1.
Having recently regained dry land after four weeks adrift in the first thousand pages of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s pelagic six-volume My Struggle (only to find myself confronted with a note-strewn desk and two large books bristling with the polychromic sticky tabs it now occurs to me I might have wanted to devise a reasonably consistent system for deploying), I’m troubled by the sense that if there’s ever been a literary project best left to speak for itself, My Struggle might be it. It’s also likely that the many liberties its author takes — with conventional narrative structure, with any readily discernible logic dictating some passages’ tortuous paths of thought, with grammatical norms, and even with the ordinarily sacrosanct writer’s mandate to eschew cliché — have overwhelmed the sector of my brain that transacts in sentences, paragraphs, rhetorical touch, and so forth, to the extent that I’m in for my own considerable struggle here as I try to transform the notes I scribbled down with seeming indiscrimination in several different notebooks, Book 2’s margins, on Post-its and the back of a gas bill that it looks like still needs to be paid into an orderly account of what it’s like to read Knausgaard. Nevertheless, some thoughts:
The first thing I should emphasize is that I found myself consumed by My Struggle, swallowed whole in a way that recalled for me the experience of reading similarly mammoth works like Moby-Dick, JR, Crime and Punishment, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 2666 — Big Books that temporarily assume an autocrat’s control over their readers’ inner lives. And then since my ostensible focus here is Book Two: A Man in Love, I should also single out for praise this second volume while conceding that it’s in many ways merely an amplification of the first, and that this is both a merit and demerit. Which is to say that if you found yourself unable to put Book One down even during some of its most water-treadingly indulgent-seeming passages of plotless drift precisely because you were compelled by the minutiae of Knausgaard’s “struggle,” then you will find a lot to keep you reading through A Man In Love’s near-600 pages. If, on the other hand, you found the former book frequently irritating, disagreed with its author’s aggressive indifference to poetic niceties; if you considered it an unconscionably navel-gazing sprawl, the dull and the mundane speciously elevated to metaphysical heights the actual text rarely managed to reach…you may not make it through Book Two.
I’m in the former camp: read both books hungrily and find myself already missing Knausgaard just a few days after turning A Man in Love’s last page, searching the Web for inexpensive crash courses in Norwegian, mostly just wishing Volume Three were available in English now. (At roughly five hundred pages per installment, the last four are presumably intruding nightly on heroic translator Don Bartlett’s sleep). Some readers will be put off by the prospect of a prose work of Proustian length written in sentences that lack Proust’s style, elegance, and grace; I, too, had a hard time with some of the silly all-caps interjections (“FUCK, SHIT, FUCK!”) along with the frequent, blithe lapses into rank cliché — “The time was ripe,” “It was now or never,” “She was clearly cut from the same cloth as me,” and so on. The writing is purportedly ungainly in its original Norwegian, too. And yet the coarse phrasing serves Knausgaard’s overarching purpose oddly well. While there’s very little polish at phrase-level, sentences are syntactically complex — circuitous, recursive, serpentine in the way bar-stool disquisitions on points of intense personal interest can be — and if consistently guilty of the serial-comma-splice, then also a reflection of the almost desperate speed with which Knausgaard seems determined to track every insight, notion, thought-line, argument, reflection through the labyrinthine warrens of whatever burrowing creature’s hole it’s drawn him down.
Here he is, for instance, having just returned with his nursery-school-age daughter from a classmate’s birthday party:
I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a role in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn’t that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them, on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn’t actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something that could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.
What was the problem?
On the other hand, it would be unfair if the ratio of thought to action here left readers with the false impression that this is a 573-page book in which nothing happens. In passages that volley back and forth through time we see young Karl Ove decamp for Stockholm; sever ties with almost all of his old life in Norway, (which program includes leaving his first wife); fall in love again; remarry; fight to sustain (and then, once it’s begun to slip away, recover) the elation of those first few months of courtship as the new couple settles into everyday routine; witness his second wife Linda’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of their first daughter; give listless interviews and lectures on his books and ambivalence towards literary fame; discourse with friends and enemies on being, art, morality — but the sections I liked best, the ones that make the books worth reading, retreat from these episodes and trek into the underground of consciousness, where Knausgaard’s unchecked and frequently volatile reflections are no longer bound by the normative limits of decent speech and behavior in respectable company.
2.
Some of these sentences and paragraphs are long, but they operate in a way very much unlike those of some other writers one tends to class as either maximalist or longwinded, depending on one’s feelings about length in prose: Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, or László Krasznahorkai. Bernhard’s read almost like parodies of manic, rabid, raving thought — they are very much internal monologues. And while they are unhinged at times, what seems like madness is really an insane deference to logic: a logic that will pursue the necessary consequences of first premises far beyond the boundaries of bourgeois comfort, into the truth that lies beneath and must be left to lie there unlooked-at if life will be lived, if family, colleagues, social circles are to be engaged — basically, if anything is to be done.
Bernhard, like Beckett, is in this way very funny. His narrators’ better tirades follow their merciless logic to conclusions that are shocking or at least discomfiting not only because we can’t believe somebody’s saying this, but because of the disquieting sense that they might actually be true. Here is a representative passage from Concrete, in the midst of a mostly book-spanning “digression” from the narrator’s stated purpose, which is to write a definitive study of composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy:
My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schonberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further from him. […] All these attempts […] had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all […] But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. […] Had I published my essay on Schonberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a complete failure. To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. […] And what about my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy? […] Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone.
The reason Concrete’s narrator can’t begin the monumental work to which he has devoted this phase of his life is that he foresees, correctly, that no matter how far he manages to go it won’t be far enough. Anything he writes will fall short of his vision, and while this insight is common enough to be a cliché, it’s a cliché that the artist who aspires to make art has to disregard if he’s ever to make anything. In other words, the productive artist necessarily suppresses his integrity, proceeds as if it weren’t true that anything he ultimately brings into the world will be, beside its incorporeal Platonic vision, a disappointment. What’s simultaneously terrifying and hilarious in Bernhard is his narrators’ integrity, their refusal to compromise, to deceive themselves or allow themselves to be deceived into acceptance of the subtle deviations from the truth that are what enable us to go about our lives.
Meanwhile, Krasznahorkai’s long sentences read to me much more like speech transcribed: musings, sermons, lectures, disquisitions, diatribes, and, above all, stories. They’re less internal than Bernhard’s; even when tracing a character’s unspoken thoughts they’re more like a figure talking to himself than a lunatic frantically looping along Bernhardian nightmare theme park rides, hurtling towards madness and death. Here, the former composer who has not only retired from creative life but sealed himself off from the depressed Hungarian small town in which The Melancholy of Resistance takes place has had (while hammering nails) a Saul-of-Tarsus-style revelation:
It was indeed a sudden awakening, but, like all such awakenings, not wholly unheralded, for before he set out on his tour he had been aware only of the plainly laughable nature of his efforts, the chief of which was to prevent his left hand being battered to pieces, a piffling task to which he applied the whole might of his considerable intellect [that] […]laughable as it was, […] [intimated that] there was a deeper, more complex issue at stake, the nature of which was to allow him to master the art of banging in nails. He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then […] he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for […]this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a […] flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from ‘missing the point’ to ‘hitting the nail on the head’ so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation […]
He had arrived at the decisive moment of resignation, the happy little glimmer on the head of the nail conjured nothing more or less than a mysterious, unforgettable sensation that had surprised him on his way home, that despite the apparently insufferable condition of the town, he was glad simply to be alive […]
Knausgaard, in contrast with Krasznahorkai and Bernhard, neither transposes creative-impotence-induced nerve-trauma nor conjures weirdly dialectic soliloquies. Instead, the image his prose—and even his subject—frequently calls to this reader’s mind is an author bent over his keypad, typing at very high-gear velocity:
I began to work, sat in my new office on Dalagatan writing every day while Linda was at home with Vanja and came to see me for lunch, often worried about something but also happy, she was closer to the child and what was happening than me, for I was writing what had started out as a long essay [but] slowly but surely was growing into a novel, it soon reached a point where it was everything and writing was all I did, I moved into the office, wrote day and night, sleeping an hour here and there. I was filled with an absolutely fantastic feeling, a kind of light burnt within me, not hot and consuming but cold and clear and shining. At night I took a cup of coffee with me and sat down on the bench outside the hospital to smoke, the streets around me were quiet, and I could hardly sit still, so great was my happiness. Everything was possible. Everything made sense.
Knausgaard’s purpose in My Struggle, explicit in its title, is to simultaneously depict, scrutinize and enact the process of writing the very work that narrates the story of its author writing himself through and ultimately out of his consuming need to write. It’s an impressive trick. If Bernhard’s books are often long uninhibited screeds “about” inhibited artists and writers, then Knausgaard’s first two volumes are “about” a man’s struggle to surmount the mundane impediments to his being present at his desk, feverishly cataloguing and endlessly carping about these same impediments to his being there. The most substantial narrative arc in these two volumes traces the composition of the memoir as it’s being composed — which means, since by default nearly every non-writing activity, obligation, interaction, and relationship constitutes a kind of roadblock in this composition’s path, antagonists abound:
A few weeks after the novel was finished life began as a house husband, and the plan was it would last until next spring while Linda did the last year of her training at the Dramatiska Institutet. The novel writing had taken its toll on our relationship, I slept in the office for six weeks, barely seeing Linda and our five-month-old daughter, and when at last it was over she was relieved and happy, and I owed it to her to be there, not just in the same room, physically, but also with all my attention and participation. I couldn’t do it. For several months I felt a sorrow at not being where I had been, in the cold, clear environment, and my yearning to return was stronger than my pleasure at the life we lived. The fact that the novel was doing well didn’t matter. After every good review I put a cross in the book and waited for the next, after every conversation with the agent at the publisher’s when a foreign company had shown some interest or made an offer, I put a cross in the book and waited for the next, and I wasn’t very interested when it was eventually nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, for if there was one thing I had learned over the last six months it was that what all writing was about was writing.
3.
It’s true that if this were all Knausgaard had to offer his readers, few would be inclined to indulge him for 3,000 pages (and furthermore provokes contemplation of how, for instance, a 3,000-page counter-memoir composed by Linda about her struggle to put up with her husband’s duty-shirking on the home front during their matrimony’s embryonic phase might read); but intricately textured, almost Altman-like social episodes compel a mesmeric attention that’s at times tough to account for rationally. At birthday parties, literary conferences, a christening, a funeral, in bookstores, flats, supermarkets, bars, a restless Knausgaard interacts with the whole rolling cast of people intimately or peripherally involved in his professional and private life. Much of the readerly fun to be found in these transcriptions of the interpersonal mundane inheres in the persistent dissonance between Knausgaard’s mild outward manner and the frank, often punishing perlustrations to which he subsequently subjects both his interlocutors and himself. An interview that on the surface seems to come off fairly well gets angrily dismissed as ersatz-High Culture fluff — vapid onanism Knausgaard validates by placidly agreeing to take part:
The problem is what surrounds all these authorships, the flattery that mediocre writers thrive on and, as a consequence of their false self-image, everything they are emboldened to say to the press and TV.
I know what I’m talking about. I’m one of them myself.
Oh, I could cut off my head with the bitterness and shame that I have allowed myself to be lured, not just once but time after time. If I have learned one thing over these years, which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:
Don’t believe you are anybody.
Do not fucking believe you are somebody.
Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit.
Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.
So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then at least, you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.
I also found it difficult to part ways with many characters. Knausgaard’s daughters, in particular, benefit from the filterless, unembellished presentation, probably because small children tend to do amusing, irritating, infuriating, and endearing things. Meanwhile, his friend and confidante, Geir, an academic equipped with copious wit and opinion, gets many of the book’s most entertaining lines, but also often makes both Knausgaard and the reader pause to think. Here he is with Karl Ove, Geir first:
“I think it’s Sigurd Slembe. The time to act. To act or not to act. It’s classic Hamlet. To be an actor in your own life or a spectator.”
“And you are?”
“Good question.”
A silence arose. Then he said:
“I’m probably a spectator, with elements of choreographed action. But I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot inside me that I can’t see. And so it doesn’t exist. And you?”
“Spectator.”
“But you’re here. And yesterday you were in Bergen.”
“Yes. But this is not the result of any decision. It was forced.”
“That’s perhaps another way of making a decision, hm? Letting whatever happens do it for you?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s strange,” he said. “The more unreflective you are, the more active you are. You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer. And of course that works for them, they always have to enter the ring again, and if you’ve been given a pounding in the previous fight it’s best if you don’t remember it too well, otherwise you’ve had it. But their presence was absolutely amazing. It filled everything. Vita contemplativa or vita activa, I supposed they’re the two forms, aren’t they? It’s an old problem, of course. Besets all spectators. But not actors. It’s a typical spectator problem . . .”
Behind us, Christina stuck her head through the door.
“Would you two like some coffee?”
“Please,” I said.
Book One’s critical event — the death of Knausgaard’s father — serves as a backdrop for the real story: Knausgaard’s breakthrough decision to build the first volume of his memoir around it; similarly, the less harrowing but no less felt drama of his grudging entrée into love and domestic life anchors A Man in Love’s story of a man fighting to reconcile that love with his almost inhuman artistic designs.
No surprise that not all of the individuals who came across versions of themselves in these pages were pleased with their portrayals. (The threat of legal action on the part of certain relatives resulted in Knausgaard and his Norwegian publisher agreeing to change a few names.) But in light of Knausgaard’s overall intent, they’re probably depicted accurately — not as a Dickensian cast of characters acting out one grandly shared humanist drama but rather as figures who on occasion drop by to complicate Knausgaard’s ongoing struggle to write something great. These aren’t quite people in the ordinary sense but a near-endless series of person-shaped impressions — shadows flitting across the beam of the author’s incandescently projected vision. If anyone is conscious of just how cold this frequently can make him seem, it’s certainly Knausgaard himself, who throughout both volumes lapses into long handwringing fits of self-loathing and -condemnation, agonized by his sense that he’s letting down everyone he ought to love.
4.
I call this sometimes-sociopathic-seeming tendency to reduce in their representation real people to sources of personal annoyance “accurate” because, with astounding single-mindedness (or monomania, if you prefer), Knausgaard conceives of and then executes the writing project that both consumes him and sequesters him from life. He’s Ahab, only with the final volume’s publication — which reportedly concludes with whatever the Norwegian is for “I am no longer an author” — he’s gone and caught the whale.
One interpretation of a literary quest to kill its own author might be that it’s perverse: in seeking to extinguish the artistic impulse, the author aims to annihilate not only the ambition that has driven him throughout his adult life, but an identity built up and burnished over decades. If Knausgaard is no longer an author, what is he? What will he be?
And then, from a career-lensed perspective, killing the whale is suicide. I’ve often wondered whether Wallace unintentionally terminated the novelist in himself with Infinite Jest; certainly the title of his final short-fiction collection, as well as that volume’s persistently bleak takes on the value of an individual’s drive to achieve anything, suggests a despair of ever returning from the wasteland that a book of near precedent-less critical approbation can exile its author to: after you’ve done it, what are you supposed to do? Just as Joyce could not in the ‘30s send Bloom off on another Dublin tour, so Wallace’s next novel couldn’t be I.J. Redux.
On the other hand, few, if any, authors aspiring to compose literary art that I know of start out with the intent to make anything less than what they privately conceive of as an as-yet-unshaped, but inchoate and most importantly possible Perfect Book. This is the reason they decide to write. Reality — in the form of family life, financial circumstance, the tundra of the market, self-assurance eroded by critique or, probably worse, indifference, failure, doubt, exhaustion, time — eventually intervenes. Very few people, whether they would admit as much or not, particularly in the first inferno of ambitious burn, are willing to go down with the whale. Poverty, obscurity, irrelevance, low social standing, and so forth all seem more romantic, less intolerable, more like the plot of some young person’s adventure tale, less like the despondence-inducing signatures of failure and a wasted life at eighteen than they do when you find yourself approaching middle age.
In William Gaddis’s JR, another massive meditation on ambition, art, and time, an aging, alcoholic, seemingly doomed writer is perpetually haunted by visions of windows closing, chances slipping away or already long lost to time. Since finishing my own first book, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to chart a course forward, or at least get started on some sort of new project, but have been mostly stymied by a sense that I’m just not sure what I really want to do next. I’m so much more alert to the discouraging reality that no matter what I wind up doing, committing to that work will entail an implicit decision not to try my hand at any number of other things. Granting that this might not strike your average global citizen as an existential concern on the order of the triumph of Capital, rising sea, and inequality levels, to say nothing of the looming rise of the machines, it matters to me — because I only get the handful of decades I’ve already blown through a few of, and the passage of time doesn’t seem to be bringing with it a corresponding surge in my vitality, so that the issue isn’t only that I can’t decide what kind of book I’d like to write, don’t even know how I’d like to write, I’m sick of my own sentences these days, and then I don’t know whether I should focus mainly on telling a story of sorts, and if so do I have any stories worth telling, and in this era of scattered insular intellectual and aesthetic camps, what kind of reader do I want to engage, and most of all what kind of work can I see myself committing to for the however many years it will take to complete — I can’t imagine even starting something new unless the need to carry it home takes hold of me with such force that I can’t not be working on it….
And the maybe-obvious Knausgaard link here is with the man’s sheer desperation — a desperation to emerge from all of this: the torpor, muddled thinking, indecision, and self-loathing; terror of more windows closing, fear of failure, envy, ambition so smothering it chokes off all but the most frantic exertions of will to open up the word-processing program and for Christ’s sakes just begin, the solipsism I recognized too well and have only really ever slipped free from, somewhat paradoxically, when hard at work, when the gaze is abruptly turned outward, and I’m able to see people again, see with them — perceive, if only fleetingly, that each has her own struggle, just as I do mine…in other words break out of the self’s airless solitary confinement: creative immersion as a kind of efflorescent opening out to the world at large.
My Struggle provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes-quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivates him, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free. When Knausgaard tells his wife he must leave her at home to care for their recently born daughter, must write; when he won’t compromise even after she threatens to leave him, take the kid with her, then does; and when he furthermore dispenses with every last aesthetic consideration aside from this scribomaniacal need to write, he is both chronicling and dramatizing his own refusal to abandon the pursuit…and it’s this monstrously intact integrity with which he undertakes and then completes his masterwork that answers any question about the madness of a project that, like a rocket fired straight up into the sky, takes aim at its creator and terminates in the obliteration of his authorship, his hunger to create. It’s Knausgaard’s consummation, a triumph that emancipates the husband, father, son, and friend: the author is dead, leaving what’s left of the man free to walk away from his leviathan — preserved forever now in art’s time-cheating formaldehyde — freed from the echo chamber of thwarted intent, in order to emerge, maybe for the first time, into life.
Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago: Tell us now, if you can, for we are really terribly curious about this, why is it, do you think, that reasonable people should pay good money to be, well, frightened? What, you know, can the appeal of such… unpleasantness… actually be? And on a more personal note, please, we’re all so curious… if you wouldn’t mind… what scares you? Okay, in reverse order, then: pretty much the same kind of thing that frightens you, what did you think I’d say, giant lizards? And, moving on to the first question: What are you trying to suggest, that you are not, have never been, implicated in this particular transaction? How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.
Now, as fantastically reliable as he was in delivering the desired goods, Robert B. Parker grew awfully soft in his later years, but Michael Connelly has remained true to his original impulses, to put on display the underbelly of L.A. while tracking an idiosyncratic detective’s solution of a complex crime or series of crimes. While remaining a very reliable and pleasurable crime writer, however, Connelly never rises above that category. Because Connolly is both wholly serious and honest about what he does, he would find the idea of “rising above his “category” risible. He should, anyhow—he’s earned that much, the right to an absolute respect for his own work. It is worth noting that both Parker and Connelly are rooted in Raymond Chandler, who may be the only American crime writer ever really to turn genre crime fiction into art, and he managed to do it only once, in The Long Goodbye. He knew he’d done it, too: you can feel it in his letters, the evolution from an earlier edgy, wary defensiveness into, late in his life, a self-doubting, self-questioning master’s sense of accomplishment. Though Ross Macdonald came very close a couple of times, none of the writers who followed along after Chandler ever wrote anything as resonant, complex and sad as The Long Goodbye. None of them, not even Macdonald, ever could, in large part because they were all using a borrowed template that grew thinner and thinner with every generation.
Nice essay, but the definition of literary fiction is far too narrow and far too self-serving. Much literary fiction, for instance, is just as plot-oriented and just as visceral as genre fiction, and I have no idea what Straub means by saying that literary fiction concentrates on things like “consensus reality.” Certainly Lolita or The Great Gatsby or As I Lay Dying or Invisible Man or Earthly Powers or The God of Small Things or White Teeth or The Robber Bride or A Suitable Boy or We Need to Talk About Kevin, to take some obvious examples by some very different literary writers, carry us quite a long ways off from the definition of the “literary genre” that Straub offers. I agree with Straub that there’s a weird resistance to taking the best horror writing as seriously as, say, the best detective writing is taken. Still, Straub doesn’t help anyone take horror fiction more seriously by trying to lock literary fiction into a little box of his own devising. He shouldn’t imitate the very narrow-mindedness he’s attempting to break while making his argument for, say, Stephen King or Shirley Jackson or Straub himself. If the best horror writers are as good as the best writers of the literary genre (a genre that doesn’t exist, or at least not in the terms that Straub describes), it’s because good writing can show up almost anywhere, by any kind of writer using any kind of approach.
I agree that literary fiction is really another genre much like horror, crime, or romance. The trouble with any fiction writing is exactly what the last paragraph highlights. A reliance on prescribed elements that define a genre.
Literary fiction enjoys a better reputation in terms of surface quality. The infallible reputation of the literary genre doesn’t mean it is infallible though. Literary grade fiction doesn’t suffer from an overuse of zombies, mummies or the odd rabid dog. Is does suffer on occasion from over wordiness, pretension and the shot gun blast of consciousness. The differences seem to be the amount of scrap in the heap.
“Literary fiction” is a genre like “sci-fi” or “horror.” In “literary fiction” as in all genres, there are works that transcend and works that do not. Or: most of every type of thing is garbage, but some is really great. Walk the shelves of any bookstore and on any given shelf there are probably one or two books that you would like and a whole lot that are just cheap imitaitons of other works.
It is easy to hold up “As I Lay Dying” and say, “See literary fiction doesn’t follow any rules”–but this isn’t a fair test. It is like when someone says the 60s are better than the 90s because Dylan is better than Creed. We can all pick great works and put them against terrible works to prove our point.
The fact of the matter is that there are great works on every shelf in a bookstore. Often those works that transcend our traditional notion of genre are plucked out of it and placed in the “literary fiction” section anyway. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I’m not defending genre, I’m just saying don’t be blind to the garbage all around you.
My take on why horror is more denigrated than crime fiction (to say nothing of literary fiction) is simpler than Straub’s: because it specifically defies what he describes as “consensus reality.” Crime fiction, on the other hand–and even some sci-fi–can (and does) claim to represent the world we all live in, essentially unchanged, just seen from a different, darker, dirtier, more vulnerable point of view. It’s escapism that pretends it’s not. Horror, on the other hand, begins with the premise that the reality we’re all agreed upon is not the only reality–the parameters our materialist consensus has set out for it leave out many, many scary and important aspects.
It’s easier for a crime writer to tell himself, or a crime reader to tell himself, that, even as he’s working within genre conventions, what he’s really doing is taking a hard look at reality; a horror writer doesn’t have that luxury, and his prestige will always, I think, suffer for it.
DN, I think you should maybe read a little more carefully what I actually wrote. I never said or suggested that literary fiction is in bulk better than genre fiction. I think the opposite is true: precisely because genre fiction has some clear rules, the writers who do well in genre fiction tend to be good at following those rules, and deserve to be praised for that. I certainly didn’t suggest that literary fiction is better than genre fiction just because As I Lay Dying is a great novel. (Under your reasoning, by the way, Straub should have been disqualified from mentioning Raymond Chandler and forced to defend Tom Clancy.) All I said is that the definition of literary fiction offered by Straub is false, because he has given a definition that doesn’t begin to recognize the range of literary fiction out there. If you like, I’m happy to pick an example of bad literary writing that doesn’t fit Straub’s definition: for instance, almost everything by Joyce Carol Oates. This isn’t a very interesting game anyway, trying to define what is and isn’t literary writing or what is and isn’t genre writing. If you read the last line of what I originally wrote, you’ll see that you and I are mainly in agreement, and that you’re fighting with someone who’s on your side.
First, God Bless you, Mr. Straub.
People need to stop worrying about what categories things fit into and just enjoy them. Does it matter if you are frightened by Flannery O’Connor or Stephen King? William Gay or Peter Straub? If it works, it works. SO many universities are down on “genre” fiction, wanting to make us all into these literary giants. How many writers can make a living writing ANYTHING? Look at the best seller lists – what’s on top? Mystery, detective, horror, pulp, and yes, some lit too.
People like Peter Straub fight to elevate dark fiction to a higher place, along with writers like Benjamin Percy, the aforementioned Gay, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Mark Gaitskill, AM Homes, so many. It’s a fight we wage every day.
In the end, I think all of “us” need to get along, lit and genre, high-brow and low-brow, and everything in between. Less exclusion and more inclusion. There is nothing wrong with reading Cormac followed by King followed by Pynchon followed by Grisham by Bradbury by Saunders by whoever the hell you enjoy.
Read fiction in The New Yorker and Playboy and The Paris Review and Esquire. Just read, and turn other people on to whatever it is you’re really digging.
My two cents, anyway. :-)
Robin, you are right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t really respoonding to you, or anyone, so I shouldn’t have mentioned your comment. I apologize. I am an alright guy, I promise–just got carried away in my own bubble.
You’ll have to count me on the side of people who don’t think it makes much sense to call “literary fiction” a genre akin to sci-fi or horror or anything else. All those other genres you can sum up pretty quickly and accurately and people will know what you are talking about. There is no way to sum up literary fiction that would include everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard to (I could go on and on).
This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.
Straub’s definition, which hinges around the idea that the work centers on “ordinary lives” automatically makes you think of a billion examples of literary works that aren’t about ordinary people.
It makes more sense to say that “literary fiction” is a problematic term with multiple and perhaps conflicting definitions. Because what literary fiction really means is artistic fiction. So a work of fiction can be BOTH genre fiction and literary fiction in many people’s eyes. Raymond Chandler is often listed as a literary author or in the literary section of bookstores, but we would still call his work detective fiction.
I tend to think the problem is that there is a conflation between what is pulp and what is genre.
Lincoln, I think where we differ is that I would not class those authors you list as being in the genre of “literary fiction.” What I was trying to express was that there are tropes and expectations for popular, literary fiction just as there are with crime fiction and fantasy. That is what I was failing to say in my first post.
You say you can’t sum up “literary fiction” as a genre that includes Kafka and Bolano, etc, but I think you would have just as hard a time classifying, say, “sci-fi” as a genre when comparing Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, etc.
There is good and bad of everything and the bad, or mediocre, ossify what was great about the good into cliches. All fiction, music, film, etc., does this. “Literary fiction” isn’t exempted just because Nabokov was awesome.
Now, I recognize that maybe I am changing the meaning of some terms here, but when I hear the term “literary fiction” I do not think of Thomas Pynchon or Kathryn Davis or Lydia Davis. I think of the type of earnest, well-written book that does well as a movie. I’m sorry if I am being dismissive here.
I guess the problem is that we would agree that writing within the tropes and confines of any genre is bad, but whenever a work exceeds those, it gets plucked out of the confines of that genre and not counted with its rank. It is like this:
“Pickles don’t taste good,”
“This pickle tastes good.”
“Then it isn’t a pickle.”
I don’t know why I am carrying on so–I don’t even read “sci-fi” or “horror” or any other “genre” fiction.
Giant lizards ARE pretty scary.
dn:
By what standard would you not classify them as such? Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc. If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed. Even the New Yorker, which has a (I think unjustified) reputation for being narrow and boring in its fiction still publishes people like George Saunders, Roberto Bolano and so on.
I certainly don’t disagree that most of what is published as literary fiction or in literary magazines is crap though. Most of everything is.
Including most of my comments.
Well, DN you need to change that.
Start with William Gay’s story “The Paperhanger” if that eases you in. Or just about any short by Mary Gaitskill. I’m sure you’ve read Flannery O’Connor (any short), and maybe Cormac McCarthy (The Road, Outer Dark, etc.)? If not, read them, they’re certainly dark and horrific. Brian Evenson (anything), Stephen Graham Jones (All the Beautiful Sinners), Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas), that’s a great mix of contemporary genre-benders there. Of course I’d personally suggest Straub’s Ghost Story, King’s The Stand or It (both very long) or The Long Walk (very short), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. So many great books, no need to avoid them.
A wonderful essay. For me there are often no clear lines between genres. In many ways genres are illusions. And what wonderful illusions they can be.
Greg Gutierrez
Zen and the Art of Surfing
If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed.
Not necessarily the case—for one thing, you may find a Borges story in a mystery magazine (say, Ellery Queen’s, back in 1948), and that issue of Tin House you pick up might have a story by genre writer Kelly Link (as did TH’s 2007 Fantastic Women issue).
You’re just playing the usual game of pointing to the best of “literary” fiction—McSweeney’s and Tin House—and comparing them to some notional middle-of-the-road genre magazine, and then, shocker!, the best of A is better than some imaginary average example of B. And this rather leaves aside the fact that both the magazines you name do publish genre pieces as well.
Nick:
No, that is really not the game I’m playing. As I said above:
This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.
My only point here is the term “literary fiction” is not used in the same way as the term “Sci-Fi” or “Romance” or whatever. What I’m saying is we are comparing apples to oranges. It is just a different kind of term.
When Straub lists his definition for literary fiction he simply defines domestic realism. His definition doesn’t include magic realism, avant-garde fiction, southern gothic or any of the other styles that are grouped under the term literary fiction.
I only used Tin House and McSweeney’s because they are famous and people would be familiar with them. I could name a ton of lower tier journals that would make the same point too.
And just to clarify, I’m certainly not saying that this makes literary fiction automatically better than genre fiction. I’m saying the terms dont’ really compare and if anything the term literary fiction might be unfair and problematic, since great genre works (Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) get snatched up and called literary.
It would be nice if we could move beyond the tired idea that literary fiction is by definition all but plotless. As Robin notes, it’s just not accurate.
Now if you’ll all excuse me, I need to go analyze the fonts on my dust jackets.
Lincoln,
I would suggest that those ton of lower-tier literary journals in fact do NOT publish stuff along the lines of Borges and stuff along the lines of domestic realism and Oulipo-based material and Kafkasque material, etc. Most of the journals I’ve ever seen have fairly strict aesthetic agendas, at least within particular issues. (Some, like Conjunctions, an issue of with Straub edited, have narrow agendas but at least alter those agendas on an issue-by-issue basis.) Not only are Mc and TH among the best and most popular, they are among the most adventurous—there’s probably a relation between those three attributes, of course.
You are correct, of course, that literary fiction is a rather large umbrella of sometimes competing and sometimes parallel traditions. But so too is something people often call “speculative fiction”—which would also include some Borges, and some naked propaganda for the space program, and Robert Aickman, and Vonnegutesque satires, and Joyce Carol Oates (who publishes seemingly at whim, of course) etc.
Heck, we can just narrow is down to “fantasy”: what do Lovecraft and Tolkien really have in common, traditionally or aesthetically? And they’re hardly the opposite ends of the fantastical spectrum either.
Now, of course, there are genre magazines with narrow focuses, but there are also literary magazines with focuses just as narrow. That was my objection: you picked the magazines with the broadest “literary” focus and compared them to some notional genre magazine that would only publish a fairly narrow range. Actually existing literary magazines are almost all narrower in focus than mcSweeney’s; actually existing genre magazines are almost all at least somewhat broader in focus than what you give them credit for.
of WHICH Straub edited. I wish The Millions allowed comments to be previewed.
Richard, thanks for the suggestions. I’ve read most of that stuff, or at least the obvious (Ghost Story, O’Connor, Gaitskill). I love Stephen King and think that the Dead Zone is one of the best novels ever written, period. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to read Cormac McCarthy, but that’s just my own thing. The other suggestions, I will check out. With horror fiction, my disappointment is that I can never find horror novels as satisfying as horror films, but maybe I am trying the wrong works. It seems that maybe one issue with horro fiction, at least in execution, is that there is a drive toward resolution or revelation that detracts. An in ability to leave ambiguous or unresolved. The beginning is alwasy so much more satisfying and horrific than the end. I would love for a horror novel to be able to not bring the plot to a conclusion, but leave it open. I don’t think this is a failing of horror as a genre but just a fact of execution. I imagine that publishers frown upon unresolved plots.
I don’t think Straub is talking about just domestic literary fiction. He says “the several sub-genres of literary fiction,” and includes in that list “the experimental novel.” And while it’s true that it’s hard to draw a line between Borges and O’Connor and Fitzgerald, it’s also true that it’s quite easy to see in many experimental stories just how the author is nodding to the experimental styles of, say, Barthelme, Borges, or someone else. Even though the fiction I read is almost entirely what Straub would call “literary fiction,” I take his point — it has its conventions. And so do its sub-genres. Just because someone truly singular may come along and explode them every once in a while, that doesn’t make the general point less true.
Lincoln, I think you are both very accurate in your comment and very inaccurate.
You say:
“Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc.”
And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless. Literary fiction is a genre because of marketing and nothing more. It is the same with mystery, horror, romance, etc. If I like x and y books sitting on the “Literature” shelf, then I might like z. The only thing that ties x, y, and z together is that their publishers think I will buy the other if I like the one.
Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?
The problem comes when, to take the film noir example, you try to redefine these films based on quality. That is, the only metric that would separate Sunset Blvd. and Night of the Hunter from Gun Crazy or Crimewave, is that the former are “great” films that transcend the genre and thus can no longer belong, while the latter are merely good examples of such genre. However, “great” isn’t a genre. The problem, though, is that it has been associated with literary fiction, such that quality is a defining feature of the genre. Which makes no sense, because quality (and shit) can be found in any genre.
For example, what makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road not a science-fiction book? The only thing is that it was marketed as literary fiction, and shelved in that section. That’s it. “Post-apocalypse” is a trope associated with science-fiction. There are good examples (Riddley Walker) and bad examples (Brin’s The Postman). But they’re all science-fiction, except when they’re not marketed as such.
These pointless genre battles often crop up, I suspect, not so much as the defensiveness of genre fans (be it mystery, science-fiction, horror) to be taken seriously (which I do think forms a part), but more often literary fiction fans defensiveness to admit that their taste is more defined by marketing than by quality. That is, all genres have great examples and shit examples, but “literary fiction” is the only genre that defines itself solely as the former. But the truth is, its just marketing.
Southern literature comes to mind as literary fiction that is incredibly narrow in scope, or at least as it is collected and marketed. I remember being very frustrated in college with Southern Lit–that is, you weren’t writing Southern Lit unless you had some folks in a station wagon dwelling on the blood of the earth and the history of a family’s fortunes after the Civil War. Reading lit journals that focus on Southern Lit (at the time) often felt like reading the same cliches over and over.
Ryan, I think we are actually in total agreement here:
And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless.
My point is that literary fiction is not a term like “horror” or “detective fiction.” It isn’t a genre term. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything really, but if it does it means something other than genre, namely a certain level of artistry. Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.
Nick: You are of course correct that there are literary magazines both big and small that have strict aesthetics. There are also literary magazines both small and big with very broad aesthetics. But the aesthetics are not merely domestic realism, there are journals dedicated to other styles. And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.
My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?
Lincoln, you say: “Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.”
I agree completely. Saying that is like saying science-fiction = aliens, horror = monsters, mystery = detectives. However, these latter views have often become the dominant and stereotyped view, such that, if I recommended Evenson’s The Open Curtain to friend saying that it’s one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read, they might reply that they don’t like zombies or Stephen King. Clearly, it’s their loss for not being an open-minded reader, but you can hardly blame them when “Horror” as such is always marketed as zombies and vampires and the Saw movies.
The problem is that treating “literary fiction” as something different in kind to other genres reinforces the stereotypical, popularly received opinion that “genre x means y and z” while “literary fiction means good”. I think that “literary fiction” is a marketing classification and nothing more. But I also think that “horror” is a marketing classification and nothing more. Treating them as something else, the former is “quality” the latter is “genre” often prevents readers from reading great works that they wouldn’t normally.
And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.
I can’t say that I’ve noticed too many authors who write domestic realism and satire and experimental fiction and and and…I’d love some names. Not being sarcastic here; I am always eager to find ambitious authors, especially of short stories.
My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?
It is literary fiction, in the same way hard science fiction by Hal Clement and avant-horror by Thomas Ligotti are both, broadly, “the fantastic.” Yet, one could not predict that a Hal Clement fan would also groove to the short stories and weird prose poems and fictional essays and tales-as-instructional-guides of Thomas Ligotti simply because both are “fantastical.”
In the same way one might use “sci-fi” to only mean stories with spaceships in a conversation, Straub used “literary fiction” in one of the paragraphs in his essay to mean contemporary American realism. That he ably made a distinction between the “ice cream” of Roth and Updike on the one hand, and the not-at-all-ice-cream of William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt on the other, tells me that Straub knows that there is more to literary fiction than domestic realism and isn’t conflating the two except for momentary comic effect.
You know, it’s funny, as I was reading this, and the comments that have followed, I was thinking of something entirely else, Freud’s theory of heterosexual development. Freud posits homosexuality (and all the other sexual “deviancies”) as forms of developmental ‘non-realisation’ – stuck in the prior stages – whilst heterosexual development winds up as the culmination of said development, enclosing all those prior stages within it. Two things, first off: I’m seriously truncating the actual inner complexity of Freud’s own ideas about “deviancies” (my account, as it is, is more to do with ‘Freudianism’ than Freud proper) and I’m also not intending to make some point by point comparison between sexuality and the novel. However, as the comparison makes clear, that privilege of heterosexuality as that which encloses the deviancies as immature phase of itself, non-realisations, is something I wish to work with in this different context. What strikes me as resonant here is the notion that literary fiction is writing in its fullest developmental phase, with ‘genre’ relegated to that which is stuck in the prior stages. This is partially why I’ve always found the praises that certain writers, like Hammett or Ligotti, get in which they ‘transcend’ the genre is, at the very least, gentrifying. I do think Lincoln makes a quite excellent point when he argues that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together but I think I’d argue that this is quite the same state of affairs with genre itself. Ryan has made the point already really fantastically above, so I’m going to cite him:
“Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?”
Exactly. The supposedly syntactical ‘elements’ that compose a genre’s discreteness break down upon any close inspection. However, what I suspect is that what the literary withholds from genre is precisely ‘artistry’ and I don’t think the distinction between pulp and genre quite resolves this, only repackages the bogus distinction. The art claim for literary fiction, for one thing, imports some concept of a maturity in writing. But genre reacts to the word quite distinctly, though no less maturely, from what we call literary fiction. Genre uses language with immense dexterity, I believe, but not so much in a sort of ‘well wrought urn’ mode. Rather, its brilliance is in its mobilisation of language movement and in the creation through arrangements of scenarios, a syntax of them, powerful styles. If, despite the acres of difference between them, such that there’s much passionate antipathy between adherents of each writer, there does seem a greater kinship between Hammett and Chandler than O’Connor and Borges, then I’d argue that this is due not to literary fiction’s greater diversity but is due (along with the misimpressions of marketing, another great point Ryan makes) to the commitment we still have, despite the apparent obliteration of high and low cultures under postmoderism, to relegating the un-urnlike to less than literary rather than what is truer to say of it: that it is anti-literary, another vector altogether. Which is why many of those cross-over books that are deemed literary actually often avoid what’s most profound about them: namely, how they fuck with the literary. Indeed, literary fiction may be able to offer a string of names to show its vast differences but despite everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard do belong together, as their list-ability demonstrates, in terms of the argument that their linguistic acts are the apotheosis of writing. Of course, this is not to say that the language text itself is somehow normative but I do believe our response to the language text as the deepest layer of the literary is definitely normative, not least in terms of the inspirations which inform those texts attentions to style and structure (Alain Robbe-Grillet was deeply influenced by Hammett, for instance, and he veritably invented the notion of the ‘new novel’). Also, too, genre writing can be quite languagey itself. Take, for instance, this passage from King’s latest, Under the Dome, where a light aircraft runs into the ‘dome’ which inexplicably appears out of nowhere:
“The Seneca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire down on the countryside. It also rained body parts. A smoking forearm – Claudette’s – landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.
It was October twenty-first.”
What’s quite wonderful about this in terms of the way it’s written is the quite conscious corruption of its own metaphor: where fire raining has a distinct dramatic unity, this is crudened immediately by the rain being turned into a rain of body parts, which in its lumpy thingness is likened to the grotesquery of the ‘neatly divided’ woodchuck, which could double here as a metaphor for the writing of genre itself, cleanly sliced critter. Capped with the disquietingly aerating, the inexpressive yet watchful eye of the date. This is what ‘genre’ does quite constantly on the level of language, corrupts the liquidity of writing, lumps, stirs, jumps, cuts, designs cleanly sliced critter, to achieve all kinds of uncanny effects. Given all this, I really think that there is a deep sense in which we need to do away with the developmental supremacy we hand automatically to literary fiction, even when we say genre works ‘can’ be ‘as’ good as that fiction. It really binds in not just genre but also the sources and pursuits of writing itself.
As a horror writer myself, I have also often heard the phrase, “You’re such a good writer — why do you waste your time with horror?” As if the genre (which is defined, as Straub points out, by emotional viewpoint, not by specific content) is inherently invalid.
I think “literary fiction” is a genre, at least as bookstores treat it.
Of course, one could easily say that many well-respected “literary” works are horror. Take Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example. If the overwhelming emotion of that novel isn’t horror, then I must not understand what horror is. (Beloved even has a strong supernatural element to it, moving it even further into that genre category, if I dare say so.)
I believe that writers with integrity tell the stories that interest and move them. Its the marketing side of things that insists on labels and pigeonholing, which then gives some people the opportunity to dismiss whole “categories” of work on the basis of arbitrarily defined “genres.”
Book marketing is like a fashion show, everything on parade is stuffed into a size two, even if it requires starvation. We all know real people, real writers, are rounder than that, no matter which peg you cram them into, there will always be that overflow poking out of the top. You can’t use old rusty pipes to lasso a piece of art; you have to use something flexible. There is nothing flexible about labels. Quite frankly the word genre and straight-jacket have a lot in common, in my humble opinion. Meh, what do I know, I’m a no name poet.
I’d say Straub is wrong that Chandler was the last person to elevate genre crime fiction to an art. James Ellroy has done that several times in his still-ongoing career, starting with LA Confidential, and continuing through stylist experiments like White Jazz to his latest, Blood’s a Rover. But crime fiction does have some restraints that most writers haven’t been able to overcome — if they even want to try.
Uh, should be “stylistic” experiments, not stylist. Yep, a preview option would be nice.
Good for you, Peter Straub. I made pretty much the same argument in an article for PopMatters (“Airplane Books, Junk Literature, and the Western Canon: All Novels Are Lies, Some Lies Are Better”). With very few exceptions, I find contemporary literary fiction intolerably self-absorbed, gimmicky, and just plain unreadable. Give me horror or sci-fi any day of the week. And I’m so glad Straub talks about Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye”, one of the greatest American novels ever written.
well,for me it’s quiet interesting to watch.. such movies,brings the creativeness
of the writer.
to be able to give what it should give..