ARTS COLUMN: FICTION LUNCHROOM

For Readers, Writers, and Lovers of Books - A Look at the Genres of Fiction

By: Isaac Butler

March 24, 2008

Amidst the positive reviews and good sales that greeted Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Ruth Franklin issued a rallying cry for literati the world over. Franklin, a Senior Editor at The New Republic, began her evaluation of Chabon’s work in Slate.com thusly: “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” This sentence began what was ultimately a positive evaluation of Chabon’s science-fiction neo-noir. Reading her essay, certain questions emerge: What is all of this attention to “seriousness”? How does one pass or fail a “seriousness” test? What’s wrong with writing “genre fiction”? And what is “genre fiction” anyway?

The last of these is the easiest to answer. Genre fiction is fiction that can easily be placed in a genre other than general interest literature. Romance novels, mysteries, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror are examples of the category. These genres are frequently treated as inferior by the fiction culture at large. They are, in the popular imagination, the domain of bizarre fan groups and conventions, read by outcasts and written by writers who couldn’t hack it in the regular literary world. In reaction to this, readers and writers of genre fiction have entered into a feedback loop of inside references, jokes, and secret codes layered with a good deal of self-loathing. Like the segregated tables in the lunchroom at Fast Times at Ridgemont High, everyone knows their place in the social hierarchy and, as in the lunchroom, the outcasts participate in these meaningless categories, playing a part in their own ostracism.

In the present day, however, these lunchroom delineations are meaningless. Lost and Battlestar Galactica are watched by scores of people who would never dream of reading science-fiction, even though they crave a weekly fix of it on television. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is amongst the highest regarded and most successful films of all time, and they are filled with elves, hobbits, and places called Mordor and Fangorn. In literature, the situation is even more absurd. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a mammoth, highly respected novel, is basically a science-fiction novel, as is Don DeLillo’s White Noise, widely considered one of the great works of American 20th century literature. Critics created a new term — magical realism — to justify appreciation of the fantasy novels of Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson. Many writers who graduate from genre fiction to mainstream acceptance (Jonathan Lethem and Neal Stephenson come to mind) see their earlier “genre” books reprinted as general interest fiction.

What remains of the old categories are a series of increasingly meaningless categories that denote only one signifier: Social Rank. As these genre borders break down, and writers flit in and out of various conventions, all that will be left is whether or not a particular mode of writing is thought of as “serious” enough. At the top of this seriousness pyramid is the John Updike School, well-wrought realist fiction with a minimum of whimsy and a maximum of psychological explication and character observation -- a cadre of critics and academics who seek to protect their particular fiefdoms in a changing landscape maintains this pyramid’s order. It is participated in, however, by all of us. We worry about taking a great book out in public if it has a cheesy, mass-market, science-fiction cover. We make self-deprecating jokes about our reading habits when they include dragons or comics. We close ourselves off to the possibility of fiction by only reading novels that remain in categories we’re comfortable with. Our participation in this hierarchy cheapens literature, closes doors to new ideas, and ignores the history of the art form. Moby Dick, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Candide are just a few members of the Western canon that feature many fantastical elements.

One example of a book that we’d miss out on in our quest for seriousness is Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital. This novel is a mammoth achievement, bedecked in critical praise. In its 800 pages, readers will find a profound and heartbreaking examination of the human condition within an epic journey concerning a Dickensian-sized cast of characters recounted in four different narrative voices. The storytelling mechanisms and linguistic constructions that Adrian deploys are shocking in their power and creativity. The Children’s Hospital also features the apocalypse, four angels, a Biblical flood, a pipe organ that makes ice cream sundaes, a medical resident who gains super powers, and replicators straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is because of, not in spite of, these fantastical elements that Adrian is able to accomplish such extraordinary feats of storytelling, yet it’s these very elements that make the book less attractive to many “serious” readers.

As readers, writers and lovers of books, the healthiest thing we could do for ourselves, and for literature at large, is to stop caring so much about the social acceptability of various kinds of novels. The internecine meta-politics of the art of fiction writing have little to do with the quality of fiction produced. Good writing is good writing, after all, and a good reader can recognize and appreciate it, whether it’s about suburban ennui or an alien invasion. Everything else is just the lunchroom, and it’s well past time we tore up the seating chart.

Read more from Issac Butler in his blog: Parabasis