Lit vs genre, the next round

I'm honestly not sure why it's even a debate. Snobbery over books just depresses me, with the exception of truly awful things that glorify truly awful things (looking at you, 50 Shades).

I'm glad we are still having these conversations because it forces me to address my own literary snobbery. Thank you, Post-Lupin. 

To answer your question, I've often wondered if the favoring of the minutiae in contemporary American 'serious' literature is because the self-appointed literary elite think it's more impressive to have an author who can make the seemingly boring 'everyday' details of life seem gripping. And to be fair, the authors who can do that do deserve a lot of respect. However, that pool of authors is small, so it sets an unrealistic standard for a lot of literature but may have more extreme storylines or more flamboyant characters. 

The thing I find so depressing about this debate is how it implies that once an author has 'made it,' for lack of a better expression, in the eyes of the literary elite, then they've earned the right to experiment with genre fare. Martin Amis, Joyce Carol Oates, and Zoë Heller have all done this, and while I think they are all excellent writers, it's sad and a bit annoying that they get the acclaim for snobbish set while so many other authors who have written about similar topics with intelligence and imagination are ignored because they have consistently written genre fare. I mean, Octavia Butler wrote beautifully about race and identity within a sci-fi context, Patricia Highsmith created characters who were just as complex as any written by Dostoyevsky, and Elmore Leonard was a prose master. But, given the spent the majority writing 'genre fare,' they never really got their proper due (although, after they died, it seems they have earned way more respect). 

I think the best way to combat this debate is to have more diverse reading lists in schools that have a  50-50 balance between 'serious' literature and 'genre fare.' Better yet, find books that hit both marks. Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Picture of Dorian Gray are all given, but why not Patricia Highsmith's Edith's Diary, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, or Martin Amis' Money: A Suicide Note? 

Eh, yikes. He still has his snobbery in tact. Well, I still stand by Highsmith, Butler, King, and Heller. 

Coincidentally, a writer I follow on Twitter today asked what SF books people think should be taught in school to help kindle a love of reading in students. The first one I thought about was Octavia Butler "Kindred".

I grew to hate discussing assigned literature in class. I found it all so tedious. It wasn't until after I left college that I discovered a bunch of great novels from outside America.

The hyperrealism in American fiction doesn't just reject SF. It rejects mystery, fantasy, and even offshoots of literary fiction, such as magical realism and surrealism. Seems kind of crazy in a country that boasts writers like Nathanial Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, etc. All of whom write outside of hyperrealism.

I mean, you can say that, but I graduated from the honors college at my university and had never heard of Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez until after I graduated. Of course, that was about 15 years ago. So, maybe things have changed more recently.

Damn, I wish some college professor had introduced me to Borges. I haven't found many American writers who can do magical realism the way those South American writers do. Like, have you read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy? This just felt like he was trying to do Borges but couldn't quite get there.

Some European writers do pretty well with it, though. Jose Saramago had great skill with this. Of course, Saramago is a writer who'd likely never have been published in the USA. Those fantastical novels written in that style? LOL, cannot see that getting published in the USA. And he won a Nobel Prize.

I'm not sure if Dracula hits both marks - while Stoker had a degree of respectability as the agent of a popular Shakespearean actor, it was never considered serious, literary fiction when it was published. But I suppose age does wonderful things to respectability.

Kindred strikes me as a good one to do in schools because it's not that far from Maya Angelou, which is already done in schools, and its depiction of the complicated relationship between slave and slave owner - not melodramatic, but inherently toxic in its power differentials - would make for good schoolwork. (I also note Butler's been republished in recent years with covers branding her as a Serious Black Author; more Toni Morrison than a pulp paperback.)

I'm not sure if this snobbishness continues to exist or if it even particularly matters; there probably isn't a UK author alive with the cultural cache (and certainly not the financial success) of J.K. Rowling (she's been in the news more than once recently and wouldn't be at all without that context), and genre literature's profile is forever being raised by increasingly lucrative adaptations of works as movies and (more recently) TV shows.

Perhaps they're not winning the Booker, but you can't have everything, and does anyone particularly want a Booker?

Edit: Oh, and circling back to Charlie Stross' original point: Lafcadio Hearn. Also known as Patrick Hearn. Born on a Greek island (to Irish and Greek parents), raised in Dublin, an American newspaper man famous for writing about New Orleans (having been fired from his previous news job for his marriage to a black woman) and subsequently a Japanese author called Koizumi Yakumo and translator known for his ghost stories and depictions of Meiji era Japan. I'm in walking distance of where he grew up, and his Japanese descendants (by his Japanese wife, not his earlier black wife) are still alive.

I'll poll the college kids I work with this week.

As for Doris Lessing, well yes, I have discovered some amazing books through browsing the Hugo nominations. Lessing wrote in English. So a Hugo nomination would really expand her reach.

And while the Nobel committee has made some questionable choices, Saramago was not one of them. That was also a ticket to getting every subsequent book he published translated into English. He wrote several utterly incredible novels. There's no way he'd have been published if he had been a USA writer. An atheist & communist who wrote fantastical subversive allegory in heavily stylized prose? LOL, no.

Anyway, yeah. The great argument made in the original piece is that writing hyperrealistic fiction doesn't mean you have to focus on average people in mundane circumstances. I mean, there are way too many American "serious" novels which are about whether the middle age white male protagonist will be able to get an erection/have sex with some woman. (Saw Dr. Dastardly refer to this category as "dick lit" on Goodreads recently.) I find this baffling. Seriously, why don't writers feature more extraordinary people? Or more average people in extraordinary circumstances? 

To be fair, my usual go-to litfic straw man is middle-aged college English professors writing about the sexual longings of middle-aged college English professors...
But if there is a shift in the tide, that's excellent. It may be the British side of things has more of a tilt that way. (However, still not seeing a lot of heroic lives in that list, which was my original point.)

Ordinary people in extraordinary situations may cover it better... which is always worth contemplating.

Yeah, I'd have to agree with DRC and Logoboros here.  First of all, "genre" fiction definitely has more cultural cachet than "literary" fiction; JK Rowling sure as hell isn't as popular as she is because of A Casual Vacancy (not that she should be, of course). Imagine a world in which Game of Thrones was mired in development hell over at HBO, and David Milch's series that he used to be working on based on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county had been airing for the past six years instead.  And let's imagine that it was as good as Deadwood and all those other HBO prestige shows that I admittedly have not seen (which, given the poor track record of adaptations of Faulkner, is rather unlikely, but this is hypothetical).  I can pretty much guarantee you that no matter how good this show was it would not be nearly as popular as Game of Thrones is right now.  Which isn't to say that adaptations of "literary" fiction never cement themselves into the hypothetical Canon of Things Which Are Quite Popular and Will Probably Be Classics One Day.  No Country for Old Men is frequently held up as one of the great films of the past decade, after all.  But once again, I can guarantee you that pre-sales for Winds of Winter will easily outstrip those of Cormac McCarthy's next novel (he has a novel coming out soonish, by the way!) whenever that comes out.  And let's be honest, like 2/3 of Americans would not know what you were talking about if you mentioned No Country for Old Men to them.  The same is not true for Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or Avengers or what have you.  And, DRC's offhand claim that "genre" fiction isn't winning Man Booker Prizes isn't even entirely true.  Taking a quick glance at the list I see that The Blind Assassin and Life of Pi both won (although the latter I think speaks to DRC's ultimate point that "who really wants a Booker", given what a joke of an award it is).  Sure there's some snobbish literary types out there, but what clout do they really wield in any arena of society that anyone really gives a shit about?  And honestly, on this forum, I've seen a lot more snobbish bashing of "literary" fiction and conflating all "literary" fiction with Dr. Dastardly's hilariously (and aptly) named "dick lit", than I've seen snobbish bashing of "genre" fiction.  

I'm also somewhat perplexed by the idea that there all modern American "literary" authors are hyperrealists who shun all genres.  Thomas Pynchon is often regarded as one of the better living American authors, and his books are anything but realistic.  He's embraced elements of pop culture (as opposed to solely "high" culture, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean) throughout his career, and his novels are mostly ultra-elaborate stories about illusory conspiracies where everybody's name sounds super-fake.  Pynchon's certainly not everybody's cup of tea, but his fiction is definitely not hyperrealistic. As to the idea that non-realistic books don't get published in America, I'm not so sure about that either.  I haven't read any of Saramago's work (though he's on my list of authors to read, and quite a bit higher after Desert Dweller's praise for his work), but there's certainly plenty of "literary" fiction that gets published in the US that isn't hyperrealistic.  Infinite Jest was a heavily-promoted novel that saw David Foster Wallace going on a promotional tour well before he was any sort of established literary giant.  And Infinite Jest is tremendously popular as far as "literary" fiction goes.  It's also not at all realistic, and has elements of various genres in it.  And it's hardly snobbish, being a book which discusses Hill Street Blues, Hawaii Five-O, and M*A*S*H as extensively and seriously as it name-drops obscure filmmakers.  And again, David Foster Wallace isn't for everyone, but rightly or wrongly he's frequently regarded as one of the great American literary minds of the past couple of decades and he's a guy who assigned authors like CS Lewis, Thomas Harris, Stephen King, and Mary Higgins Clark in the college courses that he taught, so he certainly doesn't qualify as a literary snob.  And what about Cormac McCarthy?  He's a guy who spent half his career writing westerns, a genre with a long association with penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and pulp fiction, and Blood Meridian is regarded as one of the best American novels ever by none other than the most pretentious asshole literary snob of them all, Harold Bloom.

I also think that the author of the piece is a bit snobbish in his own right.  Or at least his criticism of fiction about the quotidian.  Everyone experiences mundane things in their daily lives, so I'm not sure why there shouldn't be literature speaking to this.  And there are some very good authors who are capable of doing this.  Is a sci-fi/fantasy full of family drama where a family member dies automatically more moving than As I Lay Dying because the former happens to occur in fantastical circumstances? 

I'm also not sure how exactly the fantastic in magical realism amounts to lazy world-building when so much "genre" fiction featuring extensive world building is often full of plot holes or poorly-thought-out-science in an ostensible work of "hard science fiction".  It seems to me that, say, a Borges story where the feeling of unreality evoked by a confused, dream-like, seemingly paradoxical depiction of the infinite is the author's intention even if we can logically explain why it is unrealistic is less lazy than, to use an example Lupin and I were discussing in another thread recently, Neal Stephenson going into exhaustive detail painting an acceptably plausible picture of the mechanical engineering and physics behind a futuristic fictional world he has created, but then very casually glossing over a bunch of absurdly unrealistic genetic engineering and evolution stuff in the same novel.

Which isn't, of course, to say that there's no snobbery in considering what is and isn't capital-L "Literature".  I was blown away by how great Shirley Jackson is when I read We Have Always Lived In the Castle.  Yet criminally few people seem to place her in the hypothetical pantheon of "Great American Authors" (although Desert Dweller basically just did in a post on this thread, so yay for that!).

Another good example of establishment acceptance of genre would be Harold Bloom, notorious and acerbic as he is. He wrote - and later disowned - a sequel to Voyage to Arcturus, and included a Ursula LeGuin work on his definition of the Canon.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote alternate world fiction. Honore de Balzac (as Jean-Luc Lemur brought him up earlier) was a fan of the ponderous Irish Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, and he wrote his own follow-up. (I say ponderous with great affection, Melmoth is one of my favourite Gothic novels.)Yeah I'm mostly thinking of my mother, who's an avid reader and has usually read the most recent Booker winner (not that she always or even usually likes it), so it's a kind of subconscious go-to for what Serious Fiction is. Also in general: Jeffrey Eugenides (hey, she lived in Detroit: relatable), Orhan Pamuk (less so), good chance she read it. My off-hand comment about Toni Morrison covers also refers to something I saw growing up around the house.
Based on this, I just got an ebook copy.And honestly? Chabon's very good at genre. Yiddish Policeman's Union is one of my favourite genre books from the 00s, it has great world building but it's also just wryly funny.

Desert Dweller There are also authors who can just spend so much time describing things one really appreciates how TV and film can fill in all those details with a glance and then move on. I don't actually care what kind of sequins eleven different just introduced characters are wearing.

And this week, media raves to me about how great Ann Patchett's new novel is. Amazing! It is about regular people dealing with the breakup of a marriage!

Ann Patchett, keep in mind, previously wrote a pretty good lit fic novel called "Bel Canto". It is NOT about regular people dealing with the breakup of a marriage. But, now, of course, she is really showing what she's made of by writing about regular people. (As per, NPR, Seattle Times, etc.) Look at this review from NPR. Read the last paragraph and then say you don't understand what we are complaining about: www.npr.org/2016/09/17/493003934/commonwealth-doesnt-need-big-drama-to-draw-us-in

"Commonwealth has none of Bel Canto's glamour — its guns, illicit romances, hostages, or beautiful opera singer. Even the sentences are quiet: ordinary, unpretentious, and snagless. But, even if it wouldn't make me miss a flight, it is a better book for being plain. "For the vast majority of the people on this planet, the thing that's going to kill them is already on the inside," says one character. In Commonwealth, Patchett shows that great drama isn't necessary. Guns and floods and fire and terrorists needn't kill us. Ordinary life will suffice."

To sum up: Her previous book about terrorists, illicit romance, a hostage situation and a beautiful opera singer was so engrossing that it made me miss a flight. This book won't make me miss a flight, but it's better because it is about plain, regular people.