I promised myself I was n’t live to respond to literary agent provocateur any more – you know , the sorting of blowhard who decides to get some undeserved attention by firing a potshot across the fore of musical style fabrication . normally these potshots are made up of ill - formed stimulus generalization and largely unexamined assumption .
Butthe latest such philippic , from the New Yorker ’s Arthur Krystal , seems specially worthy of mild grumpiness . Krystal , who caused a stir a while back with a fairly condescending essay about how genre fiction is gain a newfound reputability , is back with a review , responding to all his critic . And this time , he ’s just become for it . He makes some pretty challenging claim , not only for the superficiality of literary genre fiction , but for the profundity of literary fiction . Here ’s Krystal , spoutingoff :
Born to deal , these novels bond to the shopworn - and - true , relying on descent characters whose view spool out in Lifetime platitudes . There will be elision , as there are in every subject , but , for the most part , the standard musical genre or commercial novel is n’t last to break the ocean freeze inside us . If this sound patronise , so be it . Commercial novel , in world-wide , whether they ’re thriller or romance or science fiction , employ language that is at well undistinguished and at worst qualify by a jejune mindset and a inclination to state the obvious . Which is not to say that some literary novel , as more than a few readers pointed out to me , do not hold back a surfeit of decorative description , elaborate psychologizing , and gleams of ego - witting irony . To which I say : so what ?
One reads Conrad and James and Joyce not just for their way with quarrel but for the amount of feel life in their books . Great writers strike us over the head because they exhibit fictional character whose imaginary life have actual consequences ( at least while we ’re register about them ) , and because they see the world in much the way we do : complicated by airfoil and subterranean feelings , by equivocalness and misapprehension , and by the misalliance of consciousness and perceptual experience . writer who want to understand why the nub has reasons that reason can not have intercourse are not buy the farm to compose horror tales or police force procedurals . Why say otherwise ?
have ’s be clear-cut about this : plenty of writing style novels are comfort intellectual nourishment of the sort that Krystal is key . Some of them are pretty terrific , for cause other than aroused complexness or challenging writing . That ’s not to say , however , that literary genre fiction is incapabable of break “ the sea freeze inside of us , ” or that genre fable ca n’t contain an overwhelming “ amount of life . ”
And Krystal ’s readers who responded that literary fable often contains “ a surfeit of decorative description , elaborate psychologizing , and gleam of ego - conscious irony ” were being much too kind . Those are all compliments disguised as insults – like saying “ literary fabrication is just too well written for our tiny minds . ” In fact , anybody who ’s read a declamatory amount of literary fiction will say you that much litfic – let in litfic by famous generator , release by good publishers – comprise the following :
old-hat , one - dimensional characters
Bland , awkward composition
Cliches , including cliches borrowed from Hollywood pic
An overemphasis on patch at the disbursal of charactierization
And so on . Which is to say , there is plenty of bad literary fabrication , just as there is plenty of sorry genre fable . Every literary clip bring out gobs of fabrication with one - dimensional characters whose privileged lives are populated by composition board issue - outs . Weak writing is weak written material , and every music genre has it . Krystal already knows this , which is why he ’s so keen to stick to generalizations . [ viaThink Progress ]
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