Will Duquette at The View From the Foothills in a post titled I've Always Thought So links to some comments by Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley and novelist Richard Wheeler. Key Yardly quote:
the "literary" fiction being written in this country nowadays strikes me as so jejune, self-absorbed and lifeless that I am just about unable to read it, much less pass fair judgment on it. Instead, I find myself turning more and more to what is commonly dismissed by the literati as "popular" or "genre" fiction…
Well, I mostly agree. At least when it comes to American fiction. I liked John Banville's The Sea and last year I liked Muriel Spark's The Finishing School. But a lot of so-called literary fiction in this country portrays a world that I don't seem to encounter in reality.
I am a voracious reader and read widely--genre fiction, literary fiction, classics, (I've been known to pull out my collected Shakespeare and read The Tempest every few years), non-fiction (currently reading a great biography of Ghengis Khan), and poetry. The one common denominator for me is, for want of a better word, attitude. I loathed "The Life of Pi," for example, because I felt as if the author was laughing at me in the end. Any book that thinks itself 'clever' may not even be read all the way through.
ReplyDeleteMy sense is that literary fiction books are more prone to this than genre fiction. Mysteries, science fiction, fantasy are for the most part, unpretentious, predictable (not the story per se, but its conventions). And believe me, there is something comforting about the predictability of genre in an unpredictable world.
Best regards,
ljcohen
http://ljcbluemuse.blogspot.com