What is "Literary Fiction"?
Some people hate beauty
A recent article in Compact Magazine, generally a clearinghouse, from what I can tell, of some rather worthwhile and unruly commentary, misses the mark in basing its prognostications of success for white male authors on one prissy metric: the likelihood that they will cough up another John Updike from their midst. “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” by Jacob Savage, does not idolize that author especially, but that’s what he means in short; and what he talks about at length is a metaphorical “pipeline” for young white males which heretofore brought them fame with little obstruction. This magical “pipeline” of cultural favoritism, as he supposes it, has been redirected by the valve of diversity to give authentic voices of color and femininity a well-deserved chance. If young white males are out of the writing game, Savage reasons, they’re to blame for losing touch with an authentic voice within themselves and exploring it on the page like their more colorful competitors do, as if they were meant to be slaving at a perfervid journal in hopes that it would grow into a novel. At least I think that’s his point, his prose is so rich with grapevine convolutions and purple adjectives that I wondered whether his reasoning had fermented into an acetic slurry by the end.
Curiously, the question of readability never comes up in Savage. He assumes that publishing depends on cultural trends which people like himself would like to keep up with, and not the tastes of ordinary book-buying humans wracked with an elemental hunger for fantasy, romance, wit, and truth. And for some reason it never occurs to this urbanite that we only reach for the likes of Updike and his ilk when a college professor tells us to.
Ever since Philip Larkin pointed it out, and everybody ignored him, the simple, sanitizing question of pleasure has been left out of literary consumption and, like little hail-fellow-well-met grad students, we’re all supposed to like a book for its sociological, nay even its statistical acumen vis-a-vis the current moment. A novel, therefore, should be a sort of literary newspaper, up-to-the-nanosecond, unassailably wise to the latest trends, and above all, depressively, materialistically quotidian. Yea, in its flat allusiveness cultural outlandishness it must be fit for comprehension excerpts on the SAT.
In attempting to trace the blight of “Literary Fiction” to its roots, it’s helpful to recall just how young a genre of writing the novel is. Once this has been duly observed, it’s inescapable just how short, stumpy, and laden with smelly fungus the offshoot in question really is.
When I was an undergrad, I was taught that Beware the Cat by William Baldwin (AD 1570) was the first lengthy work of prose in English—the first novel. Others contend that Henry Fielding was the first in his History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. True or not, the subtitle is revelatory: Feilding, flummoxed by his own creation, dubbed it “A Comic-Epic Poem in Prose.” The word “novel,” to mean a book written for pleasure—not for instruction or religious edification—seems to have reached common parlance by the 1700’s. From its inception and all through the bubbly 1800’s the novel was a racy genre thought suitable for leisured ladies and imaginative boys. A novel was either an adventure or a romance, and frequently both at once. It is curious indeed to reflect that the steamy titles one sees at the corner grocery are truer to the origins of the novel than John Updike, but such is our world.
For a time there remained something youthful and lusty in the novel, though the genre matured with its practitioners until even, or especially, seasoned men of action saw its merits, men like Kipling and London and Bierce and Melville. These were adventurers who would have tried their hand at epic poetry in a bygone era, but wrote novels instead because that was what you did in the 1800’s. And yet the point about such men is that their stories are not so very different from The Odyssey or The Poetic Edda; they did not conclude, it being the century of coal-mining, textile fabrication on steam-powered machinery, and colonial expansion, that they should make these things the soul of their storytelling.
But “Literary Fiction” makes that very mistake, and it’s a lethal one if you expect your stuff to be widely read, not to say enjoyed, without the authoritarian endorsement of academia. It is a fraudulent genre with its gangly roots clutching a shallow, slimy layer of modish social commentary. It can and should be swiftly pulled up by the roots. The marvel is that Savage treats this nauseous weed as something the young writer should aspire to. He seems to suffer from an artistic dwarfism which leads him to think that the genre nearest to hand in a shallow urban comfort zone must be the greatest because there’s nothing else around to measure it against, must be the greatest because his liberal arts college told him so. The sickly twerp thinks that the most “honest” depictions are in Cheever and his suburban swimming pools, Updike and his car dealerships, Franzen and his claustrophobic family rooms. He reminds me of the college professors I had, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
The truth is that the pretentious realism of Literary Fiction has been a disaster, a solipsistic, journalistic, rambling recounting of events that are too familiar to reveal anything. And that’s what Cheever, Updike, and Franzen amount to: letter-writers and chroniclers of the day-to-day. All three would have spent their time more wisely as compassionate journalists of real events. But story-tellers? No. And if minority, underprivileged writers are now “succeeding” where these problematic white chroniclers of the caucasian suburbs have been pushed aside, then as a white male writer, I bid them good luck and fair weather.
The above are bad because they opted for sociological parables over genuine storytelling. But there’s a problem with my verdict—something I’ve overlooked. And it’s that there happens to be a genre I would call “good realism.” It isn’t American, though; most of the realists in America were contaminated by a gray, disenchanting leftism, and yet there were one or two who could pull it off. Raymond Carver is one. Another is Stephen King, who is far less of a “Genre Fiction” writer than most would suppose. “Good realism” is where day-to-day life is plotted as a fairy tale, with the light of the extraordinary shining through the cracks in a thin shell of the merely natural. This is a realism that admits of the spiritual, and it’s found mostly overseas: Maupassant, Dinesen, Dickens, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Balzac. They understood that real life, in its meaningful moments, is little different from a fairy tale because it indicates a higher dimension breaking through the trivial authenticities.
The sophomoric hardness of the twentieth century should never have been permitted to contaminate storytelling, much less the criticism which learned to set it up as a standard to live by. We are in an age when, intellectually, most adults are hard children, and it shows in Savage. If there’s anything worth reading, you’ll find it far, far from the big publishers and in the shadows where some lurk who are still poetic at heart, who still love beauty and can show us its patterns. I know because I have found them myself.