“Fiction has become culturally irrelevant,” says Lee Seigel over at the New York Observer. I am sure he was weeping into an Hermes handkerchief as he typed. Culturally irrelevant? Really? Pretty sure the Twilight franchise is one of the only things keeping beleaguered Hollywood afloat. Pretty sure J.K. Rowling is one of only 14 women billionaires in the world that made her own fortune rather than inheriting it.
Oh, I forgot. Money is crass.
Except it’s also the yardstick by which our culture measures value.
You’re searching for the next Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald? Honey, you are looking in the wrong place. There are so many things a newly written literary novel cannot have to be considered literary, there’s nothing left to talk about but the same old dusty crap. Experimentation is not encouraged, and you know it. You want to find Hemingway? Hemingway wrote boy’s adventure stories. In sparse, amazing prose, yes. Faulker? Faulkner wrote AS I LAY DYING, FOR CHRISSAKE. Whassup, narrating dead woman? Fitzgerald, that’s the best of all. Rich people behaving badly. Novels built on the stuff of tabloids. (You know what, you can keep him. I hate The Great Gatsby and I don’t care who knows it.)
It’s all genre. Genre is the place where writers are mischievous. It is the home of dissent, of experimentation, of Weird. But you literary fiction types are so stubborn in your pigheaded anti-mischief you refuse to acknowledge what would save you. For the love of God, take your honed sentences, your radiant imagery, your soul-shaking themes, and wrap them around a plot. But no. Apparently Narrative NonFiction is the Great White Hope. We’d rather go with nonfiction, than touch that smelly, cheap genre work that earns fistfuls of money and garners adoring fans. No, keep the bloodline pure! Nominate Narrative Nonfiction instead!
Here’s the problem, chief, what made “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” the talk of the town wasn’t that it was nonfiction. It was that it was a thriller about a woman accused of hiring a hit man to kill her husband.
You wondered over the fates of the characters. You wanted to know what happened next.
You’re blinkered, lit fic. You’re blinkered and your attitude alienates readers like me. I spend hundreds of dollars on books a year. I will talk about books to anyone who will seems remotely interested. But I don’t champion you, because you don’t care about me, the reader.
Genre Fiction is the Future, is the Now, and has been the Last Ten Years, At Least. Anyone who says otherwise is being willfully blind.
5 Comments
I hadn’t read the Seigel article, so thank you for posting it and for unleashing your fury in reaction to it. I completely agree with you. What a load of snobbery on the part of Seigel. Orson Scott Card was right when he said the literary world is still stuck in post-modernism, completely blind to the revolution “popular fiction” has carried out around them.
BTW, this is why I love writing for young adults. The YA market is open to everything, literary and genre. And best of all, it’s influencing the upcoming generation of readers (not to mention their parents).
Despite the fact that I do enjoy The Great Gatsby (although it is about a tawdry subject), high fives for you -big ones. The Great Gatsby is pretty much the only example of most books touted as being wonderful/brilliant/whatever lit fic that I can stand, because the books are too often so wrapped up in themselves that nobody outside the book can even get in.
I am a senior in college, and most of the things I’ve had to read have been classic literary (non)fiction, and -just as in high school -the people who don’t read outside class glaze over, snore and drool all over their expensive textbooks, because what is considered “good” literature is based on a standard that most readers no longer use. If genre fiction was given the consideration it deserves for being truly good, captivating writing, we might all be a lot better off.
Agreed. On all points.
Thank you so much, Bailey. I apologize for the epic delay in my reply, my spam queue decided to eat your comment and I just now found it.
I agree with you 100%. When I had to take required lit classes in college, you could hear the snores from all the non-English majors who already didn’t like to read. Better to draw them in than alienate them further.
I <3 you, Mart.
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