cliterature

So what did I read last night?  After reading the foreword of Wish I Could be There by Allen Shawn I got started on The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. (You might be more familar with her previous novel The Lovely Bones).   As I read this novel I had two thoughts.  And I don’t mean I had one thought and then they other–they were repeating on a more-or-less endless loop.

 #1 This Woman Can Write!

I mean, dude.  I don’t mean just make sentences.  Her characters seem like real people before the end of the first sentence.  Her observations about the details of life are so well observed and so well expressed.  She used a nonlinear approach were the central story bristles with flashbacks without so much as a scene break–and yet at no point did I find this confusing or annoying.  As I said, she can write.  She writes female characters who are fully faceted and innately fascinating.

#2 Could this Story Get any More Depressing?

I only read three chapters before I realised I needed to get some work done on my rewrites for a non-fiction book that my alter ego, Dr Emily, is writing.  But I am pretty sure the answer to this question is: yes.  The book opens with the main character in a rather depressed, irrational state smothering her very elderly and ill (essentially moribund) mother… to death.  (So, not a romantic comedy then.)  The only reason I can relate to the main character at all is the aforementioned #1: the quality of the writing and especially the nuanced characterisation

I am not ‘genre bound’.  Despite facing the assumption many times that, depending on the assumpter, I read only serious scientific stuff, or I read only romance and porn, I am actually rather widely read (as I do, obviously, say so myself).  But I must admit that I do not all that much modern literary fiction outside of magical realism and novels with strong gay romance themes.  I don’t see this as innately a problem.  Literary fiction is just a genre, one amongst many.  There is no rule that says you have to read a lot of it.

 It may be a new idea to a few readers that literature is a genre rather than some kind of fiction nobility, but really, it is.  It is a shelving genre, is is characterised by subject and to some extent style, and it has a particular fan base and some writers that specialise in it.  It is not innately better written or more cleverly plotted than, say, science fiction (Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler spring to mind). 

So what is the content of the literary genre?  I was told once, and continue to believe, it is this: literary fiction is making a comment about the human condition.  This definition has been kicking around for a while and I don;t know where it originates from.  But I recent saw it expressed by Brett Lot, Editor of Best Christian Short Stories, as: “literary fiction confronts us with who we are, and makes us look deeply at the human condition.”

So  Fine.  But am I the only one to notice that the vast majority of recently (e.g. last 20 years) literary fiction is a complete downer?  The main comment it seems to be making about the human condition is that the human condition sucks.  And no matter how beautifully this sentiment may be expressed there is only so many times I want to read about it in any given year.  After all, the human condition is actually a pretty mixed lot and the literary obsession with banal but poetic depression punctuated with brief glimpsed of bliss and ending with some disilluminating ambiguity doesn’t connect much with what I want to ponder about life, the universe, and day-to-day existence–or what I think the human condition really is.

And besides–if it is somehow compulsory to read literature to be considered a fully-rounded human being, there is always the classics.  Apparently if genre fiction remains popular for over 50 years it becomes ‘literature’ regardless of authorial intent (kind of like receiving and honorary degree for just being good at what you do).  So, Jane Austin and the Brontes, here I come….

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