Niagara on the LakeA discussion has popped up here and there since TRUTH, a crime fiction book by Peter Temple, received the Australian prize for the best novel of the year. Some people regard this as a breakthrough for so-called genre fiction. But others see the win as an anomaly, contending that "genre" fiction, which always seems to have it eye on the market more than literary fiction, (although this may come more from publishers than authors) will never produce work as original or as beautifully crafted as some literary novels. The writing isn't as good; the stakes are too low plot-wise, originality is wanting.
Craig McDonald, in Crimespree Magazine, wrote that of the many hundreds of books he read for the Hammett Prize this year only about 15 became contenders. He said the vast majority of books mimic other writers, other series already in place.
Declan Burke wrote on his blog that he reads crime fiction out of a sense of duty more than any desire lately. Literary novels excite him. Only three recent crime fiction novels overcame the formulaic for Burke.
Is the bar set too low in so-called genre writing? Do we ask less from its writers than we do from say Julie Orringer, Joshua Ferris, James Hynes, Jeffrey Eugenides, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith? Do we crave the familiar, the easy read, a book that does not examine important issues? When a new writer is compared (on the cover of a book) to more mature writers, is that labeling really a good thing" Wouldn't the better thing to hear be: "You have never read a writer like this one. You have never read a story like this." (I do notice that literary fiction does this far less). Do so-called genre readers need to know what they're buying more than other readers.
I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do think I'd be hard-pressed to find a so-called literary writer as good as Daniel Woodrell or George Pelecanos, both who examine society through their own lens. I'd also be hard=pressed to find a so-called genre novel as good as NEXT--which is not driven to have a murder in it by page 10 as someone once told me I must.
What do you think?
29 comments:
If "Crime & Punishment" came out today it would be marketed as a crime novel. The philosophical stuff would have been removed by any editor outside of a small press.
Take the crime out of Chandler and you end up with Bukowski.
I don't know what it means but "The Red Right Hand" by Joel Townsley Rogers is one of my favorite American novels.
Dan Luft
"I don't know the answer to these questions" sums up my take but I will sit back and see what others have to say.
Already I have a new book for my pile. Me, too, David.
Patti - What an interesting question!! I think that sometimes, the line between literary fiction and genre fiction is so blurred that those labels end up being arbitrary. I think genre fiction can be literary fiction (I consider Du Maurier's Rebecca crime fiction, for instance). But certainly I can think of lots of crime fiction that's not literary. I believe excellent crime fiction can be "literary," and lots of literary fiction involves crime. Like I said - blurred lines.
A question like this puts me in mind of Sturgeon's Law(Theodore Sturgeon, SF writer) who, when asked about the state of science fiction said, "Ninety percent of science fiction is crap because ninety percent of everything is crap!"
Literary fiction is the same. I'll match Dune by Frank Herbert(none of the sequels though; there's that ninety percent) up against the best "literary" fiction for the writing and plotting.
There are more in all genres and I may get back when I think on it a while.
I think the distinction is 90% marketing driven. Read the NY Times book review, and crime has its own page, while "literary" fiction gets the longer, more thoughtful reviews. The decision about what goes where is made long before the NYT reviewers see the books.
I'm guessing the same is true for libraries, which segregate the "M" books in their own section. (Also "SF" and "W" and "YA"). The sorting has already been done by the marketers. I wouldn't look any deeper into the issue than that.
oh wow. i can so relate to craig's comments. I felt the same way when judging the thriller. enough years have passed that think i can comment, but wow. when you read 130 books, all pubbed in the same year, you realize you are reading the same story over and over and over. and i began to feel that many of those first twenty pages were identical. shuffle the names, move them to different books, and nobody would notice. it was an eye opener for me. publishers had their own variations, but even within houses the books tended to fit a very specific mold. can't begin to write everything in my head about this subject. in defense of genre -- it must adhere to a certain formula, but yes. it seems there are the writers who go blockbuster, and everyone else who imitates them because that's what editors are buying. And the blockbusters weren't that good to begin with. :D i too am now reading literary fiction and nonfiction because genre fiction isn't doing it for me.
anne frasier
"Literary" fiction is an unfortunately obnoxious label, perpetuated for the most part by high-minded academics, self-promoting literary snobs, and publishers' curiously motivated marketing divisions. The only meaningful test (or label) for a book is when an author's book has been around and still "popular" (in reprints and in readers' hands) a generation or two (and beyond) after the book's first appearance. Passing the tough test of time is, to my mind, more meaningful than any label (literary, genre, or otherwise). Of course, that is only the humble opinion of a renegade within academia.
Most don't wants to separate genre fiction from literary fiction--at least in terms of quality-but isn't some demarcation useful. I know many people who would never read one or the other. I dislike labels myself but if I only want to read books that explore alternate universes or ones take place in the western US of the 1800s or where solving a murder is key, I would find it useful to have them shelved together. I don't know how else to find them. The average Joe doesn't keep up with them enough through other means. Genre doesn't have to mean inferior. I'm a stranger here myself.
Okay, please define literary fiction. What does it have that genre fiction lacks, and why are these things considered superior? Someone please give us a list of these things and defend it. And what about the genre novels that have more of these things and are done better? Why are literary novels considered fine art, and taught in MFA programs, while genre fiction is generally not taught in academe?
As an academic, I will gladly step forward and say that "literary fiction" is itself a genre with specific expectations and conventions. I hate the snobbery of "lit" folk as much as I hate the reverse snobbery of genre folk (not to mention the backbiting between genres, eg. SF people who despite fantasy, etc.). We're talking about marketing categories that have become omnipresent because bookstores want ways to categorise their stock.
There are good books and there are bad books. Genre has nothing to do with quality.
The pity is that decades ago, all kinds of folk would be reading Shirley Jackson because she was a popular writer from a big publisher. Now she's "genre" (and "old") so no one knows. The new stage of marketing moves beyond stores and their confused categories, but has the downside of there being hundreds of thousands of books released every year and as yet, few trusted ways to find the good ones.
That's the big question. Defenders might say it is more concerned with character than plot; ideas more than emotions. Of course, this is only the lit fiction that's successful. There is no reason to assume that most so-called literary novels succeed.
Now my husband, in defending so-called genre novels, would say, there is often too little at stake in literary fiction. That it is airless, pedantic, and we rarely get outside the protagonist's head. Is Joyce Carol Oates basically a genre writer?
And the ways of finding the sort of books one likes to read is getting more difficult, I think. Look at the front of a book from ten years ago and see the number of newspapers that reviewed it compared to now.
Good responses, mesdames. My wife, an English professor, moves easily between the two forms of literature. She particularly honors mysteries but mostly teaches literary fiction in her lit courses.
I don't consider myself a genre writer at all, but the author of popular fiction, of the sort that used to be mainstream before literature was sliced in two. I've enjoyed books by popular novelists, but that category has all but vanished now. A classic in that realm was The Thorn Birds.
It is noteworthy that this division of literature occurred in the late 60s and didn't exist when I was young.
Well, most of my usual case is already made, but here's much of the rest of it:
Genre implies a single model. This is not true of Any "genre" of fiction as the marketers use the term, as all of them (even the most rigidly-patrolled of them, romance) have multiple models in play at any given time. Whereas contemporary mimetic fiction of ambition, which we grotesquely mistag "literary" to congratulate those who paid big money for their MFAs (not that MFA holders don't write "genre" fiction as well, and have as long as there have been MFAs), often can be as unimaginative and dull and hackneyed and certainly as derivative as any other fiction.
These crime fiction writers who have read too much crime fiction were already doing themselves a disservice by not reading outside CF, but that doesn't make CF any more full of derivative, dull, etc. work than any other field, very much including contemporary mimetic fiction. That entirely too many academics are pretending that Stephen King, for example, is a reliably adventurous artist, pretty much says what needs to be said about the state of academe today (that is, it ain't good enough). Writing just like your instructor, or more to the point what your instructor is comfortable with, when your instructor is good friends with prominent literary agents and acquisition editors is not any more promising a start in contemprory mimetic fiction than it is in sf or westerns or mystery, and is only less prevalent in westerns these days probably because most westerns are either published as commercial afterthoughts or as historical-fiction-art flavors in the contemporary mimetic lists (the latter ranging from Sherman Alexie to Craig Leslie to Carol Emshwiller).
It's not as if some crime fiction, a fair amount of sf and fantasy, almost inevitably some horror and some romance, and certainly some western and other historical fiction doesn't feature more character than plot, and I'd suggest it's usually contemporary mimetic fiction that is tagged with dealing with emotions more than ideas...sf fans and even some writers are often foolish enough to parade about with the banner, SF IS THE LITERATURE OF IDEAS, when Every kind of fiction is full of ideas, even if sf is one of the fields that allows for more answers to questions about how we could live, as opposed to crime fiction and contemporary mimetic usually having to focus, for success, on how we can live now.
You've commented yourself, Patti, about the dreary sameness of some contemporary mimetic fiction, much as your correspondents have joined your quoted folks in saying so about crime fiction, and Randy brought up Sturgeon's Educated Estimate...sure, 90% of sf is bad or mediocre or trivial or uninspired, but this is true of all arts.
There is Never a need to hew to formula in any field of fiction, but it is easier to market that way, and the game in all fields of fiction is to take the formula if one must employ it and, of course, Make It New.
And worse than most books not finding their audience, too true throughout the history of publishing, but also the more adveturous work in each field is often hidden from audiences who would enjoy it, and the authors of that work are unrecognized and unrewarded, by the multidirectional snobbery that is part and parcel in taking the terms "genre fiction" and "literary fiction" seriously. They barely mean anything in art, and then only accidentally. They are terms of commerce. You rely upon them only to the detriment of all but commerce.
SF and fantasy writers who have placed work in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and the O. HENRY AWARDS since 1970 have included Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, and a number of others, usually not tagged sf or fantasy writers even when writing sf or fantasy.
And Joyce Carol Oates, like Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Joe R. Lansdale, and a few others, gleefully (or perhaps a bit glumly in Oates's case) doesn't seem to give a damn what box you try to force her work into, she (and they) will continue to write what they write and draw on what they like or feel they need for the work at hand.
And Theodore Sturgeon, fantasy and crime-fiction and contemporary mimetic writer along with sf, was also anthologized by Martha Foley for BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, as was Judith Merril, in the 1950s, for F&SF stories, even before Daniel Keyes's 1959 F&SF story "Flowers for Algernon," a rather obvious example of an sf story putting character ahead of plot, weighing ideas and emotions is realtively equal balance. The Sturgeon and Merril stories were better than the Keyes. To hack through the prejudices extant, they had to be.
Not having read NEXT as yet...have you read, in sf alone, THE FEMALE MAN by Joanna Russ, 334 by Thomas Disch, THE DEATH MACHINE aka ROGUE MOON by Algis Budrys, THE SIRENS OF TITAN by Kurt Vonnegut, or even a "minor" classic such as MJ Engh's ARSLAN? All top of the head, all brilliant and well-written and memorable...
And I expect more from Jeffrey Eugenides than I've gotten, though not him alone nor he the worst offender...
I don't know much about the current state of publishing, but I do know a lot of the great pieces of literature are technically genre (e.g. Dracula).
I think we can agree that there are both great and derivative books being produced (and were produced) across the board-in -all so-called genres. Many books let us down, may thrill us. I just can't wrap my very literal mind around SF. Even as a child, I sought out books as much about every day life as possible. Once an alien enters the room, I drift away. I think it's too late to find my way in.
I think we can agree that there are both great and derivative books being produced (and were produced) across the board-in -all so-called genres. Many books let us down, may thrill us. I just can't wrap my very literal mind around SF. Even as a child, I sought out books as much about every day life as possible. Once an alien enters the room, I drift away. I think it's too late to find my way in.
The argument is endlessly fascinating but also just endless. There are so many different goals for writing, even amongst the genres as well as between genre and literary. Depending on how you define your terms, one can easily be said to be better than the other. And so on and so on.
That, Charles, is why the terms are more pernicious than useful. They don't define or describe well, they just allow for inherent snobbery to play.
No aliens in any of the sf novels I recommended, Patti, except almost exclusively "offstage" in the Vonnegut.
Jack Finney's THE BODY SNATCHERS, uncleverly retitled to match most of the films in the edition you bought, is sf with alien plants of sorts...alien plants easier to take?
Or, for that matter, 334, THE FEMALE MAN, and most of the THE SIRENS OF TITAN are about everyday life in various contexts...THE DEATH MACHINE is in part a vicious satire of the everyday lives around a Moon mission of sorts (to treat with the Death Machine), and ARSLAN is about everyday life after an invasion of the United States. All much less outlandish in their ways than the Finney.
Why are they considered science fiction then, Todd? What makes them fall into that category ro want of a better word.
The only problem with having a "no genre labeling" approach is it makes it darn hard to browse for a book you might like. Unless you do all you browsing online which only a small portion of us might do. Is there any useful way of breaking it down--one that makes no judgments?
I'm glad you posted this. I'm currently battling several people over this issue. I think a writer has to write whatever the hell he or she feels like writing and not worry about what the snoots in the universities and the marketing monsters think of it. The only conversation that's relevant is between writers and readers.
Labels such as "mystery" or "science fiction" are sometimes problematic, but not nearly so much as the ridiculous bifurcation of fiction into "literary" and "genre" which is clearly and irrevocably meant to be a distinction of literary quality. 1984, by nearly any reasonable standard, is sf, as is THE HANDMAID'S TALE, and neither of them is a better novel by such standards of literature as formal structure or the quality of the employment of the language than THE FEMALE MAN.
What makes the cited novels sf is that they take place in a possible situation or in possible situations within our world, situations that haven't yet arisen or could've arisen had different things occurred in history. This is as true of BRAVE NEW WORLD, with its satirical approach as it is of THE DEATH MACHINE of its. As true of THE ROAD's apparently rather far-fetched atomic armageddon scenario as it is of the very-near-future scenario in which 334 takes place.
THE FEMALE MAN, for example, is set in four different realities...that of Joanna, in the mid 1970s US we lived in, and through rather odd circumstances meets three analogs of herself, one each from a far future all-women human society, from an alternative-history 1960s US where the Depression never really ended, WW2 didn't really occur (and therefore no Rosies riveting) and the Betty Friedan-triggered next wave of feminism never came about (MAD MEN's sexual politics rather resembled this to me), and from the period in the future that led rather directly to the all-woman society the first analogous J lived in. It, too, has no lack of satirical content, and some very serious questions about the nature of humanity.
Crime fiction deals with crime and its consequences...science fiction deals with technological and societal change and their consequences.
Science fiction isn't a genre, but a field. As crime fiction is. They are collections of genres, works that incorporate multiple genres at times, but not single-model fields, any more than contemporary mimetic fiction is a single genre. And all include work that is sui generis...at least until someone produces work which uses that as a model.
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