A Dear Genre Letter

Maybe not if you're a genre writer, according to some.

One of the more interesting skirmishes going on in the literary world right now is over the question of genre vs literary fiction. In a September interview in the The Guardian, Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson took a vigorous slash at genre fiction, and now we have Arthur Krystal in the Oct 24 issue of The New Yorker explaining the difference between genre and literary fiction and coming down firmly on the side of the latter as being the only one with artistic merit. That people still get their knickers in a twist over this issue is one matter (I partially discuss that topic here), but what's interesting about the Krystal article is that it reveals some of the weaknesses in the arguments for a clear divide between genre and literary fiction.

First off, Krystal makes the mistake (as does Jacobson) of taking a narrow view of what constitutes genre fiction. He describes genre as books that are "born to sell" and that "...employ language that is at best undistinguished and at worst characterized by a jejune mentality and a tendency to state the obvious." Without naming names, Krystal seems to be referring to writers like Danielle Steel, Lee Child and J.K. Rowling. The problem is that no one is claiming these kinds of mega-selling authors are producing quality fiction. What proponents of genre fiction are saying is that just because a book falls within an easily defined genre it should not be ignored or automatically assumed to be the product of a second-rate writer. Krystal's prejudices are very much on view when he says, "When we open a mystery, we expect certain themes to be addressed and we enjoy intelligent variations on these themes. But what we don't expect is excellence in writing..." As illogical statements go, that's a doozy. It's a writer's skill and imagination that determines excellence in writing, not the genre they've chosen. Saying genre overrules talent would be like saying a great architect's status is determined by what's contained in the buildings he's designed. According to Krystal's logic, a Frank Gehry-designed museum would be art, but if he designs a condo tower it's just a pile of bricks and mortar.

Krystal also avoids dealing with the fact that the line between literary fiction and genre is often so thin it's not worth arguing about. Is Moby-Dick an adventure story or literary fiction? Is Metamorphosis sci-fi or literary fiction? Is The Little Stranger supernatural fiction or literary fiction? The answer to all three is both. Aside from novels that are purely about psychological insight and analysis (and there aren't a lot of those), the majority of literary fiction incorporates some kind of mystery, adventure or quest, something that knocks the protagonist out of his usual routine and thereby reveals something new about his world and his character. The mystery might be as prosaic as why a wife ran off with her lover, and the quest might be going on the road to win back her love. My point is that novels, literary or genre, are almost always about a rupture in quotidian life. The difference between literary and genre fiction in this regard is usually only a matter of degree.

Another trap Krystal falls into is equating artistic quality with utility, as he shows when he says, "Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror stories or police procedurals." The key word in that sentence is "understand." Krystal, like generations of high school English teachers, clearly feels that novels should have a purpose, a goal, and teach us something about ourselves or others. This view of literature as a didactic tool is old, dusty and blinkered. All kinds of art forms aren't "about" anything at all. Symphonies and instrumental jazz pieces are rarely "about" anything. The anger that greeted the advent of the Impressionists was largely to do with their subject matter not being deemed important or "about" anything. There is wide range of art that seeks to engage and play with the senses as its primary goal, and looked at in this way, genre fiction could be described as sensory literature. It can excite, arouse, anger and scare us, and the best genre fiction uses these emotions as a conduit for insight and ideas.

I'll happily admit that the vast bulk of genre fiction is formulaic and pedestrian, but there's certainly no proof that the same isn't true of literary fiction. And any list of the world's great literary novels would show a fair number of them are either genre or close enough to genre as to make no difference. One final example of the fine line between genre and literary fiction is found in that most literary of novels, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Probably the most memorable character in the novel's 3,000+ pages is the Baron de Charlus. He's an arch snob, a homophobic homosexual, and a raging antisemite. In short, he's an extraordinary, unlikely, larger-than-life character who could only exist between the pages of a book. And that makes him very much a character from genre fiction, which specializes in creating outsized characters who are too good, too bad, or too sexy to be true. The fact that Charlus is described with brilliant prose and an incisive intelligence doesn't alter the fact that with the addition of a hollowed-out volcano fortress and a death ray he'd make a superb Bond villain.

Scribble Scribble, Hiss Scratch

Irvine Welsh squares off against Hilary Mantel for the Booker prize.

Oh, dear, the literati are at it again. That's them you hear down at the end of the garden, yowling and screeching, spitting and biting. Want to stop the noise? A bucket of water should do the trick, or you could try shouting, "Who'd like a nice, tasty Man Booker Prize?" Either should get their attention. Several recent news items/articles are proving, once again, that novelists are, pound for pound, the cattiest people on the planet.

First up is Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, who complained at this past week's Edinburgh international writers' conference that the judges of the Man Booker Prize discriminate against Scottish writers. He even calls them racist. Next up is Declan Burke, an Irish crime writer. In an article for the Irish Examiner he interviews three crime writers on the subject of whether crime fiction can also be called literature, and whether a crime novel will ever scoop a Booker. We also learn in this article that at an upcoming crime fiction conference in Scotland, two noted crime writers (Ian Rankin and Peter James) will actually debate this question (get your tickets now before scalpers jack the prices up). Finally, we have Laura Miller in a piece at Salon.com opining that the reason the young adult fiction market is dominated by female writers is that male writers feel that there's no prestige attached to this genre. Men, she argues, concentrate their writing efforts in fields that earn critical accolades. Like the Booker, I assume.

What these stories and opinion pieces reveal is the green-eyed jealousy and animosity so many writers exhibit towards their brethren, and their willingness to make their feelings public. There are the genre writers who feel that room should be made for them at the grown-ups' table, and then we have the literary writers who claim they're being insufficiently praised, or that the wrong writers are getting the kudos. And God forbid if you're a writer who sells books in the millions. A mega-selling author like, say, J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown inevitably attracts a ton of ridicule from their peers.

It seems to me that all this very public angst and anger is unique to the world of fiction writing. No other art form has participants who are so anxious to engage in public acts of criticism and cannibalism. Last time I checked, David Hockney had no issues with Thomas Kinkade's success, and unless I missed something in art history class, sculptors have never felt they were being taken less seriously than painters or vice versa. Does Yo-Yo Ma make snide remarks about Steve Martin's banjo playing? Is Andre Rieu venting on Twitter about the fact that he hasn't been offered the baton with the New York Philharmonic? Did Jean-Luc Godard ever complain that he should have been given a shot at directing one of the Star Wars sequels?

It's certainly true that all cultural fields have their share of in-fighting and backbiting, but the literary world seems to be filled with a constant background hum of anger at the other guy or girl. Why is this? I think writers believe that their particular art form is the big kahuna of creativity: painting, music, dance, and films are, in their view, either ephemeral, limited in intellectual scope, ghettoized in galleries, or too populist. Literature, they feel, is, and always will be, the art form of record. And if that's the case, deciding what's literature and what isn't, and who gets the gold stars for good work, becomes exceedingly important.

What makes all this invective and bitterness amusing is its utter pointlessness. There has never been a universally agreed upon definition of "literary" fiction, so it becomes futile to try and describe a novel as being literary or merely genre. There's simply no benchmark for defining the difference between the two. There's good writing and bad writing, just as there's good sculptures and bad ones, and great songs and lousy ones.  And crime fiction writers really do have to shut up and stop whining about not being taken seriously; you guys sell a ton of books and the quality of your writing is frequently superb. You should spare some sympathy for those boobs still writing westerns: nobody pays them any attention. Speaking of westerns, that's the only rebuttal needed for Laura Miller's argument; that particular genre's a prestige-free zone and it's solidly male. And as for Irvine Welsh, he makes a very poor case for the idea that Scottish writers are being scorned by the Booker judges. He bases his argument on the fact that in the history of the Booker only 11 out of 255 nominees were Scots. That's roughly 5% of the total. Sounds low until you remember that the Booker is open to writers in the UK and the Commonwealth, and that represents a population of well over a billion people. That makes Scotland, with its population of just over 5m, wildly over-represented on the list of nominees. Of course, England also gets far more than its fair share of nominees, so it's really authors from India who should be doing the complaining here. The Booker prize judges are clearly biased in favour of UK writers. What Welsh seems to want is a greater share of that bias.