Here on the east coast, it’s lunchtime, and I just scarfed my food while enjoying Stephen King’s examination and analysis of the post-Potter world, taking on critics, academics, and the question of whether kids read and whether the novel is dead. Smart Bitch Hubby sent it over to me, so a hat tip to him.
I enjoyed it immensely, but then, I was eating pizza which automatically elevates my mood, like cheese covered happy pills were baked at 500 degrees.
One last thing: The bighead academics seem to think that Harry’s magic will not be strong enough to make a generation of nonreaders (especially the male half) into bookworms…but they wouldn’t be the first to underestimate Harry’s magic; just look at what happened to Lord Voldemort. And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of best-seller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ‘‘Never happen!’’ the bigheads would have cried. ‘‘The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!’‘
But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ‘‘literary novels’’ each year. While the bigheads have been predicting (and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman’s challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider adventures, Peter Abrahams’ superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants. Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling’s jovial John the Baptist?
I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.
My peeve has always been the wussy defense of Potter: “At least kids are reading!” Kids, specifically myself and teens I know, are always and have always read. So big ups to King for pointing out what is obvious to me. I wasn’t a fan of the series past book 4, as I’ve said, but if you like it, more power to you for finding so many pages of reading that you enjoy. You are lucky people indeed!
I’ve always enjoyed King’s essays in EW. They’re always insightful, entertaining, and accessible.
If I wasn’t a King fan before, I would be now. His books are great, but I always look forward to his commentary just as much. Seeing a celebrated author rant and use book terminology like a squeeling fanboy is prosh!
Au contraire, right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ‘’literary novels’’ each year.
Aaaaah. I feel better about laughing at his “Paris Review” interview now.
True, but that isn’t really the issue. Sure, kids read. The problem is that people read less and less as they get older—and that trend is increasing. Here are the stats on reading that I looked up after seeing a provocative post by Kerry Allen. Reading has decreased significantly, especially among 18- to 24-year-olds, and the Harry Potter phenomenon hasn’t changed the number of kids who stop reading during and after college.
And, as always, I don’t see the point of this blast against lit fic.
Come on. The number of “literary” novels published every year is pretty small compared to genre output. And you can’t blame adults not reading on lit fic—most adults don’t read big-name thrillers either.
It seems to me his point in the “boring and pretentious” comment, was not directed at those novels per se, but at the “bighead academics” who seem to always insist that we should be reading “important” literary fiction rather than enjoying ourselves with what they view as “mindless” genre fiction. As for me, give me the “mindless” any day of the week.
Loved Harry, in fact I took him on a positively awful vacation and Harry was the only good thing about it. Read books 1-5 back to back, at least it kept me from whining about the vacation.
I personally love the “At least they are reading” comment, that’s what my mom said to my brother when he complained about my reading material when I was 13. What was I reading? The Exorcist, needless to say my brother was shocked, he kept asking mom if she knew what was in the book. She finally told him to mind his own business. Always loved Mom because of that.
I’m there with the wank about “literary fiction”. Genre fiction is still selling like hotcakes, as far as I can tell.
Can someone provide a definition of literary fiction to me? As far as I can tell, it involves stream-of-consciousness interior dialogue, non-existent “plots”, and complete and utter misery from beginning to end (or, if something positive happens, it’s to set you up for the really depressing denouement). My question isn’t really a provocative one, I really do want to know how it’s defined.
I’m actually happy to read stuff that has interesting PoVs, is not strictly linear, doesn’t have a plot that consists of people “doing stuff”, and has lovely language. But I think the last “literary” thing I read was The God of Small Things. Sure, beautiful language and interesting setting… but by about 3/5ths of the way through, the depressing ending was well and truly set up. So I didn’t bother with the rest.
Is there such a thing as cheerful lit fic? If not, maybe that’s why people aren’t reading so much “worthy” writing. Personally, I blame Hardy, Joyce, Woolf et al. Why couldn’t literary fiction have gone the Austen/Jane Eyre route? “Romance” or not.
Who cares if people stop reading during college? Hell, I read 2-3 books a week now (some of them even “literary”), on top of my fulltime job and having a toddler, and I didn’t do any extracurricular reading when I was in school. All of my reading needs were met by research and assignments, thank you.
It’s the grownups who don’t read who worry me, and an awful lot of *them* read Harry Potter, if only out loud to their kids.
If anyone wants to read a side splitting mystery about literary prizes and literary characters look for Carnage on the Committee by Ruth Dudley Edwards. She apparently some sort of conservative Irish biographer/journalist/commentator (sorry, my knowledge of English internal politics is limited to what we get on the BBC the World, which annoyingly seems to focus too much on what the US is doing), but it does my liberal heart good to see her cut through a lot of the crap that literary fiction mired in was when I was in college.
Oh yeah, and Edwards is an equal opportunity basher.
In fact if you are going to look it up go for the audio version. The narrator is fantastic except for his strange idea of a Minnesota accent.
Yes Trix, that’s pretty much what lit fiction is about, the same way Neutrogena bronzed sheikhs, secret babies, dumb 18 year old virgins and this-close-to-being-a-rapist alpha heroes are pretty much what define the romance genre.
My head hurts. I’m gonna go eat pizza and then I’ll probably search through the archives to find relevant discussions.
Not that I mean to derail this thread. It’s just that King’s article didn’t tackle anything I hadn’t read of before in defence of the books but hey, what hasn’t already been hashed out about it.
I hope the pizza helped.
It was hardly an article full of revelations. More about one literary giant praising another. Neither are particularly critically acclaimed by anyone, outside those who already enjoy their books. I don’t like King over much, except his short stories, but I was converted to Rowling after I got past the contrived concept of a series of books about children in boarding school. I’d read all that before. It was the richness of her world that drew me in.
King is a bit disdainful of literary fiction, perhaps because he’s been stung by the critics of it who are puzzled, perhaps outraged, that he makes millions and sells millions while more talented writers are still laboring in day jobs. He has been the most popular kid in school, so to speak, and that is rarely a comfortable place to be, especially when smarter kids start writing about you in their slam books. Sure, you get invited to all the good parties and they don’t but it still hurts when people don’t like you.
Literary fiction seems to follow a formula, just as horror, romance, etc. Usually it concerns rather normal people who are disappointed by their lot in life yet powerless to effect a change. They don’t come to great revelations and rise above those disappointments very often, and if they do they get smited for it in some way.
Women in literary fiction tend to have lost a husband, either by death or divorce, and find details of their spouses lives that make them question whether they knew that person at all, and whether they even know themselves. The men, generally, are having affairs with younger or inappropriate women and being dissatisfied with their jobs, disappointed with the way their lives turned out, remembering past glories they can never hope to top, and going sailing. The beach must be in at least once part so they can spend a moment contemplating while the sun sets over the gentle waves.
Not much happens outside of the one shocking thing that propels the conclusion, and usually that conclusion is about as exciting as the funeral hour in a Methodist Church.
They are usually well educated people, consider themselves socially superior, and went to a rave once but now listen to NPR, brew coffee, and wear comfortable shoes. If someone gets drunk at one of their parties they reveal some hurtful thing, like an affair or that their parents were communists during the cold war.
They will take recreational drugs if offered but can only be addicted to alcohol, most often strong spirits they can splash into a used coffee mug just to prove how bad their addiction has gotten, though they might enjoy a cold beer with an old college friend who drops by and has a life so much better it leaves them wondering just where they went terribly wrong.
At least one of their acquaintances, including children or siblings, will be gay and they will be slightly uncomfortable but reflective about that. They do have sex but it is the sort that is uncomfortable, not only for them but for the reader as well, and they will feel guilty about it. Fortunately, it will only last about five hundred words.
Of course these things are not always in literary novels but there is a tendency in these books to excise anything that might be slightly entertaining, except irony, which is, apparently, very hard for Americans to do but bread and butter to the British. If they do contain humor it is a bit absurd and sometimes involves wordplay that would require the reader to dig out the Latin dictionary or graduate Harvard with a major in French literature.
Literary fiction is, often, to be endured and lined up on a bookshelf to impress friends while the books we really like are kept in the bedside drawer, along with the lubricants, condoms, and a handgun. Protection is, after all, very important, in all forms.
Perhaps I am a bit resentful of those who tell me I should read to enlighten, to educate myself. I had enough of that in school. I am adult now. I’ve earned the right to eat copious amounts of food that’s not good for me, drink until I love everyone and everything and think all is right with the world and I wish to express this sentiment to strangers, and read what I choose without feeling ashamed of myself.
I don’t belong to anything so highbrow as a book club because I eat books for pleasure, not to study the excrement under a microscope. Even Oprah and her hour of book talk is too tiresome for me, which sounds a bit snobbish or even ignorant. Awfully sorry about that, but not nearly so much as I probably should be.
On the whole some segments of society take books too seriously, just as we do life. The good news is there are hundreds of years of books to read and not nearly enough time to do it, but I’ll do what I can for myself while I’m here, however, I won’t be reading the mundane or the boring. I like a little magic and romance in my reads. It like icing on my cake or an umbrella in my drink. Terribly shallow of me but I sleep like a baby at night, most times. Cheers.
Who cares if people stop reading during college?
I must have phrased that badly. I said “during AND AFTER college”, trying to imply a trajectory whereby people read less and less as they get older.
Literary fiction… concerns rather normal people who are disappointed by their lot in life yet powerless to effect a change. They don’t come to great revelations and rise above those disappointments very often, and if they do they get smited for it in some way….
Are you serious??????
This, and the rest of your characterization, doesn’t describe the lit fic I read. At all. May I suggest that those who don’t read lit fic, quit generalizing insultingly about it. It’s no better to bash one form of reading than another. Reverse snobbery toward lit fic is just as despicable as snobbery toward romance.
If bashing romance as a whole is founded on thinking women and emotion are silly, then I have to think bashing lit fic as a whole is about anti-intellectualism and class perceptions. In both cases, based on wrong ideas about the audience for the book, and wrong ideas about the content of the book.
As I’ve said before, you find a cheerful work of lit fic the same way you find a romance that doesn’t squick you out. You read the back cover. You read the reviews. You read 15 pages of it in the bookstore. Exactly as you would do for a romance.
Ruth Dudley Edwards has her heroine cut a swathe through all sorts of generally accepted truths in that series. In the few I’ve read the heroine supports fox-hunting and the House of Lords – and, wonderfully, Edwards has a worthy Northern Ireland Unionist in her murder mystery set in Ireland. (I’m a N.I. protestant myself, and we never come out well in fiction.)
I’ve no idea what the author’s real views are – but I think she has a lot of fun having the heroine challenge the liberal consensus on issues.
I really enjoy some of Ruth Dudley Edwards’ books, but some are too full of bile for me. My favorite may be Publish and Be Murdered, set at a conservative magazine. A couple of the others are taken to such extremes that they’re more preaching than story. They do all start to sound alike after a while.
I would say her politics are trenchant but inconsistent (which is a shame, as I believe she’s a historian by training). The last time I was in London, she’d just written a really objectionable piece in one of the papers, The Daily Mail perhaps. Who cares, though: she’s often funny and always provocative.
Romantic fiction is generalized every day. I did the same with literary fiction and your first response was to attack me as someone who has failed to read any of it. Very kneejerk of you. I wonder what you’d think if I wrote about regional fiction in such a dismissive tone. American’s really don’t have a sense of humor???????
But, thera, why bash any whole section of fiction? Honestly, I too read a lot of everything, and if those middle-aged-middle-class-dissatisfaction plots are all you find in the Literature section, then you just keep picking up the wrong books.
The comment SOUNDS like a freshman wailing about her required lit. class, so I also expected that you did not read voluntarily what you have such a clear prejudice against.
Oh no, bash regionalists?! That will be original!—though not so much, since the women who wrote regional fiction have been discredited as “real” writers for more than a hundred years already. (Unless you mean Twain or Hardy. I’m always up for bashing them.)
As for my own genre suggestions, how about “happy endings,” “dark and tres edgy” (sorry, I can’t use a diacritical mark) and “No spoilers, read at your own risk”?
your first response was to attack me as someone who has failed to read any of it.
No, I said those who DON’T read lit fic. Not those who HAVEN’T read lit fic. I would say I DON’T read true crime as a rule—but I certainly HAVE read some books in that genre. (Actually, In Cold Blood was sort of excellent, but I still don’t read true crime.)
I wonder what you’d think if I wrote about regional fiction in such a dismissive tone. American’s really don’t have a sense of humor???????
Well, I saw no humor in your first post… but this one does make me laugh. Make of that what you will. And BTW, why assume people who don’t agree with you are American? 🙂 <—Note smiley face
Book clubs are high brow? I belong to the super elite then because I thought those were so bourgeois as to be embarrassing. 😉 Anyway
Soft Skull Press
Archipelago Books
New York Review of Books Classics (it’s particularly good at finding comedic, sharp, delicious old books that the academy has ignored)
House of Anansi
ECW Press
Graywolf Press
Dalkey Archive
Peter Owen Publishers
David R. Godine
Melville House
Those are a few of the presses or imprints that publish “entertaining” literary fiction and/or ones that don’t adhere to the formula Thera so exhaustingly presented. A few of the books may not have clearly delineated plots but that’s the nature of the lit fic beast—ideally it’s the amorphous space in which a writer may experiment with language and form in a way not encouraged by genre. It has its own limits, of course, and there are trends in lit fic as there are in any other part of the book world, but the the limits are comparatively less restrictive.
Because of the trend in realism too, and for other reasons, the best (IMO) of those writers aren’t going to provide “cheerful” lit. There is no “sad” or “happy” idea behind the books, it tends to be more complex than that, or should be. There are certainly authors who readily lend themselves to the more mainstream idea of “entertainment” though, and I’d like to name a few. Some are living, some dead.
Scarlett Thomas
Steve Stern
Martin Millar
Sylvia Townsend Warner
A.S. Byatt
Vladimir Nabokov
Orhan Pamuk
Mohsin Hamid
Luis Alberto Urrea
Murakami Haruki
Richard Hughes
Mark Helprin
Babara Hodgson
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Steve Martin
Alan Hollinghurst (Based on The Swimming-pool Library)
Elizabeth Crane
Ronald Firbank
Sara Gran
Marina Lewycka
Book clubs are high brow?
I was surprised by that too. Which leads me to wonder whether we’re talking about very different sets of books, and different kinds of reading interests, as “literary”. Specifically:
How many people’s idea of “literary” fiction is based on book club selections (Oprah being one example)? Because I tend to find the big-name book club lists, especially Oprah’s, (1) not all that “literary” and (2) pretty damn depressing. If that’s what’s come to represent “lit fic”, I can better understand the negativity.
I have read some “literary” fiction and the interesting stuff must have eluded me, because thera’s summary fit a lot of what I’ve plowed partway through, checked the last page, and took back to the library.
And … there’s been no definition of the genre by those who are defending it. Nor any titles that might be tried by someone willing to give “Important” fiction another chance.
Personally, I dislike the “This Is An IMPORTANT NOVEL!” proclamation. It’s so damned pompous. The important books are the ones people will still be reading in 50 years. And for heaven’s sake, a book is ‘important’ to every reader in a different way.
spamstopper word is story31… there are a million stories in the Naked City.
I have to agree with the litfic haters. In my experince, I have never found one that was NOT pretentious, pompous, and depressing. It may well be that there plenty that aren’t, but I’ve never seen them. I can only argue from what I know. If you’re really interested in changing people’s minds, you have to provide a list of examples that back you up, otherwise it’s just ‘because I said so, that’s why!’. To which my most common response is two words. Guess which ones.