MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 2: Genre & LitFic

China Miéville: Redefining genre fiction. Or maybe just writing damn good stories.

There was an excellent interview with China Miéville, the cult fantasy writer,  in The Guardian couple of weeks ago. The article made quite a big deal of important prejudices against genre fiction, as well as the dangers of genres remaining too insular. I’ve become increasingly aware of this issue in the last few years, partly because I don’t read much so-called genre fiction myself, and also since great things must be happening there too. And there are great things going on, there’s no doubt about it — but are there enough people aware of that? For instance, why did Granta mention Miéville in its 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue, but not include some of his work? Why do the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books never review or mention fantasy or sci-fi books that are just as good as (and, I’m guessing, often better than)  ”mainstream” literary fiction? As Ursula K. Le Guin, the empress of fantasy and sci-fi, would have it: “When he [Miéville] wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it.”

But why do genre authors need this kind of recognition? They have their own journals, they have their own prizes (the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Hugo… Miéville has won all of them) Doesn’t that suffice? Are the members of the high brow literati rejecting genre writers on purpose, or are they just trying to cater for another kind of audience? Miéville and other “weird” fiction writers are trying to bring the genre in which they operate somewhere else, in an effort to remove themselves from the cliché of classic orcs-and-goblins fantasy fiction of Tolkien fame. They’re bringing fantasy fiction out of the box, but seeing the criticism the Man Booker Prize has been receiving and the kinds of books that have won it in the past few years, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for these writers to be swimming towards that particular literary establishment. They’re better off letting themselves drift off to more hospitable shores.

Is it useful at all, then, to have genres? Wouldn’t we better off having a giant “fiction” section, encompassing everything from inter-galactic monsters to bodice-ripping highlanders? Let the readers decide among them, so they won’t shy away from books with dragons or cyborgs that they might actually enjoy. The “Literary” sections of bookstores already encompass so many different kinds of books, would it be that much of a stretch? Let’s remember that Margaret Atwood controversially refuses to label her “futuristic” novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Floor, as science-fiction. She prefers the term “speculative fiction”, because according to her, science-fiction entails “monsters and spaceships” whereas her stories “could really happen.” I wonder: would Oryx and Crake have been shortlisted for the Booker, had it been tagged as Science Fiction? I certainly hope so, but, alarmingly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure. But then, authors are also able to reinvent themselves and skip between genres. Think of Dan Simmons, who has melded poetry and extremely literary content with science fiction elements in his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium series, but has recently delved in the realm of literary horror with novels like The Terror (the story of the Franklin expedition, with a monster), and Drood (a retelling of Dicken’s last years).

The Miéville interview also raises the concept of Literary fiction as an increasingly problematic idea. LitFic, apparently, can be defined as a genre as well, with its own conventions (think Ian McEwan). The problem, according to Miéville, is that LitFic won’t admit to being a genre, and yet asserts its superiority over all other genres. There’s also a massive irony in LitFic being placed above fantasy writing, since the oldest forms of fiction, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, all have fantastical elements. These kinds of stories are the origins of Western literature, but they’ve recently been relegated to the fringes of fiction. Similarly, the majority of young adult fiction published today combines elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and dystopias. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or The Hunger Games. But genre is something we grow out of, for some reason — according to Miéville, fantasy writers (and, I suppose, readers) just never do. Or maybe they just don’t get influenced into thinking less of it. The obsession with realism is a fallacy that has remained at the forefront of literary criticism for some time, but it is clearly obsolete as a standard to judge works of fiction.

Last year, Bill Morris wrote a convincing retrospective of Miéville’s work in The Millions. He talks about his own literary education as a reader of “High Brow Rot”, with very few “mainstream” or “genre” books slipping through the literary cracks. Then, Miéville came into Morris’ life, and with his mix of energetic story telling, vivid writing, and engaging worlds, he opened his eyes to whole new worlds. Morris writes: “By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience.”

Reviewing all of these statements and what they tell us about the current literary landscape, the only conclusion I can come to is that writers should be praised and rewarded on the basis of good writing, not what they write about — be it time traveling aliens or realistic suburban women.

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers. 

The Best Online Book Coverage, Made Better

"A new chapter for guardian.co.uk/books"

The biggest piece of book-related news this week was the publication of the late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. I’ve already discussed the first sentence, which had been published online, so I won’t talk about the book any more. Suffice to say that it received what appears to be generally positive reviews, considering the difficulty of both criticizing an unfinished book and untangling the fiction from Wallace’s personal life, which has been much discussed since his death. The best review I read was by Emily Cooke, published in The Millions, entitled “The Burden of Meaningfulness”.

But what really attracted my attention this week in the book world was not, in fact, any book in particular, but rather a new step in the evolution of how books are discussed online. The Guardian’s Books website, in my opinion already the best books website out there, has just renewed itself with a new “incarnation”. The change in appearance is very subtle: the same handy purple toolbar is at the top to access the various sections of the website, but the top stories are now given more attention, with a large section, freed from the rest of the page’s content, and a bigger image (this has always been one thing Guardian Books has always done very well: assigning various images to all of their articles, and not only images of books, making their articles shine individually). A clickable arrow allows you to scroll to other top stories, allowing each article its own space to breath and more time to last on the front page, which is important because the website has a lot of new content every day. The rest of the organization of the front page has remained unchanged — latest news, Guardian Bookshop, Most Viewed articles, latest blogposts, etc. — except for a central rubric entitled “Talking Points” with four sections marked with new symbols: “Hot Topics”, “Comment & debate”, “Tips, links, & suggestions”, “Search, star-rate, & review”.

That’s where you’ll find the website’s most significant (and groundbreaking?) change: Guardian Books is now hooked up with a database of 8 million books published in English. This means you can search for virtually any book you like and see everything The Guardian has written about it. You can also rate the books, write your own review, add it to a favourite’s list, or suggest the book to the editors so they can cover it. The only issue I have found is that the database provides individual publications, like searching through a giant bookstore catalogue, which means searching a classic gives you multiple results, one for each edition. This is problematic insofar as the content on the website is not usually specific to a book’s edition, but to the book itself, no matter what incarnation. So it might be a little bit frustrating to find out what’s been written on The Master and Margarita, because you get five pages of results, and all of them are the same book.

Guardian Books is no longer just a newspaper website with good content, it has become a community for book lovers. To a degree, that’s what it already was, although I don’t think they had planned it that way. The website has a lot of very active readers, who comment with much caustic verve and wit on nearly everything on the website, providing hours of unexpected pleasure for anyone who happens to scroll down past an article and into the “comments” section. Indeed, the most popular articles can muster over a hundred of them in very little time. The Guardian has recently proved how this potentially annoying participation — comments on YouTube, for instance, seem to be increasingly idiotic and exasperating — can be turned into a strength when they asked readers to suggest the best books of continental European countries in a series entitled “World literature tour”. Now they have definitely maximized the potential of their readership by tapping directly into its knowledge base, asking readers what they should be reading and covering, and allowing them to express themselves more freely on a topic they take so seriously: books.

The editors of Guardian Books, I think, are therefore really helping literature to exist and develop online, because they’re making a creative space for readers to share and discuss their opinions and insights. The internet has often been described as lethal to books — replacing ink and paper with screens, shortening your attention span, shifting the reader’s attention away from the book itself to the merely book-related —; but it’s clear that the Web 2.0 can inject a good deal of vitality into the book world by allowing readers to come together, and giving books — new and old, good and bad — the space and time to thrive outside of the reading per se.