How is Literary Fiction Like a Porn Store in the Suburbs?

It's spring. The windows are open. And the cries of protest are in the air:

J. Robert Lennon, author of Familiar, in Salon: "Literary fiction is terrible"

Matt Haig, author of The Humans, on his blog: "Literary fiction must go"

These are not my exaggerated summaries of their ideas -- these are direct quotes from their own headlines. You can almost imagine the picket signs taped to yard sticks, clutched by the gloved hands of women in pearls, marching up and down a suburban sidewalk, determined to get that awful adult video store out of the building that used to house a perfectly respectable 7-Eleven. It's TERRIBLE. It MUST GO. March march march!

Lennon's point is just that literary fiction is mostly bad. Or as he put it: hackneyed, insular, terrible, mannered, conservative, obvious, mediocre, uninteresting, crap, boring and also "fucking boring."

Haig goes a step further to say that literary fiction as a genre damages our culture, imprisons the imagination, codifies snobbery (as he put it "book fascism"), and ejects people from the collective campfire of... reading?

To be fair, Lennon's broader point is that writing students shouldn't have to read everything on the IndieNext list. (I would argue they should at least know that there is an IndieNext list.) And Haig seems to be ready to do away with all genres entirely. (Even sci-fi post-punk supernatural upmarket women's true crime erotica? Yes, that genre is a STRAITJACKET.)

I've read both Haig and Lennon and I liked them both. Both of them are genre-busters. Lennon's most recent book, Familiar, reads like literary (yeah, literary) women's fiction but plunges its main character into an alternate universe bizarrely like her own, bending it sharply into scifi. Haig's The Radleys was a domestic novel with vampires. His new one (The Humans, coming to the US in July from Simon & Schuster) promises to be about an alien. The NYT called Haig "a novelist of great seriousness and talent." In his review of Lennon's Castle in the NYTBR, Scott Bradley said, "J. Robert Lennon’s literary imagination has grown increasingly morbid, convoluted and peculiar — just as his books have grown commensurately more surprising, rigorous and fun."

So obviously, based on that, literary fiction has all but destroyed books and writing. Literary fiction, with its tiny market share, its limited shelf space, and shrinking media presence MUST GO because it is TERRIBLE!  This reminds me of a blog post I wrote back in 2009 -- "How Twilight Killed The Wasteland." I wrote it after Lev Grossman announced in the Wall Street Journal that "lyricism is on the wane." Yeah. Must still be waning?

I'm honestly confused by the strength of the rhetoric in these articles declaiming literary fiction. Why would intelligent people crap on a genre where interesting things do happen, where boundaries are exploded, where formal experimentation is acceptable, where transgressive topics are allowed, and "newness" is encouraged. I read a lot of books last year including scifi, historical, 19th century, memoir, and yes nonfiction and even instruction manuals. My favorite books were the ones I could preface with this much-maligned and apparently dangerous adjective "literary." Literary scifi yes please! Literary historical thank you! Literary southern hello! "Literary memoir" tells me this is not a celebrity tell-all or political expose. "Literary thriller" tells me I can enjoy my sentences while I scramble through a plot.

And before we go, let's talk about that awful pit of "fucking boring" writing: the literary novel itself, the one without the saving influence of any other more acceptable genre.

YES PLEASE. Write more like that. Put it on every street corner in my neighborhood. I'll be breaking that picket line to buy it in hardcover. Make it strange and difficult and I'll buy two.

How Twilight Killed "The Wasteland"

Lev Grossman, book reviewer for Time Magazine, has bravely prophesied an end to modernism. In his Wall Street Journal article, Grossman posits that the modernist stranglehold on novel-writing is finally over. A new day has come! Nuts to you, Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and Kafka. You guys are history! No longer will readers suffer through beautiful language to get to an epiphany. Today's readers want plot, plot, and more plot. "Lyricism is on the wane," gloats Grossman, citing high sales of the Twilight series as proof that plot trumps beauty for these kids today.

Grossman, possibly unaware that Joyce and Eliot have been dead for fifty years, believes that these "modernists" have tricked us into thinking that a decent plot is indicative of a weak book. So, we're secretly reading mysteries and scifi, wishing literary writers would just take heed. "Should we still be writing difficult novels?" he asks, "Isn't it time we made our peace with plot?"

Grossman has graciously forgiven the moderns for blowing up the conventions of the Victorian novel. But he now feels that the time has come to embrace plot again. His evidence? The popularity of young adult novels, which never aspired to disregard plot in the first place. For Grossman, there have been no intervening literary movements. No novels of consequence that delivered any measure of plot with their lyricism, or any lyricism with their genre. The article has the intellectual weight of a strawberry tart, and yet the internet is upside down with panic over it. Is literary fiction over? Do we all have to start writing vampire novels?

Relax. Grossman's thinking is reductive, cowardly, but mostly just silly.

Consider these three major flaws:

1. It's weak on literary history. Did modernists shatter plot? Maybe. But look at the novels Grossman cites: Wharton, Hemingway, Lawrence, Fitzgerald. Really? These writers may be moderns, but in theme and ethos, not in formal experimentation. Pound, yes. Kafka, yeah. Joyce, okay. But Grossman's list of defiant modernist novels is full of plot. Sorry.

2. He uses the word "Pavlovianly."

3. His prognostications don't make sense. In proving his point that plot is back in style, Grossman uses Chabon, Lethem, Niffenegger, Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke as examples. These are the literary champions that are boldly bringing back the storylines we have all been silently, hopelessly craving for 80 years. However, these writers are all contemporaries of the Twilight juggernaut. The figures that Grossman so gloomily references (adult trade sales down 2.3% while Twilight author Stephanie Meyer sells 8 million books) would seem to reflect that while Chabon and Niffenegger may have been slinging Grossman-approved level of plot, the book-buying public wanted to buy Twilight books anyway.

I hope that writers of difficult books will not pause to listen to Grossman's confused ramblings about how literary movements from one hundred years ago are stultifying contemporary fiction. I hope writers will disregard all petulant whines about how "we the people" really want to read inglorious garbage like Twilight. I hope writers of difficult books will not take plot advice from a guy who lifted his own plot from Harry Potter. Yes, Twilight is selling. Yes, cheap fiction does move. It always has. But greatness is not easy, in reading or writing, and you weren't really writing for guys like Grossman anyway. Write for the smart people, the people that filled a football stadium to hear T.S. Eliot, the people who still celebrate Bloomsday. Write for me. I will still work for an epiphany.

To Hell with Publishing: Neither Irreverent nor Inventive

The name promises much. The name inspires obstreperous agreement. Yeah, to hell with publishing, anyway! This is 2009. We're all about downloads, and Kindle, and Twittered novels, and free information, and Google books, and plots we can download via wires straight into our arteries, and plugging into authors via Friendfeed, and instant updates, and modules! To hell with publishing, to hell with journals, to hell with prizes, to hell with first novels. Yeah! Fist-pump!

From a group of projects so provocatively named, I now expect mind-blowing innovation. I expect earthshaking progress. I expect, at the very least, heaps of scorn for the old way of doing things, and arms flung wide open to the new, digital world. Please, make sense of fiction on Twitter for me. Please, package blogged novels. Please, help me to understand new media. I beg you! Unfortunately, what I'm finding here is same old, same old. Instead of revolution, "To Hell with Publishing" is pushing cardstock, ink, and contracts. Readings at a library under a dropped ceiling. Submission guidelines -- click here! And please include a cover letter.

"To Hell with Publishing" is just another small press. Like every other small press in the history of earth, they desire to "return vital writing, and in particularly, the best in contemporary fiction, to the main literary stage." Well bra-thumping-vo. They publish... books. Books made of paper and glue. And they publish journals. They have a prize for... unpublished manuscripts, but unagented manuscripts are not considered. Please submit paper copies in triplicate, because at "To Hell with Publishing" they are all about the snail mail.

That name followed by that business model is like the sound of a trumpet fanfare followed by the sound of a drunk falling downstairs. Where's the innovation? Where's the middle finger raised to the literary establishment? Listen: Here are the two ways that "To Hell with Publishing" bites its thumb at the mainstream presses.

1. They will only publish first novels. No second novels! Oh my god! Their plan is that other publishers will swoop in and take over their authors' careers after novel #1. Because yeah, mainstream publishers are so interested in picking up seconds after the author has been deflowered of his first novel. Do I really have to pursue that analogy?

2. Their journal (To Hell with Journals) will only have 26 issues. They have decided this... in advance. Only 26 and no more, even if thousands of screaming fans are lined up outside the bookshop, demanding just one more issue, tearing up their organs in despair that only 26 issues can possibly be produced. They will stand innovatively firm on this principle: THEY WILL FOLD AFTER TWO YEARS.

These two policies manage to be simultaneously defeatist and overly ambitious. Yeah, we MEANT that journal to go under, and we MEANT that author to never produce another book, because that's all part of the rakish, devil-may-care plan we have here at "To Hell with Publishing." Look, there are already small presses out there doing exactly what THWP desires to do, but without these weird stipulations that seem to undercut any kind of longevity or long term relationship between press, author, and reader. Obviously a few more domain names are needed: tohellwithlegitimacy.com, tohellwithauthorloyalty.com, and tohellwithrelevance.com. "To Hell with Publishing" is a profound disappointment, leaving this reader still looking for the next great thing. When it comes along, I have a feeling that "To Hell with Publishing" would be a really cool name for it. Unfortunately, that domain name is already taken.

For more info: I found out about To Hell With Publishing from the Book Ninja.