I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in publishing. It’s true that no one reads book reviews any longer, and I should know because I write book reviews.
I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot. If the words are flat and lifeless, I can’t read the book
It’s true, too, that literary prizes don’t trigger the massive surge in sales they once did, owing to a depreciation that awards judges have exacerbated by woking-out. Shortlists in the past decade have systematically over-represented the ‘under-represented’. This modern version of bend-over-backwards virtue has been so conspicuous that it’s called into question whether the books’ excellence really took priority over clumsy social engineering or the judges’ moral vanity. Book buyers aren’t all stupid.
I certainly agree that many contemporary authors have similarly self-harmed by regarding themselves as too sophisticated for plot. (Alternatively, some hifalutin novelists might fancy having a plot, but they’re rubbish at constructing one. Plotting is hard.) In our household, a formally inventive novel in which nothing happens constitutes fire-starter for our wood stove.
Still, I myself belong to this sidelined class of ‘literary novelists’. Someone should stick up for us a tad, and I bet no one else in this magazine will volunteer.
I know we’ve an often-well-earned rep as boring, pretentious, purposefully opaque and hard to read. But none of these qualities is definitive of my camp. The sole difference between standard commercial fiction and the convincingly literary kind is the prose. It’s all about language.
I hasten to add that no book that I care to read is exclusively powered by good writing. Yet I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot, either. If the words on the page are flat, lifeless and mechanical – if they merely facilitate getting Johnny from the dining room to his car – I can’t read the book. If the prose is awkward, the grammar and punctuation dubious, the vocabulary either pedestrian or embarrassingly juiced up, I can’t read the book. I can’t read for enjoyment in a state of active pain.
For one of the only creative writing aphorisms I’ve ever coined runs: ‘If you don’t say something well, you haven’t said it at all.’ Type ‘war is sad’ and you have communicated exactly nothing.
In fact, Thomas tips his hand in that piece when he refers to literature’s ‘pyramidion’ (the top bit of an Egyptian pyramid – a noun new to me and a keeper) and George Saunders’s ‘pointless, repetitive polyphony’. Line up those plosives, boyo, pow, pow, pow! Thomas might not read only for ‘beautiful sentences’, but this is not an author oblivious to the well-turned phrase.
I am pro-plot. I never write a novel without one. But I’m not sure about Thomas’s advice to plant a dead body in the manuscript by page 90. This may be another broad distinction between commercial and literary writers. We more elevated souls don’t kill nearly as many people. There’s not a dead body in my current novel until page 317 – but the corpse means something. I am not capriciously murderous. I pick my spots. Why, in my fourth novel I almost killed two billion people – then pulled back from the brink. I’m a largely realist writer, and most of my readers don’t inhabit an excessively homicidal world (unless they live in London).
Some of the best novels have feet in both the commercial and literary camps. They’re well-paced and eventful but also well crafted. Take Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. Plenty happens, but the prose is quietly gorgeous. Or check out T.C. Boyle (any novel aside from The Terranauts, which is terrible). I should clarify, too, that plenty of genre fiction – many a thriller or crime novel – is stylishly written, which their highly skilled authors don’t always get credit for.
The novel form is marvellously elastic, and literary iterations are more likely to take advantage of its latitude. ‘Serious’ fiction (a designation that doesn’t prevent mine from being funny) allows for passages of reflection, the exploration of ideas or issues and the development of interior lives that visual media can only gesture towards. Only prose can think. And language has tone and rhythm. Non-stop action conveyed by musically primitive prose is like listening to one finger on a piano go plink, plink, plink.
Because I am ‘literary’, I may digress. Born in conservative Virginia, my father decided to become a minister in his youth because at that time clergy (such as Martin Luther King Jnr) exerted significant moral and cultural influence, and he wanted to be important. Yet the times grew ever more secular, until later in his life he was bewildered why as a prominent theologian he had so much trouble getting an op ed accepted by the New York Times. Historically, if he wanted to be a mover and shaker, he’d backed the wrong Presbyterian horse.
His daughter has maintained the family tradition of having opted for a career with dwindling relevance to the contemporary moment. When I was coming of age, writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were titans. Like my ambitious father, I wanted to be important. Yet in my latter career, novelists have been precipitously demoted. Even Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jonathan Franzen any more. Nowadays, the most any of us litfic types can hope for is a Netflix option. At least the popularity of the quality television series testifies that the audience’s narrative appetite is as keen as ever. Breaking Bad and Succession may be the literary novels of our time, allowing for a depth of character development that films haven’t time for.
Thomas’s discouraging observations about my newly low-status corner of publishing may be humblingly accurate. Yet the very fact that his essay shot to number one on The Spectator website’s Most Popular list must mean some folks out there still care about literary fiction – if only to complain about it.
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