Welcome back to Glass Half Full, and thanks for reading!
Today I’m taking a break from the exploration of conspiracy theories and science denial to engage in some literary hatchet work criticism. Or at least to give you an idea of the kind of stuff I like to read (and, I hope, write). It’s a bit of a one-off, but it might be the opening installment of an occasional how-to series on writing fiction. The series will be called “Fiction 101,” and as the name implies, it will cover the basics of narrative.
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I’ve been thinking about the differences between genre fiction and literary fiction for a long time, but have always hesitated to put my thoughts out in view of the public because it’s such a fraught subject. But M.J. Biggs dipped her toes in these waters with this post, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Here’s a big caveat that, though this post will make a Large Claim, these are just the thoughts of a haphazard reader (and a haphazard writer!) who appreciates many of the genres. As usual, I’m in the middle, which is just bound to tick everyone off.
And also, maybe my views are a bit dated, since “literary fiction” was declared dead in 2023 (see below) and, according to Lincoln Michel, MFA programs are now genre-friendly. So maybe there’s already been a great melding, or else people just don’t care about these genre debates anymore. And maybe everything I say here about literary fiction should be in the past tense.
Before my own Large Claim, let me borrow some claims from others. First, we should remember that genres are merely marketing tools, so that booksellers know where to shelve the books and readers know where to look for them. As a writer, you can write within the confines of a genre, or not. And I have to agree with Lev Grossman when he said that “literary” is just another genre with its own forms and rules. (It was in this Time magazine piece from 2012, in which he borrows this great line from M. John Harrison: “The sooner literary fiction recognizes and accepts its generic identity, the sooner it can get help.”)
I’ll add that the rules of the “literary” category are often more restrictive than those of the other genres. Romance? Two people fall in love and live happily ever after (or if you want to get edgy, happily for now). That’s it1. But literary? You must have finely crafted, fresh prose. Literary fiction is character-driven, so you must focus on character first, paying more attention to internal conflicts than external ones. There should be a theme that speaks to universal human experiences, but not an overbearing one that turns the characters into mouthpieces.
Yet you can find well-drawn, nuanced, and finely motivated characters, along with agile prose, in romance novels. You can find universal themes, handled with subtlety, in speculative fiction. Since literary fiction can’t really claim an advantage in these areas, it has increasingly focused on another rule: you shouldn’t have too much — or any — plot. If you doubt this last one, here’s the main problem Rachel Cusk found in Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests in a review in the Guardian: “That [Waters’ ambitions] pertain to plot rather than to the development of the novel’s core ideas is disappointing.” As I remember it, Francine Prose likewise criticized The Goldfinch for having too much plot and not enough style, but her review is behind a paywall.
More recently, you also shouldn’t try to imagine characters different from you, the author, living in periods other than your own, whether past or future. In short, literary fiction is autofiction (narratives that are thinly disguised memoir). Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is exactly the kind of fiction Rachel Cusk writes. And when your life consists of traveling from writing workshop to writing workshop, plotlessness necessarily ensues. (I say this having only read Outline. It’s possible that Cusk does something different in the other two books in the rest of this … wait for it … trilogy. So even literary writers can play to Amazon’s algorithmified marketplace!)
Dan Sinykin took Grossman’s point about genre to perhaps an absurd degree when he wrote in The Nation last year that “literary fiction” was a genre that lived and died between 1980 and 2023, and also that the term “genre fiction” only came into use a decade earlier. He admits that the genres themselves existed before being deployed as marketing tools, but it’s good to remember that these varieties of fiction, and the general distinctions between them, have always been with us. Jane Austen wrote at the same time as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens (himself a highly commercial writer) wrote at the same time as the penny dreadfuls, and Henry James wrote at the same time as Owen Wister and the dime novels and pulp weeklies.
I’ll leave it to readers to notice the class distinctions here. (While noting that my own father, who inspired my love of reading, was a working man who loved the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and also a good whodunnit, as well as Hemingway and Nabokov. His review of the latter might be summed up in the modern terminology: “meh.”)
Getting past genre
Maybe, instead of dividing fiction into genres, even with “literary” simply being one of many, we should instead divide it up in a simpler way: good fiction and bad fiction. What’s the difference, you ask?
Here comes my Large Claim: Good fiction is narrative that employs all three legs of the fictional stool I’ve talked about so far: character, plot, and theme.
Bad fiction focuses on just one, maybe two, of these legs. Bad fiction can be an action-only novel featuring stock characters with no internal life and nothing to say about the world at large. Or it can be a novel so stuck in a character’s head that nothing ever happens2. Or it can be an idea-driven novel in which the characters are mere mouthpieces for a philosophy (I certainly worry about this for Ship of Fools) or agents who act out a tale with a ham-fisted moral.
In contrast to all these ways of being bad, good fiction features well-drawn, dimensional characters dealing with conflicts, internal and external, that drive the plot forward in ways that speak to the human condition, all told through fresh, illuminating prose. And if all those things are working in synergy, then you really can’t tell what came first in the author’s intention. Is it character-driven? Plot-driven? Idea-driven? Who can tell? The stool doesn’t wobble because each leg is the same length.
At this point, I have to put the brakes on and bring up one other element of literary fiction that I left out until this point. (Did you notice it?) This is the inventiveness, usually formal, for which literary fiction is, or used to be, known. A story can really be anything. It can be a fictional anthropological report. It can be told through letters. It can be a history. It can be told in reverse chronological order. It can be 900 pages long and take place across the course of one day. It can be one 900-page sentence. So sometimes a piece of fiction can be “good” while violating my three-legged stool analogy by having no characters at all. This is what makes it “uncategorizable,” as that Writers.com article pointed out. Genre fiction can also be structurally inventive, but usually not to the lengths you’d find in literary fiction.
That caveat aside, let’s look at three writers I’d call excellent, whether they fall into the literary category or not.
Three writers
We’ll start with Sarah Waters and her novel, The Paying Guests. While Cusk derided the novel for its pastiche, I grew up in the salad days of postmodernism, so I view pastiche as a good thing. The story, set in 1920s London, follows Frances, the twenty-something single daughter of a formerly genteel family that is forced to take in lodgers, a married couple. She soon falls in love with the wife of this couple and starts an affair with her.
The rest of the novel’s twisting and dramatic (but not melodramatic) events flow from this situation. The first third of the novel is a love story, the second third is a police procedural (told from the suspect’s point of view), and the final third is an intense courtroom drama. I found the juxtaposition of these three genres to be structurally daring, and what’s more, it worked as a story. I’ve seldom been so gripped with tension as I was in the final third, and I usually hate courtroom dramas.
Waters’ writing is both stylish and lush, her characterization nuanced and deft, and she has the invention of a whole sub-genre to her credit, the lesbian historical novel. The theme that arises from The Paying Guests and most of Waters’ other work is of the individual trying to live an authentic life in the midst of a repressive society. For literary bona fides, she’s been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times (but not for this novel).
Next up, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This dystopian novel made a splash back in 2014, and it’s one of the two main touchstones for my own post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children. It falls into the sci-fi/speculative genre in that it explores a future dystopian world in which humanity has been largely wiped out by a virus that makes COVID look like a bad hangover. Instead of focusing on the lawlessness and mayhem of such a society (although there’s some of that) it considers what parts of culture can be saved when everything else breaks down. I loved the contrast between the pre-pandemic days and life post-pandemic. The two periods are connected not just by the characters’ memories but by a graphic novel that becomes almost a talisman for certain characters in the future world. Underscoring the novel’s hybrid nature (what is sometimes called “upmarket”) it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and the Toronto Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
And finally, how about going for the truly commercial — crime fiction? I’ll nominate James Lee Burke and his Dave Robicheaux series of crime novels. Mostly set in and around New Orleans, these read like literary novels with a backdrop of crime and violence. Burke got his start publishing non-genre novels set in the same milieu (Half of Paradise, which Kirkus Reviews categorizes as literary fiction) and in literary journals like The Southern Review. The rhythms of his prose and its imagery rank him with the best writers out there. And these aren’t just whodunnits, although there’s always a crime to be solved, but considerations of southern history, culture, and race relations. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the Edgar Grand Master Award and many other prizes.
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Come back on Friday for the next installment of Ship of Fools, “A Flat-Earth Interlude,” in which Sam Rowbotham returns with an even more outlandish plan to prove the existence of an unknown continent called Antarctica.
Of course there are tropes, such as “friends to lovers” and “enemies to lovers,” but these aren’t genre-defining.
And by “nothing,” I mean literally nothing, not the kind of “nothing” of which Jane Austen is wrongly accused. Even Emma is action-packed compared to modern autofiction, although it’s the action of changing interpersonal relationships.
Interesting. Good insight. I always feel strange saying I’m trying to write literary fiction. It sounds so pretentious. I wish there was another word for it.
Thought-provoking study of some of the issues involved in genre classification.