as a house.
Ultimately, a good story does not mean sacrificing the literary virtues that Ms. Chung and others wax poetic about. Indeed at the end of Ms. Chung’s article she gives a list of books that she believes provide both.
I want books that will both entertain and enlighten me… but if it doesn’t do the former, don’t expect me to stick around in case it might do the latter.
I rest my case:
A Reader’s Manifesto
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers