Stupidest essay of the week

I forgot to post this before--day job upheaval will do that--but Lev Grossman's recent essay in TIME about "highbrow fiction being assaulted by lowbrow genre" (the quotes are mine) did not impress me much, to say the least:

In Michael Chabon's new mystery novel, The Final Solution (Fourth Estate; 131 pages)--hang on, let's back up. This is Pulitzer prizewinning Michael Chabon? Wonder Boys and Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon? Byronic hair Michael Chabon? Why would an esteemed, respectable literary novelist like Chabon want to sully his fancy-pants reputation with a mystery novel?

One of the interesting things about the present moment in U.S. literary history is that the tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell. And like Chabon, who in addition to writing The Final Solution has edited an anthology of hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tales, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage; 328 pages). And like Jonathan Lethem, who has just published Men and Cartoons (Doubleday; 160 pages), a collection of highly literary stories about, among other things, superheroes.

Without getting into yet another debate about how the best fiction is simply that, whether it's rooted in the conventions of literary novels or the convention of genre novels, but it seemed to me rather odd that Grossman neglected to mention anywhere that he was the author of one such "hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tale," CODEX.  I mean, if a "literary thriller" about a mysterious manuscript doesn't count as the very thing that puzzles Grossman in his essay, what would?

Comments

[Kevin Wignall]

What an arse!

[Fiona]

Susanna Clarke unclassifiable? (Uttered in the same breath as Margaret Atwood, too???) Come on, sonny! Crap. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was fantasy, pure and simple - just because it happens to be good doesn't mean it's "unclassifiable". Honestly!

[Ray]

I had something splendid to say, but Kevin just summed it all up for me.

[Stuart]

Isn’t it great, that in a world where society is finally getting free of class boundaries, it’s still being gleefully enforced in the world of books. High-brow literature my fuzzy backside. A book’s a book. Justifying an unreadable stack of paper by declaring it beyond the grasp of the ‘low-brow’ (read dim-witted) masses, is nothing more than another case of the emperor’s new clothes.

Time for people to point the finger and say, “We can see your willy!”

[Stuart]

Actually, that sounded a bit like a socialist rant... Maybe it’s the beard talking.

;}#

[Andi]

I'm SO bleedin tired (huh, who am I channeling this morning) of people who write stuff JUST to provoke, which this crap so clearly is. The tone is so $^& ARCH, using terms like oooooh "sully" . If this whoever he is (sorry I don't read literary criticism or pundits) wants me to take his thoughts seriously, could he leave out remakrs like "byronic hair Michael Chabon"? What the hell does that mean, or does it have to do with books, writing, genre, brow level or merit?

YUCH. Ptui. Retch. Think i'll go dive into some lowbrow high fantasy now.

[John Rickards]

I do find the whole air of superiority bloody annoying.

My agent told me about a literary author of his who once told him she'd never consider "lowering herself" to writing a genre novel. What he wanted to say, but couldn't, was: "Lowering yourself? Have you ever tried it? Writing something that has to have plot and character and pace and where you can't spend four pages describing leaves blowing in the park?"

Like Stuart said, a book's a book.

[David Montgomery]

What a jerk. He's just jealous because he wrote a genre book and nobody bought it. They were clearly too busy rushing out to get the DaVinci Code, a similar book I'm sure Lev consider to be far inferior.

I'm starting to weary of this whole genre vs. literary fiction debate. Really, their sales just don't justify the attention. :)

[Laura]

Who benefits from the debate, that's what I want to know? Not genre writers. Not readers. So it must be the literary writers who keep beating this dead horse.

Such pieces always make me feel as if I'm an ill-behaved dog running amok in the great marble temple of literature. "Stop her! She's peeing on the floor! She's drinking out of the toilet! She won't play by the rules -- except those tired genre conventions that mark her work as second-rate. Ohmigod -- she's humping Nadine Gordimer's leg. Get her out!"

(Um, by the way, I'm still a bit exuberant from finishing my revisions.)

[Jennifer Jordan]

I feel like a humping dog coming in after Laura and going, "Yeah, what she said," But, yeah, what she said.

We can complain about what readers are reading because some of the best genre work I've read goes out of print. I've heard so called literary authors bemoan thier fate because they don't sell as well. But this debate is long standing and ultimately as pointless as a circle because that's what it is. The literary crew can pat each other's backs as much as they want. No one else will. Poor babies... it's like the chess club wondering why none of them have a date for the dance.

When I pick up a book, I don't give two farts about genre as long as its good. Saying that a book 'escapes' genre when it is well written is just a game played when something catches the cool kids by surprise. "Oh, you can come and play with us now."

No thank you.

[Sarah]

I'll bring up another current pet peeve then: the McSweeneys anthologies that Michael Chabon edits. I've read a couple of the stories in each and enjoyed them, but the whole "hey kids let's try on a genre" philosophy seems incredibly pandering to me.

Because if the reverse happened--if there was an anthology featuring notable genre authors writing "literary" short stories (befitting the stereotype perpetuated by the New Yorker or the Paris Review)--would it get nearly as much attention for being "innovative"?

[Victor Gischler]

Try getting a university creative writing gig with only "genre stuff" on your CV.

Possible? Yes.

Difficult? Yes.

VG

[Dave Worsley]

Wow, what a pompous gasbag. If John Lethem isn't beautiful writing then I'll just jump off a stack of Giller Prize novels. Beats reading most of them

[m.j. rose]

What Laura said (though I'm not sure about the humping)
And what Sarah said - which by the way was hysterical to thnk about. Would anyone take it seriously if Nora Roberts and Mary Higgens Clark teamed up to edit a literary anthology.

[Keith]

I think he's being tongue-in-cheek. The way I read it, it's a positive review.

I'm about a third of the way through THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF PRIVATE EYE STORIES. The main thing I'm really getting out of it is an understanding of why people bash the genre. The Chandler and Macdonald stories are great. The others (so far) are also fun, but what you get out of them is pure genre, not great writing.

Where the disagreements start, I think, is when people insist that if it's that good, it's not genre anymore. I don't really have a problem with that. They're wrong, but you can sure see why they think so--most of these stories succeed or fail based on how purely they communicate the iconography and how clever the puzzle is. I don't think those things are what anybody means when they say "great writing."

[Jimmy Beck]

I enjoyed the first McSweeney's mammoth tales anthology. And I think Chabon is sincere in wanting to throw off the plotless-New-Yorker-story yoke. So I don't view HIM as being pandering or patronizing. I think the fact that such a quasi-big deal (well, in literary fiction terms) was made of it, says more about the ossified culture of literary fiction than it does about McSweeney's. Because, let's face it, the New Yorker sometimes publishes some tremendous things (the recent Allan Gurganus comes to mind), but even in the Treisman era, as often as not, the fiction is still a beautifully crafted non-event a la Updike, Beattie et al. So to get people like Jim Shepard, Dan Chaon, Atwood and Lethem together and market them as "genre"--even if they're just doing what they do already--is really just a way to sell books to a broader audience.

[Cornelia Read]

I think they're all just pissed off because they've turned "literature" into the kind of Philboyd-Studge Latin whose precise declensions can only be enforced with Joycean pandy-bats viciously applied to the reader's tender palms and footsoles, and meanwhile we're all having so much goddamn fun over here in Vibrant Street-Italian Vernacular Land it should be illegal.

I still applaud Walter Mosley's comment at LCC this year, when he was asked whether he worried about Harold "Thigh-Man" Bloom, that "that would be like a Great Dane worrying about a Chihuahua."

And I wouldn't hump Nadine Gordimer's leg for a fat seven-figure deal in Lee Child Dollars, though peeing on marble floors remains a constant temptation. (GO LAURA!!)