by B. R. Myers
Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too
late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested
masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie
or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't
have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of
precious raves on the back. In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what
all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose—"furious dabs
of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was"—and
I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.
I realize that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to the
literary establishment. For years now editors, critics, and prize jurors,
not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the rest of us how
lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting times. The absence
of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has given rise to an
extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with something for every
palate. As the novelist and critic David Lodge has remarked, in summing
up a lecture about the coexistence of fabulation, minimalism, and other
movements, "Everything is in and nothing is out." Coming from insiders
to whom a term like "fabulation" actually means something, this hyperbole
is excusable, even endearing; it's as if a team of hotel chefs were
getting excited about their assortment of cabbages. From a reader's
standpoint, however, "variety" is the last word that comes to mind,
and more appears to be "out" than ever before. More than half a century
ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham
were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered
no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is
deemed to be "genre fiction"—at best an excellent "read" or a "page
turner," but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track
record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated
like a pop-culture event, but most "genre" novels are lucky to get an
inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review.
Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand,
is now considered to be "literary fiction"—not necessarily good literary
fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even
the best-written thriller or romance. It is these works that receive
full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and
another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and
these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees.
The "literary" writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at
status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like "ontological" and
"nominalism," chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book
of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these
days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes
with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of
action—unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense
to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a
novel's pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin's aptly titled
Waiting, which won the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner
Award (2000).
The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity
of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked
tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called
middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal
affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson
is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery
under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen
King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less
pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre
storyteller.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers
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