By Cindy Orr

Cornelia Read on the blog Murderati says that literary fiction lost her in the 1980s. “I can’t stand novels that just kind of drift around about vaporous bullshit and then wander out of the room at the end without a point,” she says. She blames MFA programs for making an artificial distinction between genre and non-genre works in the past couple of decades.

I thought I had a handle on the issue of this evaluative label: if you started your career as a “literary” author, then it’s okay to switch into genre fiction later. Take Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood as examples of this premise. But if it’s the other way around, you’re forever living in the genre ghetto like Ursula K. Le Guin or countless other talented writers.

But then along came Michael Chabon trying to move from literary to genre fiction, and he’s accused of spending “considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” This writer in Slate says that Chabon wishes for “a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.”

Wow, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? Fiction essential in people’s daily lives!

The sheepishness and guilt readers feel about genre fiction has permeated our culture. Alafair Burke decided to do a little study. She searched “don’t like or don’t read thrillers or mysteries” on Google. Then she searched “don’t usually like.”

Guess what? There were many more people who said they didn’t usually like thrillers or mysteries, but they loved this one…or that one…or couldn’t put the other one down. It’s all about the guilt, you see. People don’t feel they can admit wholeheartedly that they like reading genre fiction. But it’s clear that they really do.

This literary vs. genre fiction quality issue holds true in other countries besides the United States as well. In the 1970s, British judges were about to give a science fiction award to Salman Rushdie’s first novel Grimus. At the last minute, his publisher withdrew the book because they didn’t want Rushdie to be labeled as a genre writer. “Had it won,” said Brian Aldiss, one of the judges, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.”

In Canada, William Deverell calls it “our national snobbery disorder,” and Andrew Pyper says that writers’ workshops, the “true growth industry in the ink-based sector” are held responsible for the perception that Canadian literature is “at the cutting edge of blandness.” Douglas Coupland refuses to take Canadian Council grant money because the Council will not support writers who they think are commercial or write in a genre, though Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction is okay…and she openly admits to reading mysteries.

For many years in Britain, says a Guardian writer, the Booker prize was synonymous with baffling and unreadable. For years the judges chose “that bird without wings, the novel without a narrative.” But, partly because the bad economic times have meant fewer first novels, the Booker Prize shortlist this year was full of titles he calls “cracking good read(s), … novel(s) you can lose yourself in, with the childish gratification that good storytelling provides.” And the winner turned out to be Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall—clearly a historical novel.

Another Guardian article looks forward positively and speculates that, since so many people have now been exposed to science fiction through television and the movies, we may now be moving into a period that is “post science fiction.” This, as he describes it, is an era where science fiction writers like China Mieville are breaking down the walls of the genre from within, and literary authors like Michael Chabon and Lev Grossman are working away at them from the outside.

Grossman himself, in a piece about Chabon, says, “This is literature in mid-transformation, the modernist bleeding into the postmodern and beyond. In his introduction to Astonishing Stories, Chabon calls this new high-low fiction ‘Trickster literature,’ and you can almost hear in that label the distant bugle call of a manifesto. And you can almost see the future of literature coming. Looks like it’s going to be a page turner.”

But in the same essay, Grossman uses the loaded words “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” It seems he won’t risk being seen to be “lowbrow” until he’s sold a few more novels—he didn’t acknowledge that he wrote the genre novel Codex, for instance. It would be terrific if we eventually get to the point where a good book is a good book no matter what the genre, and writers are not afraid to acknowledge their roots. But a few are defiant…

I think maybe Laura Lippman may have said it best, “Who benefits from the debate, that’s what I want to know? Not genre writers. Not readers. So it must be the literary writers who keep beating this dead horse. Such pieces always make me feel as if I’m an ill-behaved dog running amok in the great marble temple of literature. ‘Stop her! She’s peeing on the floor! She’s drinking out of the toilet! She won’t play by the rules — except those tired genre conventions that mark her work as second-rate. Ohmigod — she’s humping Nadine Gordimer’s leg. Get her out!’”

I hope we’re moving into an era where a genre label is merely a helpful guide to people looking for something good to read, and the word “genre” ceases to be a pejorative term. But I’m not holding my breath.

At any rate, there’s an overwhelming amount of discussion on either side of the genre wars. Anyone want to write a book?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Genreflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.