http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward-docx?CMP=twt_iph
In the article linked above from the Guardian newspaper, the author, finding everyone on a train reading the Larsson books, has a hissy fit and says that no genre books can stand up to a good literary novel because genre novels have a blueprint in hand. In other words, the genre novel does not start from square one like a literary novelist does. (He says other things too but this was my area of interest).
Now I am not a big fan of the Dragon novels myself. But they have one great strength-an enormously appealing, yet not treacly, heroine. Beyond that there is too much chasing about and torture for my taste. Yes, I know that was his point. That men hate women and will pretty much do anything to them.
1) what other strengths did you find in the novels 2) is Dock right-is having a blueprint most of the struggle? Does the genre novelist get to skip over the difficult parts of writing a "literary" novel.
25 comments:
I havne't read these and probably won't. Too long and I'm not a big mystery fan anyway. Good genre novels do much of the same kinds of things literary novels do, only they have a better story.
I liked the first one a lot but have up on the second when it just seemed to be torture, torture, and more torture.
I liked the whole "investigating the past" stuff and of course the character of Salander was fascinating, mucht he way a bloody car crash would be.
Jeff M.
Having a blueprint keeps the genre writer from doing what a number of literary writers do: pointlessly meander all over the place. Usually. Larsson did a bit of meandering, at least in the first book which is the only one I've read. But at least he wasn't navel-gazing.
Yes, structure is not necessarily a bad thing. You can examine anything you want along the way.
This Docz guy needs a slap in the face with a wet salmon. If literary fiction were all that great, more people would be reading it. To say otherwise is ignorant snobbery.
'gave' up was what I meant to say
Jeff
Lumping Larsson with Dan Brown? Has Docx actually read their books?
I think there's a difference between genre and literary writing, but it's a line that's often blurred. Denise Mina is one example, Megan Abbott another.If you pick up any edition of Otto Penzler's The Best Mystery Short Stories--and this is just one example--you'll find literary crime stories that don't rely on formula.
I'm a fan of the Millenium books despite their weaknesses.I agree that Lisbeth Salander was a stroke of genious.It's interesting to think about why that character has had such broad appeal.
I think her appeal is that she has the strengths and weaknesses of both sexes. So we all relate to her. We all feel like the abandoned child, the person being pursued, the victim of an unjust world. She may be one of the strongest and best written "literary" characters of the 21st century.
The dean of American critics, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, begins his selection of the year's best books with this:
"This year the fiction part of my personal selection of the year's best books is shorter than ever: only two novels, alas. This reflects my disenchantment with what passes for American literary fiction these days, a subject upon which I've remarked in this space in the past, as well as the simple fact that over four-and-a-half decades of reviewing books I've found it more and more difficult to write about fiction in interesting or original ways."
Most of his choices are biographies or memoirs, including one by Roseanne Cash, and the rest tend to be histories or letters. Not fiction.
Back in the 80s James Crumley once mentioned that when a genre novel stinks, at least it has the structure to fall back on and when a literary novel stinks it just falls apart.
And, honestly, I think that THE LONG GOODBYE is the best book I've read about male relationships and how they go wrong.
Dan Luft
Yes and Joyce Carol Oates said the same thing in the New York Review of Books. And I would regard her as someone who travels in all genres.
I've read the Stieg Larsson books and agree with Jeff: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was the best book in the series. The following books kept getting weaker. Lisbeth Salander is the focal point of the trilogy. She generates all the energy in the books. Art is what lasts. If a genre novel still has an audience 100 years from now, it's Art.
I thought the best of the Larsson novels was the first one. To me, the greatest strength was that he wrote convincingly about a heroine with a disability I'd never found in the main character in a novel before. He wrote in a way as to let me into her thought processes, I thought. In other words, for me there was something completely unique in the book.
After the first one, I too was put off by the continuing emphasis on brutality against women.
To me, the writer who writes classics in the sense that literary novels can be classics is Dashiell Hammett. I admire him precisely because he created several of the templates mystery writers still use. He did not write to a formula.
It's all just words on paper.
My son would agree with you. He's read them all and says each is half as good as the one before it. I took his word and stopped after the first one.
Love the quote from Crumley.
Hammett is amazing.
I didn't like the books. The first one was just ok, but I didn't finish reading the second or the third. The message that men can and will, often, do just about anything to women is not news. I resent the fact that Larsson felt compelled to glorify the very ugly brutality he claimed to be against. I just don't get the popularity of these books.
In truth, Charlaine Harris did this better in her SHAKESPEARE'S LANDLORD series set in an Arkansas town with the unlikely name of Shakespeare. Her enigmatic heroine, Lily Bard has it all over
Larsson's.
I like Naomi's point about a so-called 'blueprint' keeping a writer from meandering. 'Meandering' seems to go part and parcel with 'literary' writing.
Time to quote Theodore Sturgeon: 90% of everything is crap.
I'll start by addressing the whole, old debate about "genre" fiction--everything is a genre. "Mainstream" or "literary" are both genres we've made up, just as much as "mystery," "thriller," "science fiction," "speculative fiction," etc etc. And one can be just as formulaic in literary/mainstream work as in any other. Is it really hard to predict a story arc in a book in which "it's all about character development"? No. I think all of us writers shoot ourselves in the foot the minute we start buying into the importance of genres as anything more than a way of shelving books--and when we start claiming that, by definition, one "genre" is better than another.
As for the Larsson novels, I don't think Larsson glorified brutality at all, and I enjoyed all three books very much, though I agree that the first was the best. Since Larsson died after having submitted manuscripts of the latter two, this makes sense: they no doubt didn't get the same sort of rigorous editing the first did (and of course the middle one lacks the solid ending of the first and last). I enjoyed the books because of Larsson's ability to build suspense, to create engaging characters--likable ones and complete villains--and because of Larsson's clear humanity and focus on the ways in which various kinds of exploitation are just larger reflections of specific, personal crimes. His broad perspective and passion made the books much more interesting than they would have been if they'd just been about killers and spies and hackers.
I read the article, but I don;t know how to address it. There was so much bullshit there I can't take the other 25% seriously.
I agree with Olivia and James. And Yardley's quote seems more about Yardley than the quality of fiction he's read.
Yvette, I really agree about Charlaine's Lily Bard series. For those who haven't read them, she is a woman who was raped and brutalized by a motorcycle gang before the first book starts. Little by little in the course of the five books she puts herself back together and rejoins the world, and does it while helping solve several murders. As I remember them (it's been 8-10 years since I read them) you do see what happened to her without the wallowing in detail the Larsson book subjects you to.
The books need to be read in order.
Jeff M.
Lately when this comes up I've been saying that there is a difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment reassures - all that stuff people talk about in mystery fiction when order is restored and justice is served.
But "literary entertainment" is also often about reasuring, just in a differrent way - the phoney tacked on downer ending can be as predictable as the murderer getting caught. There's a blueprint, just a different one.
But there can be art in every genre that doesn't follow a blueprint. It's just very rare.
Jeff, I think you and I are the only two people who have read the Lily Bard series by Charlaine Harris. (And that's really a shame. It's a terrific series. Better than the vampires and/or the undead thing.) It's been a while since I read them too, but I especially remember that Lily goes about toughening herself up so she can 'take care of herself' in most any situation.
Rather than being a perennial 'loser', she makes herself someone to be reckoned with. We don't actually know the specifics of what happened to her until the second or third book if I'm remembering correctly. Very well done.
NOTHING escapes genre. Nothing. I've never kidded about this, and I'm not now. Anyone who says otherwise is either deluding themselves or lying.
That said, if someone was actually starting from Square One, they would have to never have read any fiction at all. Consider how dull and "reinventing" (as in The Wheel) they would be, as too many would-be originators are entirely too often. Surely Bildungsromans don't resemble each other, nor family sagas, etc., because of the vast new originality of each of these works as they spring from their creators' brows.
Pointlessly attempting to define fiction as "literary" and "genre," as popular a party game and means of stunting careers and the artform as it is, is pernicious and frankly stupid.
Subject matter is not blueprint. Bigots, however, have blueprints, and Procrustean beds.
Haven't read Larsson's novels, and have rather enjoyed the films, but not so much as to follow Larsson's apparent meandering--heaven forfend, How Could That Happen In A Genre Book? --if one has never read a "genre" book, particularly one written by Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand (oops, I Guess She's Literary And Not Genre! *choking on derisive laughter), Lawrence Sanders and perhaps a thousand others or am I underestimated severely?--and would suggest that Salander is heroine with deficits, so she's an underdog but not a defenseless one. In short, a crowd-pleaser.
And now, having (re-)stated my usual response to such assertions, in all directions, I'm glad to see James succintly and Olivia at slightly greater length agree with my past assertions and their continuance...except only to the degree that she uses, on the road to dismissing it's signficance, another of my bugbears: that "mainstream" doesn't exist, except in the marketing departments and among others suffering from delusions that pouplarity defines the content of fiction...
I've seen too many careers suffer, and sometimes end, as a result of this pointless bifurcation and its enforcement, hence writing "it's" when I mean its, and "am I underestimated" for "have I underestimated/am I underestimated"...that this is so widely blithely accepted, when it has no bearing on the essential reality of the work in question (even if it can be applied to the mediocre examples of the work in question in all directions) drives me up a wall. It's helped contribute to a few actual suicides, and more distantly to accidental deaths (from the frustrations inherent in facing this actually rather trival form of bigotry and ignorance). It really needs to end. If for no other reason, aside from its inherent stupidity, than because it also cuts off the larger audience for fiction from large swathes of fiction, and not a few brilliant works of various sorts.
Certain subject matter can affect the nature of the story being told, but it doesn't have to in every case, and it doesn't in every case. Finding new ways to tell the stories is what genius is about, in part.
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